A federal judge sentenced Bruce Silva, the leader of the Bronx gang known as Dub City, to 22 years in prison on Tuesday, closing out a racketeering case that stretched across more than a decade of violence in Mt. Hope and Morris Heights. Silva was the last of 10 defendants to be sentenced in the case, which detailed shootings, narcotics trafficking, and fraud carried out by the gang.
U.S. District Judge Paul G. Gardephe handed down the sentence after Silva pleaded guilty in February to racketeering conspiracy and firearms charges, according to the Department of Justice. Prosecutors said Dub City operated as a subset of the larger MacBallers street gang, claiming turf along corridors including Walton Avenue and Jerome Avenue between East 175th Street and Burnside Avenue, and used that territory to run narcotics sales and carry out shootings against rivals. The US Attorney SDNY announced the sentencing Tuesday.
A Shooting That Paralyzed an Innocent Bystander
Charging documents described one shooting carried out by Silva near 105 East 175th Street that was aimed at a rival gang member but instead struck an innocent bystander, leaving that person permanently paralyzed. Federal investigators documented eight shootings tied to the gang between 2019 and 2022, according to the same DOJ account. The enterprise's violence was financed in part through bank fraud and the trafficking of fentanyl, heroin, oxycodone, cocaine base, and marijuana across the Bronx, per court filings described by CaseMine.
The prosecution relied on the federal RICO conspiracy statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1962(d), which allowed prosecutors to hold individual gang members accountable for the enterprise's collective acts of violence, extortion, and narcotics distribution dating back to at least 2019. That legal framework let the government aggregate years of non-fatal shootings, fraud, and drug offenses into a single ten-defendant case rather than pursuing each act separately.
A Gang With Roots Going Back More Than a Decade
Dub City was not a new operation when federal prosecutors moved in. The gang had already been targeted in 2012, when the New York City Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor indicted 17 members, including Silva and co-defendant Shadell McBride, following a violent turf war, according to the Bronx Times. Despite that earlier state prosecution and gun seizures, key figures within the gang resumed leadership roles in the years that followed.
The federal case formally began in April 2023, when the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York unsealed a 10-defendant indictment charging Dub City members with racketeering, narcotics conspiracy, and firearms offenses. Six defendants were arrested that April, while others were already in custody on prior charges, the DOJ said.
Jailhouse Violence and Witness Intimidation Complicated the Case
The years-long path to sentencing was marked by repeated trouble inside the federal detention system. While awaiting trial on the SDNY racketeering charges, Silva was separately charged in September 2024 for an August 2024 assault at MDC-Brooklyn, in which another inmate was left with a makeshift weapon lodged in his spine. Silva and co-defendant Hassan Elliott faced those charges in the Eastern District of New York as part of a broader federal crackdown on jailhouse violence.
Witness intimidation also surfaced during pretrial proceedings. In June 2024, Judge Gardephe sanctioned co-defendant Bruce Melvin after finding that Melvin had used a contraband cell phone inside MDC-Brooklyn to broadcast a co-defendant's recorded police interview on Instagram, according to a filing on CaseMine. The video, which reached more than 1,300 viewers, prompted online harassment branding the co-defendant a snitch, and the court subsequently restricted Melvin's access to discovery materials.
The case also produced a significant appellate ruling on digital evidence. In July 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit vacated a lower court's suppression order and allowed prosecutors to use digital evidence recovered from Silva's iPhone, according to FindLaw. The ruling affirmed that detective expertise could be used to connect alleged gang crimes to the contents of a smartphone search, clearing the way for that evidence at trial.
With Silva's 22-year sentence, all 10 defendants named in the 2023 indictment have now been sentenced, closing out a case that federal prosecutors say dismantled a gang responsible for years of shootings and drug trafficking across Mt. Hope and Morris Heights.
