Details: Maduro's Being Held at 'Hell on Earth' Jail, Known for Maggots in Food, Heat Going Out, and Fatal Violence
It’s a long way from a presidential palace to a prison cell — and ousted Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro is finding that out in real time.
The former El Señor Presidente, once known as much for his macho braggadocio as for devastating his country, was spirited from his opulent digs in Caracas by a daring special forces raid ordered by President Donald Trump and executed by the American military over the weekend.
Now, he’s ensconced in a federal prison in New York City that’s described in a New York Post headline as “hell on earth.”
The quote describing the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn comes from a September 2024 Business Insider interview with a defense attorney commenting on the case of rapper-turned-criminal-defendant Sean “Diddy” Combs.
“To go from living in mansions in Beverly Hills and Miami to the MDC is as epic a change in circumstances as one can have,” attorney Mark Bederow told the publication.
“All that money won’t make it warmer when it’s cold, colder when it’s hot. It won’t make the food more edible. It won’t make the cockroaches stay away.”
Swap out “living in mansions in Beverly Hills and Miami” with “being the ultimate rulers of a socialist slave state,” and it might come close to the kind of epic “change in circumstances” Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, are experiencing now.
And judging by reports published about the MDC over the years, Bederow wasn’t exaggerating a bit.
According to the New York Post, the facility was the target of a campaign by New York’s Legal Aid Society criticizing the prison as a detention site for illegal aliens rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The society claimed the prison was rife with “maggot-infested food” and dangerous conditions that can involve “fatal violence.”
A New York Times report in September 2024 described how the federal prison in Brooklyn has been the site of inmate attacks that have killed other prisoners, as well as non-fatal attacks that have included stabbings with makeshift weapons.
And then there was a notorious power outage in January and February 2019 that left inmates with limited heat and hot water for a week — and led to a lawsuit against the federal government, as ABC News reported in July of that year.
(About the only thing the Metropolitan Detention Center has going for it is that it’s not the federal prison where notorious sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in 2019. That was the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, which closed “temporarily” in 2021, as The New York Times reported at the time. It has yet to reopen.)
All of that — as bad as it is — sounds like a week at summer camp compared to the stories that have come out of El Helicoide, the giant torture complex in Caracas that Maduro used as a prison for his own opponents.
Former prisoners have reported treatment that included electric shocks to testicles, the systematic rape of women, suffocation with plastic bags — the usual stuff of totalitarian nightmares.
That kind of treatment, needless to say, is not how American prisons operate. And a prison like MDC, which has housed big names — often with big-budget legal teams — is in the spotlight too much to be playing games that would outrage a fundamentally decent nation.
(As an NPR report noted, MDC is holding or has held celebrity prisoners like Combs, alleged assassin and leftist heartthrob Luigi Mangione, Epstein paramour and procuress Ghislaine Maxwell, Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, and former Trump attorney Michael Cohen.
Names like that mean public attention. And public attention in the United States generally means coddling treatment.
But it doesn’t necessarily mean the food’s going to be five-star Michelin, that the heating and air conditioning will suit every resident’s taste, or that the fellow inmates of the Crips/Bloods/Tren de Aragua variety will be as well behaved as the leftist Eurocrats of Davos.
And that means Maduro and his fair first lady are going to have a lot of adjusting to do while they await their legal fate in the United States.
Still, they could have it worse. They’re out of power and in prison, but at least they’re in the United States. They could be out of power and in prison back home.
“This is the least they deserve,” Gabriel Bonilla, a Venezuelan comedian who fled to Argentina in 2017, told the New York Post.
“The worst prison in the United States is a mansion compared to the prisons and holes where people have been tortured for years in Venezuela.”
Maduro is finding that out, too. And if he had any sense, he’d be damn grateful for it.
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