Motorized bike crews are terrorizing New York City with rapid-fire jewelry robberies, violently ripping expensive chains from the necks of unsuspecting police officers and civilians, according to law enforcement sources and NYPD data.
The NYPD has recorded more than 20 chain-snatching incidents involving motorized bikes since September, at least 10 of which turned violent. Police sources, however, say the official tally likely captures only a fraction of the problem.
“There are hundreds of chain snatchings around the city,” a law enforcement officer told The Post. The officer requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the media.
The officer said many of the robberies are connected to the Trinitarios, the violent street gang founded by Dominican inmates at Rikers Island in the early 1990s. The group has since expanded into a criminal network that has plagued the Bronx and Upper Manhattan for decades.
“That’s one of their big things, chain snatchings, and two people on a bike doing robberies,” the officer said.
The most high-profile attack occurred earlier this month, when an NYPD detective was stabbed 10 times after confronting two alleged robbers, described by authorities as illegal migrants.
Nine additional victims reported being punched, stabbed or knocked to the ground during the frightening, lightning-fast thefts.
Federal officials also said two suspected Trinitario members riding scooters shot an off-duty federal Border Patrol agent at a Manhattan park on July 9, 2025. The incident helped trigger a sweeping gang crackdown in New York in January.
Dubbed “Operation Salvo,” the federal operation removed 54 alleged gang members from the streets, officials said. The arrests followed the shooting of the 42-year-old law enforcement officer at Fort Washington Park in Washington Heights, near West 155th Street.
In New York, the suspects often appear to have the upper hand.
Even when arrested, some are quickly released by judges, critics of the city’s criminal justice system say.
An NYPD officer also said suspects whose immigration status is uncertain are not turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement because New York City is a sanctuary city.
“We’re not allowed to confer with ICE, so we just arrest them,” said the officer, who also requested anonymity. “They get released on their own recognizance [by a judge], and they go back and do it again.”
That alleged revolving-door pattern was evident in the case of Jorge Beltre, a Bronx bodega worker and Uber driver who said he was attacked by two scooter-riding thieves while walking his 5-year-old son home from school on Oct. 8. The assault happened near Mount Eden Parkway and Sheridan Avenue in Claremont.
Beltre, 30, fought to protect his 14-karat gold Cuban-link chain. During the struggle, one of the attackers pulled a knife and stabbed him in the leg, police said.
Despite the injury, Beltre managed to hold the 17-year-old suspect with help from eight bystanders until police arrived. His son was not hurt, Beltre said.
Police charged the teenager with robbery and criminal possession of a weapon. Beltre said the Bronx District Attorney’s Office told him the suspect was released on $900 bail.
“The community and I caught one,” Beltre told The Post in Spanish. “Why did they let him go? He didn’t say where the other guy is. He didn’t say who the other guy was. I feel outraged. Why did they grant him release?”
“It fills me with outrage because I felt my life was in danger,” Beltre continued. “We are living through a scourge. The Bronx is practically being ravaged by these criminals. People are getting their chains snatched — two or three incidents a day. The community is fed up.”
The attack has also left his young son shaken. Beltre said the boy asked his mother to let him take a baseball bat to school “so he could hit the criminals if he saw them.” Beltre said the men who targeted him were also from the Dominican Republic.
Beltre needed five stitches to close his wound.
The Bronx District Attorneys Office didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.
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In another incident on Sept. 13, a 54-year-old victim told cops he tried to hold onto the motorbike-riding thief who ripped a chain off his neck on Grand Avenue near West 180th Street in the West Bronx.
But the thief accelerated, dragging the victim, who suffered minor injuries and lost his $2,700 chain, cops said.
Two robbers on e-bikes approached a 60-year-old man near Duncan Street and Laconia Avenue in the East Bronx on Sept. 28, displayed a firearm and punched him in the face before snatching $8,000 of jewelry from his neck. He suffered minor injuries.
The motorized muggers are brazen enough to target cops.
An off-duty female office, had her chain snatched at the corner of Arlington and Barbey streets in Brownsville, Brooklyn, on Oct. 10, police sources said.
The crook grabbed a gold necklace that read “Angie” from the 25-year-old’s neck before riding off on a scooter, the sources said. The necklace was worth about $800, the cop reported.
The female officer’s attack came eight days after two criminals stabbed Detective Jose Mercedes, 33, near East 206th Street and Rochambeau Avenue in Norwood in the Bronx as they tried to rip the necklace given to him by his mom off his neck, he told reporters this week.
Mercedes told the crooks several times in both English and Spanish that he was a detective — but “they didn’t care,” he said.
The accused robbers, whom police identified as D’Angelo Caraballo, 25, and Sneider Mejia, 24, fled the scene on an e-bike. Mercedes chased them but collapsed because he was losing so much blood, he said.
Police hunted the duo down outside of Boston and brought them back to New York to face attempted murder charges.
The Department of Homeland Security and ICE said both men have prior criminal records, and are Dominican Republic natives living in the US illegally.
An NYPD spokesperson said the chain-snatchings had been decreasing in the Bronx recently.
“Since the attempted murder of Detective Mercedes, there has been a significant decrease in chain snatches within the confines of Patrol Borough Bronx North,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson added that major crime declined 7% in all five boroughs of the city so far this year, with the Bronx continuing to lead the city with a 12% reduction — to 20,751 so far this year, versus 23,545 in the same period last year.
Surveillance photos released by the NYPD show the robbers often have their faces completely covered and are difficult to identify, police sources said.
Critics lay some of the blame for the troubling trend at the feet of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has called for less enforcement of e-bikers — in purported support the multi-million food app industry. Their lawlessness has surged as cops write fewer tickets.
“Mamdani doesn’t want to enforce summonses against these moped guys because they’re working, but then everyone’s taking advantage of it,” said Michael Alcazar, a former NYPD detective and an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
“This is what they do in Third World countries,” he added.
Alcazar thinks the NYPD needs to use the broken-window theory of policing to staunch the epidemic.
“Bad guys have to know we’re enforcing these things,” he said of the tactic in which cops write summonses for small infractions to prevent larger crimes. “That will nip this in the bud.”
A return to the NYPD’s plainclothes anti-crime units, which were disbanded in 2020 under self-described Marxist Mayor Bill de Blasio following protests over George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, would also help, he said.
“Nobody wants to talk about bringing back anti-crime but it’s an effective tool,” Alcazar said of the plainclothes cops. “This is what we did when crime was spiking.”