Robert Alcantara was arrested in the Bronx as he traveled to his home from Pennsylvania, where he bought parts to make guns that cannot be traced.
One day in November, law enforcement authorities observed a Providence, R.I., man buy the key components of nearly four dozen so-called ghost guns at a gun show in Morgantown, Pa.
The man, Robert Alcantara, loaded the parts into his car and began heading back to Providence, where he operated a ghost gun “home factory,” the authorities said.
But he never made it. Mr. Alcantara was arrested on state gun-related charges as he drove through the Bronx, and the authorities seized parts for 45 ghost guns from his car, the government said.
Mr. Alcantara later told investigators he had paid $16,200 for the gun parts and planned to turn them into completed firearms, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Thursday in Federal District Court in Manhattan.
The complaint charges Mr. Alcantara, 34, with conspiracy to traffic firearms and lying when questioned by a federal agent.
In the two years leading up to his arrest, Mr. Alcantara was involved in the sale or attempted sale of what appeared to be more than 100 firearms, most of them handguns that he bought in an incomplete form and then finished at a workstation in his house, the complaint said. Most were sold in the Dominican Republic, the complaint said.
When Mr. Alcantara spoke with investigators after his arrest, he did so after being advised of his Miranda rights and waiving them, the complaint said. It said he told investigators that he did not intend to sell the 45 firearms after he had completed them.
A lawyer for Mr. Alcantara declined to comment on Thursday.
Ghost guns — untraceable firearms without serial numbers that are assembled from components bought online or at gun shows — have proliferated in New York and elsewhere and have drawn increasing concern from law enforcement officials.
They can be built from kits and can complicate investigations, making it hard to trace such guns to their source. Their availability, even in states with strict firearm laws, can make them accessible to people barred legally from owning or purchasing guns.
“Untraceable ghost guns pose a serious threat to public safety,” said Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, in a statement announcing the charges. He added that Mr. Alcantara’s “deadly ghost gun business has been shut down.”
Nicholas Biase, a spokesman for Mr. Williams, said Mr. Alcantara was ordered detained by a federal magistrate judge in Providence, and he is expected eventually to be sent to Manhattan to face the potential charges and a trial.
In the federal complaint, prosecutors said that the ghost gun parts Mr. Alcantara purchased included the lower receiver or frame of a pistol, which houses the trigger and the magazine, and the upper receiver or “slide.”
They said a search of Mr. Alcantara’s cellphone turned up photographs that appeared to show he has been making “substantial numbers” of ghost guns at his Providence home.
One photo showed a sanding belt, a hydraulic drill press and other tools used in assembling the guns, and five finished ghost guns. Another photo depicted the finished guns each with a logo of a ghost gun manufacturer. A third photograph showed eight more firearms that appear to be packaged for shipment or sale, the complaint said.
The complaint said the phone also contained a conversation between Mr. Alcantara and a representative of a ghost gun retailer, in which Mr. Alcantara discussed purchasing kits for large numbers of ghost guns and how to pay for them.
In one conversation in November, he talked about buying a large number of ghost gun kits from a retailer at the gun show in Morgantown, according to the complaint, which was signed by Kiran Mathew, a special agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The government said Mr. Alcantara also told the authorities after his arrest that he had a YouTube channel on which he discussed firearms. One YouTube video shows Mr. Alcantara saying that he had a firearm created with parts from a ghost gun manufacturer, the complaint said. In the video, he successfully fires the ghost gun.
