A man accused of running a secret police station in Manhattan at the direction of the Chinese government, using it to report to Beijing on political dissidents, was convicted of illegally working as a foreign agent on Wednesday.

Lu Jianwang, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said, opened the station with the goal of helping Chinese citizens renew their driver’s licenses while living in America. But a far more sinister aim, they said, was running the outpost as a hub to monitor outspoken critics of the Chinese Communist Party.

Mr. Lu, an American citizen also known as Harry, was accused of aiding China’s campaign of transnational repression by opening an illegal police station in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood.

Mr. Lu, 64, who wore an American flag pin on his suit during the trial, did not react as the verdict was read aloud. He was supported by dozens of members of a group linked to his hometown in China.

He was “in lock-step with what the Chinese government asked him to do,” Antoinette N. Rangel, a federal prosecutor, said during her closing argument on Tuesday.

After a full day of deliberations, a jury found Mr. Lu guilty on one count of acting as a foreign agent and another of obstructing justice. He was acquitted of conspiring to act as an agent of China.

Dozens of Mr. Lu’s supporters from his church and his Chinese community organization packed the courtroom. One supporter pumped her first as the verdict on the first charge, not guilty, was read aloud, but struck a somber tone after the guilty verdicts. Mr. Lu did not change his expression.

Mr. Lu had been “held accountable for blatantly disregarding the law and our country’s sovereignty,” Joseph Nocella Jr., the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, said in a statement. He added that his office would protect the rights of those “seeking freedom from repression and speaking out to bring democracy, reform and human rights to China.”

Mr. Lu, along with Chen Jinping, was arrested in April 2023. Mr. Chen pleaded guilty to working as an unauthorized agent of China in December 2024.

Mr. Lu was the president of the American Changle Association, a Chinese community organization and social club for people from the city of Fuzhou, like Mr. Lu. Such groups have attracted scrutiny for their persistent efforts to influence New York politics, through methods such as harassing and threatening candidates with platforms seen as harmful by the Chinese government, at the behest of the Chinese Consulate.

Mr. Lu’s brother, Jimmy, had made donations to former New York Mayor Eric Adams, who spoke at the club during an event in September 2022, days before it was raided by federal agents. In July 2022, Jimmy Li, a congressional candidate with roots in Fujian Province, which includes Fuzhou, visited the clubhouse and was endorsed by a number of the group’s leaders.

The weeklong trial showcased the Justice Department’s long-running crackdown on what it calls a global campaign by China to harass, intimidate and repatriate its political dissidents. Prosecutors depicted Mr. Lu as a willing operative of the Chinese government, eager to deepen his longstanding ties with party officials.

They presented the jury photos of Mr. Lu mingling with government officials in China, text messages in which a Chinese security official asked him for information on a prominent pro-democracy activist, and expert testimony about China’s global efforts to quell dissidents.

But Mr. Lu’s lawyer, John Carman, described the case as overreach by federal prosecutors. During his closing statement on Tuesday, he said Mr. Lu had merely been trying to help his fellow community members, Chinese Americans of Fujianese heritage.

“This isn’t spy time,” Mr. Carman said. “This isn’t international espionage. This is license renewal.”

In January 2022, Mr. Lu began working with Liu Rangyan, an official at the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, who became his official handler, prosecutors said. They met and were photographed at the global rollout ceremony in China for the overseas police stations.

Ms. Liu, prosecutors said, had directed “every detail” of the Manhattan station, down to the type size, logo and spacing of a banner inside the station. She wanted Mr. Lu to track down an outspoken critic of Beijing who was living in California and had taken part in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

“Just help me verify if this person exists,” Ms. Liu wrote, referring to the dissident.

On the second day of the trial, two F.B.I. agents dramatically unfurled the banner in front of jurors. It read “Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station, New York, U.S.A.”

Prosecutors said Mr. Lu had aided the Chinese authorities beyond his work setting up the station. In 2018, he sent photos to another Chinese official of two members of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that is banned in China.

Just as the F.B.I. searched the organization’s headquarters in 2022, prosecutors said, he deleted messages from the social messaging app WeChat from his phone, which amounted to obstructing justice.

Ms. Rangel said the station was “stopped early in its tracks.” Though Mr. Lu was not financially compensated for his work, he received “continued bona fides from the Chinese government,” said Carrie Crossmore, an F.B.I. agent who interviewed Mr. Lu.

But supporters of Mr. Lu said they thought he was being punished for work that was ultimately benign.

“Harry’s motives were pure,” Mr. Carman said outside the courthouse, standing alongside Mr. Lu. “His support was there because he’s helped a lot of people in his 45 years in America.”

Baimadajie Angwang, a former New York City police officer who was cleared of accusations that he had spied for China, sat with Mr. Lu’s legal team throughout the trial. Like Mr. Lu, Mr. Angwang said he was wearing an American flag pin on his suit to quell any notion that he was disloyal to America.

“We have to do things like this to prevent people from coming after us,” said Mr. Angwang, who also served in the U.S. Marine Corps.

Michael Forsythe contributed reporting.

A 16-year-old boy was heading to a Starbucks in the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn in November, unaware he was walking near a marked man.

The teenager, who had just left a football game, was steps away from the coffee shop on Nov. 30, when two people fired into the street. They missed their target, a member of a rival Brooklyn gang, officials said on Monday. But they struck the boy, severing his spinal cord and leaving him paralyzed from the waist down, officials said.

The boy, who was not identified, was one of seven people shot — one fatally — between April 2025 and March 2026, as two groups from Coney Island, Koney Sides and FOG, formed an alliance and fired indiscriminately at rival gangs around Brooklyn in attacks that sometimes erupted in broad daylight.

Four of the people shot, including the 16-year-old boy, were innocent bystanders of retaliatory violence that swept through several Brooklyn neighborhoods, including Brownsville, Crown Heights and Canarsie, officials said. The other victims included another 16-year-old boy and two young men, 20 and 21, officials said.

Fifteen people, including 11 teenagers between 16 and 19 years old, were indicted on May 6 on charges that included conspiracy to commit murder and criminal possession of weapons, said Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney, who announced the indictments on Monday. The boy who was paralyzed was shot by a 16-year-old, officials said.

The other four defendants are between 20 and 27 years old. They have all pleaded not guilty.

“These men were ready for war, and we allege that they were willing to use those guns at a moment’s notice, never hesitating to take action against their perceived rivals,” Mr. Gonzalez said.

The accusations against the teenage defendants and the age of the victims underscored how youth-related shootings have propelled violence in the city, even as the overall number of killings and shootings keep dropping.

The feud was driven by grudges and beefs that are based on geography, with rivals mocking each other and escalating tensions in videos posted on social media.

“It’s not monetary,” said Joseph Kenny, the Police Department’s chief of detectives. “It’s not over drug turf. It’s not over girls. It’s just strictly over them disrespecting each other.”

Mr. Gonzalez, standing alongside Commissioner Jessica Tisch during a news conference, played several videos that showed some of the shootings, sometimes on busy streets where people were walking and riding scooters on sidewalks.

The violence began escalating after the April 27, 2025, killing of Javon Johnnie, one of the members of the Koney Sides/FOG group, Mr. Gonzalez said.

Two days later, at his vigil, members of the gang began talking about who might have killed him and mistakenly blamed a rival group, he said. Mr. Johnnie had been shot by someone he was trying to rob, officials said, but at the time his friends believed he had been killed by gang rivals based in Flatbush.

That night, four members of his group, including Tyquan Holmes and Tamari Carmona, 17, went to the Flatbush Gardens housing complex wearing masks and bearing firearms, Mr. Gonzalez said.

“They went out there looking for payback,” he said.

Surveillance video shows four people walking in a courtyard and coming upon two young men who see them, back away and flee. The group begins to fire when suddenly Mr. Carmona falls to the ground, fatally wounded. He had been shot by Mr. Holmes, who accidentally struck him in the head, Mr. Gonzalez said, describing it as an incident of “friendly fire.”

Five days later, Mr. Holmes texted his mother who had reached out to him to remind him to call his probation officer, Mr. Gonzalez said, showing the text exchange on a screen.

“Tell her I’m out of town,” he replied to her, according to the texts. “Got bigger things to worry about. Somebody life got took.”

Mr. Holmes then told her he was involved in the shooting, according to the texts.

Matthew Keith Mobilia, a lawyer for Mr. Holmes, now 18, did not immediately respond to a message for comment.

Commissioner Tisch said the defendants were awakened and arrested early in the morning on May 6 following a 13-month investigation into the two groups.

All but two of the defendants are “accused of pulling the trigger in these cases,” she said. Police officers recovered a total of more than 180 shell casings following the attacks, Commissioner Tisch said.

“Behind every one of these numbers is a real victim and a real community forced to live with the consequences of this violence,” she said.

In one instance in May 2025, four men wearing masks and hooded shirts shot at the house of a rival in Canarsie. One of the shooters was caught two minutes later by police officers who had been patrolling in the area.

In another, on Feb. 20 at about 11 p.m., a 16-year-old was shot in the abdomen when he was standing around Newkirk Avenue in East Flatbush with two other people. Three gang members shot at them, firing about 30 times, in retaliation for a shooting that had happened earlier that day, officials said, but the 16-year-old, who survived, had nothing to do with the feud.

“That is the level of recklessness that we’re talking about,” Commissioner Tisch said.

In 2025, the police carried out 70 gang takedowns and arrested about 390 people identified as gang members, she said.

That’s a significant number, Commissioner Tisch said, because about 60 percent of city wide shootings have “some nexus” to gang rivalries.