After US military forces seized Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in Caracas during a controversial pre-dawn raid, they were ultimately spirited to one of this country’s most infamous jails: the Metropolitan detention center (MDC) in Brooklyn, New York.
The deposed Venezuelan president and Flores will almost certainly reside in the MDC until their federal trial on drugs and weapons charge – inducting them into a notorious group that counts Sean “Diddy” Combs, Ghislaine Maxwell, Sam Bankman-Fried and Mexican drug kingpin “El Chapo” as either current or former members.
The facility, located in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, holds prisoners with pending cases in the United States district court for the eastern district of New York as well as those serving brief sentences.
The notable names mentioned above are among the many high-profile defendants who have called this correctional facility home in recent years. Luigi Mangione, who faces federal and state charges in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, is presently jailed there.
Other widely known inmates have included Trap Queen singer Fetty Wap, the Rev Al Sharpton (who served a 90-day sentence in 2001), disgraced R&B star R Kelly, “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli, and Nxivm sex cult leader Keith Raniere and member Allison Mack. Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras found guilty of trafficking cocaine, was also held there. Donald Trump pardoned him in December.
Defense lawyers representing both famous and lower-profile detainees alike have repeatedly complained that conditions at the MDC are unsafe and inhumane.
Following Combs’s arrest on sex-trafficking charges in September 2024, for example, the fallen hip-hop mogul’s lawyers Marc Agnifilo and Teny Geragos cited violence at the MDC in making their pitch for bail. The attorneys said in a letter that an inmate was killed at the MDC in the summer of 2024 and noted that a minimum of four detainees died by suicide there in the past three years. They also alluded to examples from other cases detailing “food contamination and hazardous physical conditions”, invoking other times where the MDC was described as “dirty”, “infested with drugs” and replete with violence.
Federal judges have even refused to send defendants there who they determine don’t pose a danger to others.
Manhattan federal court judge Jesse Furman said in a January 2024 decision that he would not send a man – who he noted had been compliant with his bail terms – to MDC before his sentencing for fentanyl distribution, due to the conditions.
Maxwell, who in 2021 was found guilty of aiding her former partner Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of teen girls, pushed for bail during her MDC tenure, arguing that the conditions were inhumane. She said jail guards flashed lights into her cell every 15 minutes to make sure she was alive. (Epstein died by suicide in the now-shuttered Manhattan federal jail in 2019.)
A power outage at the MDC in the winter of 2019 left inmates without heat for an entire week while a polar vortex hammered New York with below-freezing temperatures. Defendants have often contended with “near perpetual lockdowns” that could “no longer [be] explained by Covid-19” restrictions, Furman said in his decision.
“It has gotten to the point that it is routine for judges in both this district and the eastern district to give reduced sentences to defendants based on the conditions of confinement in the MDC,” Furman wrote. “Prosecutors no longer even put up a fight, let alone dispute that the state of affairs is unacceptable.”
The MDC, which houses 1,336 inmates according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, has reeled from overcrowding and staff shortages. After Manhattan’s Metropolitan correctional center closed in 2021, the MDC was among the facilities that absorbed its detainee population.
Manhattan federal court judge Colleen McMahon even said in 2021 that both Manhattan’s Metropolitan correctional center and the MDC were “run by morons”, according to the New York Post. At the facilities, officials neglected to “do anything meaningful” to address conditions. Wardens at these jails, McMahon said, “cycle repeatedly, never staying for longer than a few months or even a year”.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons has claimed that conditions at the MDC have improved. “Since January 2024, there has been a substantial decrease in violence, limits on the inmates’ scheduled times out of their cells, and attempted introductions of contraband at MDC Brooklyn,” BOP officials said in a recent fact sheet.
“In short, MDC Brooklyn is safe for the inmates and staff,” they also claimed. The MDC’s staffing has improved, with 87% of positions filled, and a decline in the number of inmates since January 2024, officials said.
Maduro and Flores appeared in Manhattan federal court on Monday following their transfer to the MDC and both pleaded not guilty. Maduro carried himself with a defiance similar to that of his foe, Trump, and called himself a “prisoner of war”.
But Maduro and Flores’s courtroom presence put into sharp relief that they were no longer leaders enjoying the power that came with helming even troubled nations – they were now bedraggled detainees awaiting trial.
Maduro was dressed in drab jail garb – khaki pants with a blue and orange shirt – with Flores wearing a similar color scheme. Flores had bandages on her face, which her lawyer said were to treat injuries sustained during the couple’s capture.
