Federal prison officials confirmed that an interagency operation was conducted Monday against the New York City jail, where Sean “Diddy” Combs was being held.
Combs is being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center, in Brooklyn. He faces charges of sex trafficking and racketeering. Over the years, other high-profile prisoners, including R. Kelly and Sam Bankman Fried, were held at this facility.
In a statement to CBS News, the Federal Bureau of Prisons said that the operation “was designed to achieve our common goal of maintaining a secure environment for our employees as well as the inmates housed at MDC Brooklyn.”
The statement also added that there was no active threat to the facility.
For the sweep, the Bureau partnered with the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspect General and other law-enforcement agencies.
MDC Brooklyn has a long history of complaints
MDC Brooklyn is under increased scrutiny due to deaths, violence, and poor conditions. The Bureau of Prisons, along with the Justice Department, has been working to solve the problem and hold the perpetrators responsible.
Nine inmates were arrested last month for a series of attacks in the jail. Federal prosecutors raised serious safety and security issues, including the stabbing deaths of two inmates and a correctional officer shooting at an unauthorized car.
MDC Brooklyn, where Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide in 2010, is the only federal prison in the city. MCC New York closed in 2021. The waterfront industrial complex is home to 1,200 people – mainly federal defendants awaiting trial in Manhattan or Brooklyn.
The MDC Brooklyn inmates won a class action settlement of $10 million for the frigid temperatures during an eight-day power outage in 2019.
Kelly sued the jail after it placed him on suicide alert after his sentencing, in 2022. Bankman-Fried’s lawyer said that he only survived on peanut butter, bread, and water after the jail did not provide vegan food when he was there, last year.
Ja Rule stayed briefly at MDC Brooklyn on gun charges and Rev. Al Sharpton, who was serving a sentence of 90 days at MDC Brooklyn in 2001 to protest the U.S. Navy’s bombing of Vieques in Puerto Rico, went on hunger strike.
