Illustration by Ben Kothe; Source photographs from Getty
Diego Lasarte
A member of the editorial staff
Four months ago, Nicolás Maduro, the President of Venezuela, was abducted in the middle of the night during a U.S. raid on a military complex in Caracas and brought to New York on charges including narco-terrorism and drug trafficking. (He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.) After being booked at a local D.E.A. office, Maduro was transported to Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal jail in Sunset Park. Since then, little has been revealed about Maduro’s living conditions behind bars. But, in a recent interview, the rapper and former gang member Tekashi 6ix9ine claimed to have been roommates with him. “Maduro slept, like, right across from me,” 6ix9ine told Adin Ross, a manosphere streamer.
During the interview, 6ix9ine described Maduro’s condition after being released from solitary confinement—“he smelled like shit when he first came out the box”—and said that Maduro told him details of the top-secret raid in Caracas. The rapper also posted a video, right after his release, showing off a homemade SpongeBob SquarePants figurine, made out of cardboard by a fellow-inmate, that he claimed Maduro had signed for him.
6ix9ine and Maduro were likely in 4 North, a unit in the M.D.C. Brooklyn where high-profile inmates are often held—previous residents include the rapper Sean (Diddy) Combs, the former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, and the crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. The unit has tight quarters, with the beds clustered together dormitory-style. Meals are wheeled in, and there is a small room where detainees can work on their legal cases, according to someone who spoke often with an inmate held there. There are no pillows. The V.I.P. clientele are sequestered from the rest of the prison. “They will never encounter inmates from any other part of the facility, and officials will not put any dangerous inmates in there,” Sam Mangel, a federal prison consultant who has advised inmates in the Brooklyn M.D.C., told me.
Maduro’s case is still in preliminary stages. Mangel estimated that Maduro could be at the jail as long as another eighteen months, as his trial proceeds. Meanwhile, back in Caracas, Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s former Vice-President, is serving as acting President and has proved willing to work with the U.S. And, a few weeks ago, Trump publicly weighed succeeding Maduro as President himself. “I’m polling higher than anybody has ever polled in Venezuela,” Trump said. “I will quickly learn Spanish—it won’t take too long, I’m good at language—and I will go to Venezuela, and I am going to run for President.” Maduro, for his part, has reportedly had trouble sleeping in New York. According to the Spanish newspaper ABC, he’s been heard yelling in the night, “Tell my country that I have been kidnapped!”
Editor’s Pick
Illustration by Ben Kothe; Source photographs courtesy Commission of Fine Arts; Getty
Trump’s Triumphal Arch and the Architecture of Autocracy
As though the ballroom weren’t enough, the President has now proposed the construction of a triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery. Standing at two hundred and fifty feet high, presumably for the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it would be more than twice as tall as the Lincoln Memorial. Asked by a reporter whom the arch would be for, Trump said, “Me.” Adam Gopnik reports »
More Top Stories
On the tenth anniversary of Prince’s death, check out these images from 1983, when the photographer Tom Arndt captured a casting call for “Purple Rain,” in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn.