Bankman-Fried heads to Brooklyn jail notorious for poor conditions
SAM Bankman-Fried will prepare for his fraud trial from a Brooklyn jail where inmates ranging from convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to Honduras’ former president have complained of subpar conditions.
US District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan ruled last week that Bankman-Fried, the founder of bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, must be jailed for tampering with witnesses while free on US$250 million bond at his parents’ home in Palo Alto, California.
Bankman-Fried, who has pleaded not guilty to fraud charges over FTX’s collapse, will now be housed before his Oct 2 trial in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC), a far cry from the luxurious Bahamas resort where he lived until his December 2022 arrest and extradition to the United States.
In recent years, MDC has been plagued by persistent staffing shortages, power outages and maggots in inmates’ food. Earlier this year, a guard pleaded guilty to accepting bribes to smuggle in drugs. Public defenders have called conditions “inhumane”.
In the winter of 2019, an electrical fire cut off the jail’s lighting and heat for days as temperatures fell to minus 18 deg Celsius.
Lawyers for Maxwell, who was convicted of recruiting and grooming teenage girls for abuse by the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, said raw sewage seeped into her cell there. Her attorneys compared the “reprehensible and utterly inappropriate” conditions there to Hannibal Lecter’s incarceration in the 1991 movie, The Silence of the Lambs, “despite the absence of the cage and plastic face guard”.
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They also cited “hyper-surveillance” by overbearing guards, a bad diet, and sleep deprivation.
Maxwell was sentenced last year to 20 years and is being held at a prison in Florida.
The US Bureau of Prisons, which runs MDC, did not respond to a request for comment. The agency previously has said it is committed to the safety of inmates and staff, and that humane treatment of inmates is a top priority.
Founded in 1994, MDC currently hosts 1,608 inmates. It is now the jail housing detainees awaiting federal trials in New York City, after the Manhattan Correctional Center closed in 2021 for improvements. Epstein killed himself in his MCC cell while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. REUTERS
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