The New York Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC, in its English acronym), the New York federal prison where Nicolás Maduro is imprisoned, has housed such notorious inmates as Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, rapper Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, and former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández.
Located in the Brooklyn district, it has been called a “hell on Earth.” It is one of the city’s most notorious prisons along with Rikers and was the subject of complaints about staff shortages, crime within its facilities, and harsh living conditions in the cells.
In New York’s only federal prison, its approximately 1,200 inmates await trial in federal courts, since the Metropolitan Correctional Center in southern Manhattan closed.
An old British dam, Ghislaine Maxwell, partner and accomplice of the deceased sex predator Jeffrey Epstein, denounced “inhuman, cruel and degrading” conditions in the MDC and compared her cell to that of the psychopath Hannibal Lecter in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’.
Another inmate, former Mexican Secretary of Public Security Genaro García Luna, reported in a letter made public by his lawyer that he had witnessed homicides and stabbings.
The long list of ‘celebrated’ figures was joined in 2024 by
Luigi Mangione, accused of murdering the CEO of the insurance company UnitedHealthcare, who coincided with the controversial rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs.
The former advisor to President Donald Trump,
Michael Cohen, was also incarcerated in the facilities in 2020, accused of tax evasion, among other charges, and remembered his time in prison on the occasion of Combs’ visit to the same.
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“(Combs) 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,” assured the former Trump advisor, who added that in the first stage of confinement there is no access to books.
Currently, the
alleged leader of the Sinaloa cartel,
Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada García, is another of the prisoners being held at the facility awaiting trial on charges of murder and drug trafficking.
In 2019, the situation in the federal prison generated protests after seven days partially without electricity or heating.
According to videos uploaded to social media, many inmates were asking for help by banging on the windows with objects after several days in which the thermometer in New York reached fifteen degrees below zero. In addition, lawyers for the inmates reported that there were no medical services.
The 2019 incident prompted a Department of Justice investigation to assess whether the Bureau of Prisons had “adequate contingency plans” to address the living conditions of inmates.
For their part, the prisoners filed a class action lawsuit, which resulted in the compensation of 1,600 inmates with about ten million dollars for enduring cold and inhumane conditions due to the power outage.
