Luigi Mangione and Sean “Diddy” Combs now share another thing in common besides lawyer Marc Agnifilo—a home in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
Having been previously charged in both New York and Pennsylvania for his alleged involvement in the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Mangione now faces four additional federal charges as of Thursday, including two stalking charges and murder through use of a firearm.
Joining the ranks of MDC’s exclusive club of famous felons and alleged felons, Mangione is currently in custody in the notoriously hellish facility after arriving in New York to what felt like a presidential welcome. While the MDC holds around 1,200 detainees, it also is notably home to the alleged criminal Combs and the felon former crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried, who are reportedly in the same housing unit.
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Along with Combs and now Mangione, the MDC also once housed disgraced rapper R. Kelly and Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, who bemoaned her living conditions so loudly—including that she was losing hair, living with rodents, and being physically abused—that she was ultimately moved to a low-level federal prison in Florida, according to AP.
As for Combs, Agnifilo told the Daily Beast in September that he was “doing quite well under the circumstances,” and denied rumors that the rapper was scared of eating the prison food, which according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons national menu, plates several options for breakfast, lunch, and dinner including oatmeal, hamburgers, and chicken fajitas.
The facility has been New York City’s primary federal detention center since 2021 after the Bureau of Prisons shut down Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center (where Jeffrey Epstein died in 2019) over its alarming conditions.
Predominantly used as a post-arrest detention center for people awaiting trial in Manhattan or Brooklyn’s federal courts, the MDC notoriously bolsters a less than squeaky-clean image with claims of understaffing, violent outbreaks, and a string of suicides and deaths plaguing the facility.
The MDC’s reputation is so disastrous, in fact, that some judges have even refrained from sending defendants to the facility according to AP, and Combs’ lawyers made a point to mention its conditions in one of his motions for bail in September claiming that “several courts in this District have recognized that the conditions at Metropolitan Detention Center are not fit for pre-trial detention.”
“Just earlier this summer, an inmate was murdered,” they continued. “At least four inmates have died by suicide there in the past three years.” Combs’ lawyers were seemingly referencing the death of an inmate named Uriel Whyte who had been awaiting trial on gun charges for more than two years, but was stabbed to death inside the MDC on June 7. A second inmate, Edwin Cordero, died after being injured in a jail fight over a month later.
According to The New York Times, Cordero’s lawyer called his client’s death “senseless and completely preventable” before describing him as “another victim of M.D.C. Brooklyn, an overcrowded, understaffed and neglected federal jail that is hell on earth.”
This “hell on earth” is also made manifest through its abysmal living conditions, with the MDC being thrust into the national spotlight after a week-long blackout left its inmates shivering in the cold in January 2019. The blackout subsequently sparked a class action lawsuit which was settled for around $10 million last year.
The MDC’s nightmarish conditions have also trickled into the courtroom on several occasions, with two taking place in 2024 alone. In January, Southern District of New York Judge Jesse Furman refused to send a 70-year-old defendant to the MDC, and opted for bail instead after their conviction for drug charges. In his 19-page decision, Judge Furman described the MDC as “dreadful” and said that “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.”
“Prosecutors no longer even put up a fight,” Judge Furman continued. “Let alone dispute that the state of affairs is unacceptable.”
Then again in August, Eastern District of New York Judge Gary Brown said he would vacate a 75-year-old defendant’s sentence for tax fraud and place him on home confinement instead if the Bureau of Prisons were to send him to the MDC, citing its “dangerous, barbaric conditions.”
In response, the Bureau of Prisons said it would “temporarily” pause sending any defendant convicted of crimes to the MDC to serve their sentences. It added that there were 43 people currently serving sentences in a minimum-security unit at the prison site.
Mangione was arrested in Pennsylvania on Dec. 9 and has since been the subject of increasingly incriminating evidence in regards to Thompson’s murder, according to police. Along with gun charges in Pennsylvania and a slew of murder charges in New York, Mangione has also been charged with one federal count of using a firearm to commit murder—if he is found guilty he could face the death penalty.
