What it’s like inside the infamous jail where Venezuela’s former president Nicolás Maduro is being held

By Alisha Ebrahimji, CNN

(CNN) — A federal jail with a documented history of power outages, staffing shortages and detainee complaints just got two more high-profile detainees.

Former president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were moved into the notorious Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn on Saturday following their US military capture in Caracas just days ago. The husband and wife face criminal charges in the US.

The couple isn’t the only high-profile detainees to see the walls of the MDC. The building has housed several notable figures like hip-hop mogul, Sean “Diddy” Combs, singer R. Kelly, “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli, socialite and Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, one-time cryptocurrency whiz kid Sam Bankman-Fried, drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, rappers Fetty Wap and Tekashi 6ix9ine – even former Honduras president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted of drug trafficking charges before he was pardoned last year by President Donald Trump.

Suspected cartel leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia and Luigi Mangione, who pleaded not guilty to the shooting death of a UnitedHealth Group executive, are current inmates at the facility.

In their first court appearance in New York Monday, Maduro and Flores pleaded not guilty to drug and weapons charges and chose, for the time being, not to fight their detention.

Here’s a look at what life inside MDC Brooklyn looks like through the eyes of inmates, attorneys and judges:

From Miraflores Palace to a ‘miserable’ place

Constructed in the 1990s to address overcrowding in New York City prisons, MDC Brooklyn is a pre-trial detention facility for those charged in New York federal court. Detainees include a mix of suspects and defendants, including people accused of serious crimes, high-profile cases, and others awaiting sentencing or transfer.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons operated two centers – one in Brooklyn and one in Manhattan – until 2021, when the doors to the Manhattan facility closed after it drew criticism for its management of multimillionaire financier and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s death there by suicide in 2019.

Before his capture, Maduro lived mostly at Miraflores Palace, a sprawling presidential residence known for its neoclassical architecture, large windows, grand halls and manicured courtyards – a stark contrast to the living quarters inside the Metropolitan Detention Center.

Described by attorneys and inmates alike as “disgusting” with “horrifying” conditions, the facility is the only federal correction center serving the nation’s largest city.

For its more than 1,300 inmates, daily life at the federal jail can be grueling.

It’s dark, overcrowded and loud, according to CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig, who has been inside the building many times.

While all prisons are miserable places to be, he said, “the MDC is maybe the most miserable” of all that he’s visited.

Inmates in the facility’s Special Housing Unit, known as the SHU, where it’s likely Maduro is being housed for safety and security, are kept in solitary confinement under restrictive conditions, Daniel McGuinnes, a criminal defense and civil rights litigation attorney who represents several clients housed at MDC, told CNN.

Inmates spend up to 23 hours locked down inside their cells with restrictive escort protocols in place when they do move outside of them and have limited access to legal phone calls, according to a DOJ report.

The jail has also struggled with chronic understaffing, complaints about mold, fungus and poor food quality, McGuinnes said.

Access to medical and dental care at the facility has always been “horrific,” according to McGuiness, who noted he often has to remind his clients to thoroughly document their requests for such care.

“At some point I’ll have to step in and request it on their behalf,” he said, “because it’s just not getting done.”

CNN has reached out to the Bureau of Prisons for comment.

‘Longstanding problem’ highlighted at aging facility

A prolonged power outage spun the correctional facility into crisis, leaving inmates in near-total darkness during a polar vortex for a week in early 2019. The outage prompted a Justice Department investigation into whether the Bureau of Prisons had adequate contingency plans to address the issue.

A lawsuit filed on behalf of inmates alleged they were confined to their cells for days with nonfunctioning toilets and other unsanitary conditions. The Bureau of Prisons ultimately settled the lawsuit, compensating almost 1,600 inmates with a total of approximately $10 million for enduring frigid and inhumane conditions because of the power outage.

Michael Horowitz, Inspector General for the US Department of Justice at the time, said it was determined “that heating issues had been a longstanding problem at the jail that existed before, during, and after the fire and power outage and were unrelated to these events.”

Judges avoid sending defendants to MDC over worsening conditions

In early 2024, the Bureau of Prisons appointed an Urgent Action Team “to take a holistic look at the challenges at MDC Brooklyn,” spokesperson Emery Nelson told CNN.

“The team’s work is ongoing, but it has already increased permanent staffing at the institution (including COs and medical staff), addressed over 700 backlogged maintenance requests, and applied a continued focus on the issues raised in two recent judicial decisions,” Nelson said at the time.

Despite the noted improvements that year, conditions at the Metropolitan Detention Center seemed to worsen as the months ticked by.

In June 2024, Uriel Whyte, an inmate awaiting trial on gun charges, was stabbed to death by another inmate, according to a DOJ news release.

A month later, inmate Edwin Cordero died in a fight that broke out inside the prison. Cordero’s lawyer told The New York Times his client was “another victim of M.D.C. Brooklyn, an overcrowded, understaffed and neglected federal jail that is hell on earth.”

Later in September, the DOJ announced five inmates were charged in those murders and a sixth was charged with attempted murder for allegedly stabbing another inmate 44 times with a makeshift weapon. Meanwhile, another inmate was sent to the hospital with an ice pick stuck in his back, according to the release.

During a multi-agency operation, the following month – as part of a larger safety and security initiative – investigators seized “a number of electronic devices, drugs and associated paraphernalia, and homemade weapons,” the Bureau of Prisons said in a news release that year.

The “charges demonstrate the Justice Department’s commitment to rooting out violence and criminal behavior at federal detention facilities — a critical component of our work to improve conditions across the Federal Bureau of Prisons,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said at the time.

The situation on the grounds became so concerning; at least two federal judges refused to sentence defendants to MDC in 2024 because of the derelict environment, The New York Times reported.

Bottom line: “It’s a very difficult place to be an inmate,” Diddy’s attorney, Marc Agnifilo, said of the facility in 2024 and argued in court.

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This story has been updated to remove quotes attributed to Michael Cohen, who has not been inside MDC.