Sean Diddy

Sean Combs’s New Home: A Troubled Brooklyn Jail

Author: Julia Jacobs and Ben Sisario Source: N.Y Times

September 18, 2024 at 11:22

Yuki Iwamura/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The music mogul, who is charged with sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, is being held at a federal detention center. His lawyers are appealing.

When Sean Combs flew from Miami to New York this month to prepare for an expected federal indictment, he left behind his expansive mansion with multiple pools, a spa and a guesthouse on a man-made island.

Going forward, though, home for Mr. Combs will most likely be the Metropolitan Detention Center, a hulking concrete structure in Brooklyn that houses more than 1,200 people and has a reputation for poor conditions.

Mr. Combs was ordered held in federal detention on Tuesday and taken to the Brooklyn jail after a judge denied him bail. A grand jury had indicted him on sex trafficking and racketeering charges, and prosecutors said he was a dangerous person who would be at risk to flee if released.

It was a sudden change of circumstances for a music producer, known in the industry as Diddy and Puff Daddy, who has been wealthy since becoming one of the most prominent record label founders of the 1990s. Jail records now have him registered under the number 37452-054.

The M.D.C., as it is known, has been troubled by deaths and suicides and an electrical fire that once left inmates without heat for days in the dead of winter. A lawyer for Edwin Cordero, a detainee who died there in July from injuries he sustained in a fight, called the prison “an overcrowded, understaffed and neglected federal jail that is hell on earth.”

Though Bureau of Prisons officials did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday, the detention center in Sunset Park is typically where federal defendants awaiting trial in Manhattan are held.

Mr. Combs, who pleaded not guilty, is set to appeal the bail denial. If he fails he is expected to be held in federal detention for months as he awaits trial.

The prospect of that was apparent in the desperate efforts from his lawyers to convince Judge Robyn F. Tarnofsky to grant bail, arguing during a two-hour hearing on Tuesday that they had taken Mr. Combs’s passport and that he was willing to post a $50 million bond, secured by his Miami home.

In a letter to the judge, his lawyers called the conditions at the Brooklyn detention center “horrific,” referring to reports of food contamination, a recent murder and at least four suicides there in the past three years. Other judges, they noted, “have recognized that the conditions at Metropolitan Detention Center are not fit for pretrial detention.”

A man in a white shirt and a dark striped jacket. — A lawyer for Mr. Combs argued that he was not a flight risk, but prosecutors convinced the presiding judge to deny him bail and he is now set to be incarcerated until his trial.Credit...Lucas Jackson/Reuters

But Judge Tarnofsky was persuaded by federal prosecutors who argued in the Manhattan courtroom that what they described as Mr. Combs’s history of substance abuse, violence and obstruction of justice made him an unfit candidate for release. They pointed in one instance to how he had denied claims of physical abuse made by a former girlfriend, Casandra Ventura, until surveillance video emerged of Mr. Combs assaulting her inside a hotel.

“The sequence of events makes crystal clear that you cannot take the defendant at his word,” Emily A. Johnson, a prosecutor, said at the hearing.

Mr. Combs remained largely impassive during the debate, sitting between his lawyers in a black T-shirt and gray sweatpants. Prosecutors have accused him of coercing women to participate in elaborate sex parties with male prostitutes and of using violence and intimidation to prevent them from exposing him.

His lead lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, told the judge the sexual encounters were consensual and asked her to trust that he would be able to produce his client, as directed, were Mr. Combs to be released.

“I don’t know that I think you can trust yourself,” Judge Tarnofsky responded, referring to Mr. Combs. She cited a history of alleged violence linked to substance abuse and noted that some of the people cited by prosecutors as victims of Mr. Combs could be particularly “susceptible” to coercion because of the power dynamic.The detention facility in Brooklyn — which opened in 1994, following several years of neighborhood opposition — has been host to a number of high-profile defendants, such as Sam Bankman-Fried, R. Kelly and Ghislaine Maxwell. It became the primary federal detention center in New York when its sister jail in Manhattan — where Jeffrey Epstein died — was closed in 2021 because of poor conditions.

Mr. Combs’s legal team worked for weeks to convince federal prosecutors that, whatever missteps their client had made, he was not someone who would be appropriately charged as a sex trafficker or racketeer.

“We tried,” Mr. Agnifilo told the judge on Tuesday, “and we couldn’t win them over.”

During that same period, the prosecutors were collecting a trove of evidence that they said proved just the opposite.

Ms. Johnson, the prosecutor, said at the bail hearing that the government had issued more than 300 grand jury subpoenas and collected more than 90 cellphones, laptops and electronic storage accounts as part of the case. The government said it had identified at least a dozen witnesses who observed Mr. Combs’s violence toward women or saw the results of the abuse.

When it became clear that Mr. Combs would probably be charged, Mr. Agnifilo said he recommended to his client that he fly to New York to “sit it out” ahead of an indictment. Mr. Combs took up residence at the Park Hyatt hotel on West 57th Street in Manhattan.

His lawyers had hoped he would be allowed to surrender, but investigators instead arrived at the hotel on Monday evening, putting Mr. Combs under arrest at 8:25 p.m. For the foreseeable future, his nights will most likely be spent in the Brooklyn detention center.

Julia Jacobs is an arts and culture reporter who often covers legal issues for The Times. More about Julia Jacobs

Ben Sisario, a reporter covering music and the music industry, has been writing for The Times for more than 20 years. More about Ben Sisario