When Tekashi 6ix9ine, the rapper and former gang member, finished serving a three-month sentence at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, he left carrying a peculiar souvenir. He showed it off to two friends who were waiting outside the jail to collect him: it was a homemade SpongeBob SquarePants figurine with a jagged series of lines—not unlike a heartbeat monitor, or a mountain range—scribbled on it. This was, 6ix9ine explained, the autograph of Nicolás Maduro, the President of Venezuela. The signature was also dated, in Spanish, “2.º Abril.”
“Look, one of one,” 6ix9ine said, holding up the SpongeBob, which, he later explained, another inmate had meticulously crafted, folding six hundred pieces of paper and sewing them together, over the course of two weeks. “Maduro signed it,” he said, proudly, before adding, “Venezuela forever.”
On January 3rd, Maduro was abducted from Venezuela during a U.S. raid on a military complex in Caracas, dubbed Operation Absolute Resolve. That same day, he was transported to a D.E.A. office in Manhattan for booking, before being brought to M.D.C. Brooklyn, New York City’s only functioning federal detention facility. He has been held there for the past four and a half months.
6ix9ine, who was at M.D.C. Brooklyn after violating the terms of his supervised release related to a 2018 case, claims to have been roommates with Maduro for a portion of his sentence—an experience he described in great detail to Adin Ross, the manosphere streamer. “I didn’t want to bug him, like, I didn’t want to seem like a fanned-out little girl,” 6ix9ine told Ross. “ ’Cuz as soon as he came in, like, I was, like, Yo, whatever you need.” At one point, early in his incarceration, Maduro seems to have been kept in a unit designed for solitary confinement, as is often the case for inmates of his status. “He smelled like shit when he first came out the box,” 6ix9ine explained. “But then, you know, he was able to get time to take a shower and stuff like that.” (The Federal Bureau of Prisons declined to comment on Maduro’s conditions in the M.D.C. Brooklyn, citing the safety, security, and privacy of the inmates.) Afterward, Maduro was likely transferred to a unit known as 4 North, which is typically where high-profile inmates are held, such as the rapper Sean (Diddy) Combs, who spent more than a year at the jail, and more recently, 6ix9ine. (“I took Diddy’s bed,” 6ix9ine said.)
There are two main buildings in M.D.C. Brooklyn: a larger building, where most of the male detainees are held, and then a smaller building, which holds female inmates. 4 North is on the fourth floor of the latter, above the female jail. In the unit, which can house only a small group of detainees, the beds are clustered together dormitory-style, and there are no pillows. 6ix9ine described the cramped conditions. “Maduro slept, like, right across from me,” he told Ross, gesturing to a distance of about two feet.
