What Nicolás Maduro’s Life Is Like in a Notorious Brooklyn Jail
When Tekashi 6ix9ine, the rapper and former gang member, finished serving a three-month sentence at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, he left with a strange memory. He showed it to two friends waiting outside the prison to collect it: It was a homemade SpongeBob figurine with a series of jagged lines – sort of like a heart rate monitor or a mountain range – scrawled on it. It was, 6ix9ine explained, the autograph of Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela. The signature was also dated, in Spanish, “2.º Abril”.
“Look, one on one,” 6ix9ine said, holding up the SpongeBob SquarePants, which another inmate, he later explained, had meticulously made, folding six hundred pieces of paper and sewing them together, over the course of two weeks. “Maduro signed it,” he declared proudly, before adding: “Venezuela forever.”
On January 3, Maduro was kidnapped in Venezuela during a US raid on a military compound in Caracas, dubbed Operation Absolute Resolve. The same day, he was transported to a DEA office in Manhattan for booking, before being brought to MDC Brooklyn, the only functioning federal detention center in New York. He has been detained there for four and a half months.
6ix9ine, who was at MDC Brooklyn after violating the terms of his supervised release related to a 2018 case, claims to have been roommates with Maduro for part of his sentence — an experience he described in detail to manosphere streamer Adin Ross. “I didn’t want to bother him, I didn’t want to look like a little deployed girl,” 6ix9ine told Ross. “Because as soon as he walked in, I was like, Yo, whatever you need.” At one point early in his incarceration, Maduro appears to have been held in a unit designed for solitary confinement, as is common for detainees of his status. “He smelled like shit when he came out of the club,” 6ix9ine explained. “But then, you know, he was able to have time to take a shower and stuff like that.” (The Federal Bureau of Prisons declined to comment on Maduro’s conditions at MDC Brooklyn, citing safety, security and privacy of inmates.) Afterward, Maduro was likely transferred to a unit known as 4 North, which is typically where high-profile inmates are held, such as rapper Sean (Diddy) Combs, who spent more than a year in prison, and more recently, 6ix9ine. (“I took Diddy’s bed,” 6ix9ine said.)
There are two main buildings at MDC Brooklyn: a larger building, where most male inmates are held, and a smaller building, where female inmates are held. 4 North is located on the fourth floor of the latter, above the women’s prison. In this unit, which can only accommodate a small group of inmates, the beds are grouped together like a dormitory and there are no pillows. 6ix9ine described the cramped conditions. “Maduro was sleeping right in front of me,” he told Ross, pointing to a distance of about two feet.
