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Police Raid Of Brooklyn Motorcycle Clubhouse Nets Guns, Cornucopia Of Drugs
By
Nathan Tempey
Published Feb 20, 2017
Modified Feb 20, 2017
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By
Nathan Tempey
Published Feb 20, 2017
Modified Feb 20, 2017
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Police arrested two dozen people over the weekend in a raid of a motorcycle club in Gowanus that officers say turned up guns, drugs of several kinds, and a lot of people with open arrest warrants.
Officers acting on a search warrant swarmed the block of Butler Street between Third and Fourth avenues early on Saturday morning and descended on the clubhouse of God's Only Demons. Inside, they say they recovered five guns, marijuana, ketamine, crack and powder cocaine, and paraphernalia for packaging the drugs up to sell.
Cops arrested five men on drug and gun charges, and another 19 on old warrants, according to a police spokesman. The five men with new charges are from Borough Park, Bensonhurst, Red Hook, Sunset Park, Mariners Harbor, and Tottenville, according to police.
Anthony Rosario, 46, of Tottenville, is being held on $25,000 bail and facing 16 misdemeanor and 5 felony drug charges. Cops say they found him with weed, crack, razors, scales and grinders (?) with cocaine residue, and 15 bags of cocaine. Attorney information for Rosario was not available at press time.
The NYPD press office and Brooklyn District Attorney's Office said they did not have ready access to information on the nature of the other charges and warrants.
In 2014, the NYPD filed a lawsuit seeking to shutter the clubhouse using the controversial nuisance abatement method. The suit cited a 2012 murder outside the clubhouse that reportedly happened following a dispute inside, a subsequent inspection showing that alcohol was being kept there without a license, and the 2013 hospitalization of a 16-year-old boy who passed out at the clubhouse during a party at which minors were allegedly served booze. The lawsuit evidently did not succeed.
A neighbor complained to the New York Post following the raid that the club is the scene of frequent fights, and occasionally, shootings.
The club and the immediate vicinity were the subject of 14 noise complaints from 2011 to 2014, according to city data, five of them between 4:30 and just after 7 a.m.
The block was the scene of two felony assaults and three grand larcenies from January 2016 to the beginning of February 2017, according to police data.
The club is one of three motorcycle clubs in the neighborhood, and it opened around 2011, according to a DNAinfo report.
An NYPD spokesman said the raid was part of an investigation that is ongoing.
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Nathan Tempey
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