Photo: Shareif Ziyadat/Getty Images
After P. Diddy’s lawyers lost their bid last week to keep him out of jail, he was sent to the Metropolitan Detention Center, where sources tell NBC News that he’s bunking with an unlikely roommate: the mop-headed, fallen king of crypto, Sam Bankman-Fried.
P. Diddy was arrested on September 16 and indicted on charges of of racketeering and sex trafficking after a growing list of women accused him of sexual assault. While he awaits trial, he’s stuck in a unit that houses around 20 people who prison officials think shouldn’t mix with the rest of the population. NBC News describes P. Diddy’s new home as a “barrack-style area.” But it also might be the nicest slice of the city’s last federal facility, a place that has been accused of “rampant violence, dreadful conditions, severe staffing shortages, and the widespread smuggling of drugs and other contraband, some of it facilitated by employees,” according to the Associated Press. A lawyer for a detainee who killed himself there called the MDC “hell on earth.”
The Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn is just a few blocks from Costco, between the expressway and the water.
Photo: Theodore Parisienne/New York Daily News/Getty Images
A source tells People that P. Diddy has been “treated like any other detainee awaiting trial” — which included being put on suicide watch when he first arrived.
Photo: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
We know more about how Bankman-Fried has done there. And he seems to be flourishing after a tricky start. His lawyer said the jail wasn’t getting him the right dosage of Adderall or following his vegan diet, forcing him to subsist on peanut butter, bread, and water. Other inmates have tried to extort Bankman-Fried, according to an inmate who got out — a former member of the Bonanno crime family, who gave an interview to a YouTuber. He described SBF as a shy kid with “the body of an 80-year-old” who was afraid to make eye contact or take a shower. But he gave him a lesson in prison survival and says SBF has been winning over the other roommates by giving tutorials in crypto. (Other sources told the WSJ he’s even making elaborate trades with the prison commissary’s mackerel, or “macks.”)
Bankman-Fried is expected to eventually move to a facility closer to his parents in California, but for the time being, he’s preparing for his appeal. P. Diddy is staying put until he stands trial, but so far no date has been set.
