Sean “Diddy” Combs is used to living in multimillion-dollar mansions. His new home is a notorious federal jail in New York City known for extreme violence and abominable medical care.
The Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn was the scene of two fatal stabbings in two months over the summer. And in April, MS-13 gang members stabbed an inmate 44 times in a shocking attack that was caught on camera.
The victim was one of the lucky ones: He survived.
The situation at the Metropolitan Detention Center, known as the MDC, has gotten so bad that judges have refused to send certain nonviolent inmates there.
“Chaos reigns,” U.S. District Judge Gary Brown wrote in a decision last month blasting the conditions at the facility, “along with uncontrolled violence.”
The detention center has housed a number of high-profile inmates in recent years, including Sam Bankman-Fried, R. Kelly and Ghislaine Maxwell. They are kept in a segregated unit outside of the general population. Still, the conditions are horrid across the facility, according to interviews with more than a half-dozen defense lawyers and a review of court documents.
“I have a client who spent 25 years in federal prison somewhere else, and he’s like, ‘Get me the hell out of the MDC,’” defense lawyer Xavier Donaldson said. “It has a way of breaking people.”
A judge on Tuesday ordered Combs, who has been charged with sex trafficking and racketeering, to be held without bail. Combs’ lawyers appealed, but the ruling was upheld Wednesday. That means he is likely to remain at the MDC until he goes to trial.
The facility came under the spotlight in the winter of 2019 when a power outage left inmates without light or heat for a full week during a brutal cold snap. Conditions for the detainees continued to deteriorate during the Covid-19 pandemic, when they were subjected to 24-hour lockdowns.
In 2021, the Justice Department shut down the city’s other federal jail, the Metropolitan Correctional Center, two years after disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s death by suicide.
With the most violent federal offenders in New York now housed in the same facility and officials struggling to hire enough corrections officers, the MDC has only become more dangerous, according to defense lawyers and the head of the corrections officers union.
“The agency as a whole has failed to assist MDC Brooklyn with the staffing crisis, hence allowing MDC Brooklyn to fail,” the union head, Rhonda Barnwell, wrote in a memo to Bureau of Prisons officials in June 2023. “What are you waiting for? Another loss of inmate life?”
Her questions proved prophetic.
First came the stabbing on April 27, which was caught on surveillance cameras.
The victim was sitting alone at a table when a man sneaked up behind him and pulled out a shiv from his waistband. The man, whom prosecutors identified as an MS-13 gang member, stabbed the victim multiple times. Two other alleged MS-13 members pulled out homemade knives and joined in the attack, according to surveillance video obtained by NBC News.
It went on for about 37 seconds until a corrections officer showed up in the housing unit, causing the attackers to flee. The unidentified victim sustained about 44 stab wounds to his back, chest, abdomen, right arm and legs, according to federal prosecutors.
Two shivs were recovered — one 10.5 inches in length, the other 5.5 inches long. The lead attacker was identified as Luis Rivas, who is serving a 40-year sentence for a host of gang-related crimes, including nearly decapitating a 16-year-old boy in Queens, New York.
The stabbing marked the start of a spate of deadly violence.
On June 7, another inmate, Uriel Whyte, was fatally stabbed in the neck at the MDC, according to the Bureau of Prisons and the chief medical examiner’s office. Less than six weeks later, Edwin Cordero, 36, was stabbed by another inmate. He died July 17 of a stab wound to the chest, according to the medical examiner.
“Mr. Cordero was a victim of MDC Brooklyn’s deplorable conditions, which are fueled by chronic overcrowding and understaffing,” said his lawyer, Andrew Dalack. “Until the federal government gets its act together to make the conditions at MDC Brooklyn more humane and secure, the solution is simple: Far fewer people should be detained there, period.”
A spokesman said the Bureau of Prisons “takes seriously addressing the staffing and other challenges at MDC Brooklyn.”
“That is why, earlier this year, the director appointed an Urgent Action Team to take a holistic look at the challenges at MDC Brooklyn,” the spokesman added. “The team’s work is ongoing, but it has already increased permanent staffing at the institution (including COs and medical staff), addressed over 700 backlogged maintenance requests, and applied a continued focus on the issues raised in two recent judicial decisions.”
A series of cases of alleged medical neglect have drawn the ire of judges over the past year.
An inmate, Terrence Wise, was found to have a mass in his chest in February. But he wasn’t told of the mass or provided any medical care for two months — even after he started coughing up blood, according to court records. He was eventually sent in April to a hospital, where he learned the cancerous mass had nearly doubled in size, according to court documents.
In another case, an inmate endured hours of extreme pain, with the MDC staff ignoring his cries for help, after his appendix burst in April. He was then forced to recover from surgery without pain medication, according to court documents.
“This is not an anomaly,” U.S. District Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall said at a hearing for the inmate, Jonathan Goulbourne, in May, according to the New York Daily News. “I am tired of hearing the defendants that are held at the MDC are not being provided with the necessary medical treatment.”
A statute in the federal court system requires defendants who are out on bail to be remanded to jail after they are convicted. But in January, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman went so far as to cite the conditions at the MDC as an “exceptional” circumstance that allowed him to leave a defendant on house arrest ahead of imposing a sentence.
Furman cited the facility’s “dreadful conditions” and said it has been found to be “egregiously slow in providing necessary medical and mental health treatment to inmates” to justify his decision not to send a man convicted of drug trafficking to the MDC.
Judge Brown offered an even more scathing assessment of the Brooklyn facility in his decision last month in which he vowed to place a convicted fraudster on house arrest if the man were to be placed at the MDC to serve his nine-month sentence.
Brown described the conditions as “dangerous” and “barbaric.” He also noted that each of the five months preceding his opinion was “marred by instances of catastrophic violence at MDC, including two apparent homicides, two gruesome stabbings and an assault so severe that it resulted in a fractured eye socket for the victim.”
“The activities precipitating these attacks are nearly as unthinkable and terrifying as the ensuing injuries: drug debt collection, fights over illegal narcotics, resisting an organized gang robbery, internecine gang disputes and as-yet-unidentified ‘brawls,’” he added in his written opinion.
The lawyer for defendant Daniel Collucci praised Brown.
“He asked a lot of questions, did a lot of research and satisfied himself that that place is a hellhole,” said the lawyer, Richard Kestenbaum.
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