Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is going into his third night with over 1,500 other inmates in one of New York’s most notorious prisons — a far cry from his parent’s multi-million dollar five-bedroom home in Stanford.
The FTX co-founder had his bail revoked by Judge Lewis Kaplan in an Aug. 11 hearing, where he described the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) as being a jail “not on anybody’s list of five-star facilities.”
Duuude they put SBF in MDC?
That’ll break him. Going to get a guilty plea within days…. https://t.co/WrUf8rzKUO
— Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth) (@adamscochran) August 14, 2023
The MDC is a federal administrative detention center based in New York. It is an all-gender facility accommodating individuals under federal custody. The facility currently houses over 1,500 inmates but was only built to accommodate 1,000.
Bankman-Fried is expected to spend at least the next two months at the facility as he awaits his criminal trial, though his lawyers have already filed an appeal to have his bail revocation revised.
Not exactly Club Me
Unfortunately for Bankman-Fried, the prison has long been embroiled in scandals involving inmate mistreatment and corruption.
Ex-warden Cameron Lindsay said in 2019 that the MDC was “one of the most troubled, if not the most troubled facility in the Bureau of Prisons.”
Outside of the Brooklyn MDC in 2008. Source: Jim Henderson, Wikimedia Commons
In April prosecutors charged a guard with taking bribes in exchange for smuggling in contraband such as phones, cigarettes, and drugs.
In winter 2019 the facility suffered a week-long power outage leaving inmates with no heating.
The Intercept reported inmates were banging on cell windows to outside onlookers and those non-violently protesting the conditions were pepper sprayed, thrown in solitary confinement or had their toilets shuttered.
MDC’s star-studded former inmates
Many high-profile figures have previously been remanded in the Brooklyn big house including artists 6ix9ine, R. Kelly and Fetty Wap.
Martin Shkreli, better known as “pharma bro,” also had a stint at the MDC along with Jeffery Epstein’s sex trafficking accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
Up until recently, Bankman-Fried was on bail confined to his parent’s $4 million Palo Alto home that boasts five bedrooms and a pool.
Aerial view of the Bankman-Fried house in Palo Alo, California. Source: Google Maps
The revocation of Bankman-Fried’s bail came after a leak of a diary belonging to former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison to The New York Times which described her feelings toward Bankman-Fried and her role at the company.
Related: FTX’s former law firm hit with lawsuit alleging it set up shadowy entities
Prosecutors alleged Bankman-Fried leaked the diary in an attempt to discredit Ellison — a witness in his criminal trial — and intimidate her.
His lawyers denied the allegations, calling Bankman-Fried’s contact with reporters a “proper exercise of his rights to make fair comment on an article already in progress” and appealed the judge’s decision to revoke his bail.
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