In November 2021, federal investigators interviewed the manager of a Bayonne, New Jersey, apartment complex, where unit 204 had been rented by a woman whose name appeared on leases all around New York City.

As it happened, the woman was coming by to renew, so the investigators watched and waited. But the woman who pulled up in a white Range Rover and signed the lease was not the woman whose name was on it, prosecutors say: In fact, it was Latoya Williams, who was charged in a criminal complaint Wednesday with using stolen identities to rent luxurious hideouts for violent street gangs.

Ms. Williams, 35, was arrested Wednesday at her Upper West Side high-rise and charged with aggravated identity theft and wire fraud. Authorities found several hundred thousand dollars hidden in her bed frame, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn.

She made her first appearance in court Wednesday afternoon and was released on $250,000 bond. A lawyer for Ms. Williams did not respond to a request for comment.

The case against Ms. Williams sprang from an investigation by the F.B.I.’s Brooklyn and Queens field office into violent street gangs, according to the complaint. She came to the attention of the authorities in February 2021 after her number, under the name “Toya Apartments,” was found on the cellphone of a man killed in broad daylight while sitting in his Jeep in Queens, according to the complaint and a person briefed on the case.

The man was a “known associate of the Makk Balla Brims street gang,” a faction of the Bloods that authorities have previously accused of wide-ranging violence in the city, according to the complaint. In 2019, the Brooklyn U.S. attorney’s office charged 17 people as members in a sweeping racketeering case.

The indictment in 2019 detailed numerous violent armed robberies on Long Island and Queens. In at least two cases, gang members — one wearing a UPS jacket — targeted homes that had Indian flags outside, in the belief that the families might keep gold and cash.

Months after the Queens shooting that turned up the phone number, according to Wednesday’s complaint, law enforcement officers searched an apartment in Yonkers where they said gang members lived. The apartment had been rented to a woman using the “Toya Apartments” number.

At the apartment, the authorities found a summons for nonpayment of rent in the woman’s name.

The phone number was also connected to apartments in Brooklyn used by purported gang members, authorities said. In all, at least a dozen people were victims of identity theft, the person briefed on the matter said.

During an arrest at one Brooklyn apartment, police recovered five guns belonging to members of the Wood City street gang. The apartment was used by the gang’s leader, Christopher “Essay” Acevedo, according to the person briefed on the investigation. Mr. Acevedo was arrested last year on federal racketeering and murder charges, the person said, and could face the death penalty. He has pleaded not guilty.

The authorities said Ms. Williams used falsified tax returns, bank statements and driver’s licenses, as well as stolen social security numbers, to rent the apartments. In some cases, legal demands for unpaid rent and letters from debt collectors had piled up in the victims’ names.

Ms. Williams had made payments for some of the rentals using New York state unemployment benefits cards, authorities said.

The internet address used to fill out rental applications was linked to the apartment on West 61st Street in Manhattan where Ms. Williams was arrested Wednesday morning — the same address Ms. Williams gave to the New York Police Department in June when she reported a car stolen from the parking garage, a white Bentley.