More than a dozen gang members involved in a war that tormented Harlem residents for months are now facing charges in the violent mayhem, Mayor Adams and NYPD officials announced Tuesday.
Sixteen people — 13 of them under 18 years old — were indicted on charges of conspiracy, attempted murder and criminal possession of a weapon in gang warfare that exploded in 21 shooting incidents between March 2024 and February 2025 in East and Central Harlem, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said.
The clashes were between a gang known as the L.A. World gang and its rival, the Wuski gang, Bragg recounted, adding half of the shootings erupted in East Harlem.
“It is sobering for me to bring such charges, serious charges against defendants who are so young. I do not want to continue to have to make these types of announcements,” Bragg said.
Eight of the gang members were busted Tuesday, officials said.
“The 16 [alleged gang members] committed 50% of the shootings in [the 23rd Precinct] during that particular period of time,” Mayor Adams said. “That is the recidivism that we’re talking about. … We have to get the small number of people who repeatedly commit dangerous crimes off our streets.”
The gang war started as retaliation for the March 2024 shooting deaths of Harry Mendoza, 25, and Ashley Ballard, 16 — both shot in the head at the corner of E. 128th St. and Lexington Ave., officials said. Police sources said Mendoza was a member of the L.A. World gang.
“Wrong time, wrong place,” Ballard’s mother said of her daughter’s death at the time of the shooting, adding that Ballard and Mendoza were friends.
On March 25, 2024, alleged gang members of L.A. World, Jahson Jordan and an unnamed brother of Mendoza, allegedly were involved in four shooting incidents throughout East Harlem in retaliation, targeting the James Weldon Johnson Houses.
The seven month-long beef between the rival gangs included messaging on social media sites like Instagram and Telegram to plan their attacks. The shooters fired across playgrounds, courtyards, sidewalks and lobbies — boasting about the violence on the Citizen app, authorities siad.
Frequent targets of the shootings were places where innocent bystanders were nearby, including at the AK Houses, Lehman Houses, and James Weldon Johnson Houses, officials said.
“They targeted their rivals at all times of the day and night with a complete disregard for innocent life. And on a single day last March, they committed four separate shootings in four different housing developments,” NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said.
In the takedown, cops retrieved 15 semi-automatic weapons — including pistols and rifles, Bragg said, noting one of the pistols seized had a green laser beam attachment. Thirteen of the weapons recovered were alleged to have been fired by one of the defendants, Bragg said.
Tisch said through ballistic analysis of the retrieved weapons — and 85 shell casings recovered — investigators were able to connect the guns to the shootings.
“With this intelligence, detectives connected incidents, identified patterns, and built leads. And on my theme of recidivism, they also found that nine of the 16 defendants have fired a gun on at least three separate occasions,” Tisch said. Four more gang members are still being sought by cops.
“L.A.World currently has 30 members listed in ECMS in our criminal group database where Wuski has 31 members. So if you look at it, we essentially knocked out almost 30 to 35 percent of the gang with this takedown,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said. “There’s been historical violence back and forth between these groups for many years.”
