Sean “Diddy” Combs used to living in multi-million dollar mansions. His new home is A a famous federal prison in New York City, known for extreme violence and atrocious medical care.
The Metropolitan Control Center in Brooklyn was on the scene two fatal stabbings for two months in the summer. And in April, MS-13 gang members stabbed an inmate 44 times in a shocking attack caught on camera.
The victim was one of the lucky ones: He survived.
At the Metropolitan Detention Center, known as MDC, conditions have gotten so bad that judges have refused to send some nonviolent inmates there.
“Chaos reigns,” U.S. District Judge Gary Brown wrote in a ruling last month that blasted conditions at the facility “along with rampant 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 separate unit away from the general population. Conditions at the facility are still appalling, according to interviews with more than half of the defense attorneys and a review of court documents.
“I have a client who has spent 25 years in a federal prison elsewhere and he’s saying, ‘Get me the hell out of MDC,'” said defense attorney Xavier Donaldson. “There’s a way to screw people up.”
On Tuesday, a judge ordered Combs charged sex trafficking and racketeeringmust be held without bail. Combs’ attorneys appealedhowever, the decision was upheld on Wednesday. This means he will remain at MDC until he goes to trial.
The facility came into the spotlight in the winter of 2019 when a power outage left inmates without electricity or heat for a full week during the brutal cold. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the condition of prisoners continued to deteriorate when subjected to 24-hour quarantine.
In 2021, the Justice Department closed the city’s other federal prison, the Metropolitan Correctional Center, two years after the suicide death of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
With some of New York’s most violent federal criminals now housed in the same facility and officials struggling to hire enough correctional officers, MDC has become more dangerous, according to the head of the defense attorneys and correctional officers union.
“The agency as a whole has failed to assist MDC Brooklyn with its staffing crisis, allowing MDC Brooklyn to fail,” union leader Rhonda Barnwell wrote in a June 2023 letter to Bureau of Prisons officials. “What are you waiting for? for? Another loss of prisoner’s life?’
His questions were prophetic.
First, on April 27, there was a stabbing incident caught on surveillance cameras.
The victim was sitting alone at the table when a man came up behind him and pulled a needle from his back. The man, who prosecutors identified as a member of the MS-13 gang, stabbed the victim multiple times. According to surveillance video obtained by NBC News, two other MS-13 members pulled out homemade knives and joined in the attack.
It lasted about 37 seconds before a correctional officer appeared in the housing unit, causing the attackers to flee. The unidentified victim suffered approximately 44 stab wounds to the back, chest, abdomen, right arm and legs, federal prosecutors said.
Two stitches were found – one 10.5 inches long, the other 5.5 inches long. The lead attacker was identified as Luis Rivas, who is serving a 40-year sentence for a series of gang-related crimes, including the beheading of a 16-year-old boy in Queens, New York.
The stabbing was the start of deadly violence.
On June 7, another inmate at MDC, Uriel Whyte, was stabbed in the neck, according to the Bureau of Prisons and the chief medical examiner. Less than six weeks later, 36-year-old Edwin Cordero was stabbed by another inmate. He died on July 17 from a stab wound in the chest.
“Mr. Cordero was a victim of the deplorable conditions at MDC Brooklyn, which resulted from chronic overcrowding and understaffing,” said his attorney, Andrew Dalak. “Until the federal government comes together to make conditions at MDC Brooklyn more humane and safe, the solution is simple: fewer people should be held there.”
According to a spokeswoman, the Bureau of Prisons is “seriously addressing staffing and other issues at MDC Brooklyn.”
“Therefore, earlier this year the director appointed an Emergency Action Team to take a comprehensive look at the issues at MDC Brooklyn,” the spokesperson said. “The team’s work continues, but it has already increased permanent staff at the facility (including COs and medical staff), resolved more than 700 overdue maintenance requests, and continued to focus on issues raised in two recent court decisions.”
Over the past year, a series of medical negligence lawsuits have drawn the ire of judges.
A mass was discovered in the chest of an inmate named Terrence Wise in February. But for two months after she started coughing up blood, the mass was not reported or received any medical attention, according to court records. He was finally sent to the hospital in April, where he learned the cancerous mass had nearly doubled in size, according to court documents.
In another case, an inmate endured hours of excruciating pain after his appendix burst in April while MDC staff ignored his calls for help. 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 May hearing for inmate Jonathan Goulbourne. This is reported by the New York Daily News. “I’m tired of hearing that the defendants detained at MDC are not being given proper medical care.”
The law in the federal court system requires that defendants on bail be sent to prison after conviction. But in January, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman went so far as to state the conditions at MDC as an “exceptional” case that would allow him to release a defendant under house arrest before sentencing him.
Furman cited the facility’s “appalling conditions” to justify the decision not to send a man convicted of drug trafficking to MDC, which he said was “extremely slow in providing inmates with adequate medical and mental health treatment.”
In his ruling last month, Judge Brown offered a harsher assessment of the Brooklyn facility, and he promised to put the convicted fraudster under house arrest if he is placed in MDC to serve his nine-month sentence.
Brown called the conditions “dangerous” and “barbaric.” He also noted that each of the five months preceding his opinion had been marked by “disastrous incidents of violence at the MDC, including two apparent murders, two horrific stabbings and an attack so severe that the victim’s eye socket was broken.”
“The activities that provoked these attacks are almost as unimaginable and horrific as the injuries that followed: drug debt collection, battles over illegal drugs, organized gang robbery, intra-gang disputes and as-yet-unknown ‘feuds,'” he said. written opinion.
The attorney for the defendant, Daniel Collucci, praised Brown.
“He asked a lot of questions, did a lot of research, and he was convinced that this place was a hell hole,” said attorney Richard Kestenbaum.