() – Described as “disgusting” and in “appalling” conditions, the detention center music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs now calls home is a far cry from the Miami and Los Angeles mansions he once lived in.
“When he wakes up, he sees whitewashed partition walls instead of the decor of his mansions,” Michael Cohen, a former lawyer for President Donald Trump, told on Wednesday.
Cohen knows this all too well. He is one of many high-profile inmates who have served time at New York’s infamous Metropolitan Detention Center. The facility has included singer R. Kelly, “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli, socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, one-time cryptocurrency wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried and rapper Fetty Wap. The cartel’s alleged leader, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia, is currently being held there awaiting trial on murder and drug trafficking charges.
On Wednesday, a federal judge denied Combs bail, saying the bail proposal submitted by his defense attorneys was “insufficient” to address the court’s concerns. Judge Andrew Carter said there were “no conditions or conditions” that would reduce the risk of witness tampering or obstruction in Combs’ case. Combs will remain in federal custody pending trial on the racketeering and sex trafficking charges. Combs has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
A trial date has not yet been set for the 54-year-old hip-hop artist, so it is unknown how long he will remain in the Brooklyn jail, but following Wednesday’s hearing in which he was denied bail, his lawyer said they will appeal the decision.
Notorious for poor living conditions, staff shortages, inmate-on-inmate violence and power outages, the Brooklyn prison is currently the only federal penitentiary serving the nation’s largest city. This comes after the Federal Bureau of Prisons closed its Manhattan complex shortly after billionaire financier and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide in 2019.
Asked about current conditions at MDC, a Federal Bureau of Prisons spokesperson said the agency “takes seriously our duty to protect the people entrusted to our custody” and that it “reviews security protocols and implements corrective measures when they are identified as necessary.”
The Bureau of Prisons appointed an Urgent Action Team earlier this year “to holistically examine the issues at Brooklyn MDC,” spokesman Emery Nelson said in an email.
“The team’s work is ongoing, but it has already increased the permanent staffing at the facility (including officers and medical staff), addressed more than 700 maintenance requests in the backlog, and applied a continued focus on the issues raised in two recent court decisions,” Nelson said.
“It’s a very difficult place to be in prison,” Combs’ attorney, Marc Agnifilo, argued in court Wednesday, telling the judge that his client would have a hard time preparing for trial if he remained there.
The Metropolitan Detention Center, built in the 1990s to address overcrowding in New York City prisons, houses inmates awaiting trial in federal courts in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
“He wakes up on a steel bed with a one-and-a-half-inch mattress, no pillow, in an eight-by-ten-foot cell that I can assure you is disgusting,” Cohen told on Wednesday. Cohen, who was incarcerated at the prison in 2020, said inmates in the facility’s Special Housing Unit, where Combs is being held, basically have a 4-by-5-foot space to move around in.
“There are no books in Part One, so he’s dealing with a lot of things right now,” Cohen said of what to expect in Combs’ first days at the center.
In June, an inmate awaiting trial on weapons charges, Uriel Whyte, was stabbed to death by another inmate, according to a Bureau of Prisons news release. A month later, inmate Edwin Cordero was killed in a fight that broke out inside the prison. Cordero’s attorney declared The New York Times said his client was “another victim of Brooklyn’s MDC, an overcrowded, understaffed and neglected federal prison that is hell on earth.”
In January 2019, a prolonged power outage plunged the prison into crisis, leaving inmates in near-total darkness for a week and exposing them to the frigid temperatures that swept across the Northeast. The incident prompted a Justice Department investigation into whether the Bureau of Prisons had “adequate contingency plans” to deal with inmates’ living conditions. According to a lawsuit filed on behalf of the inmates, they were confined to their cells for days at a time and forced to endure non-functioning toilets inside the cells and other unsanitary conditions.
The Bureau of Prisons reached an agreement in that suit last summer, awarding 1,600 inmates a total of about $10 million for enduring freezing, inhumane conditions as a result of the blackout.
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