When the prison is the criminal: Jeffrey Epstein and the Metropolitan Correctional Center
DAILY NEWS, HARRY SIEGEL
Before visiting the place that time forgot, keep calling until someone picks up to confirm visiting hours, which are years out of date online and also prone to being canceled.
When the hour comes, go to lower Manhattan and find a shed with two benches and a stack of papers.
Fill one out and wait an hour or two or three until a guard comes to the shed to escort visitors into the 12-story building hailed as a modern and humane prison when it opened in 1975.
Get a key to a small locker for phones, watches and everything else, get stamped and scanned, and wait for an elevator to come down with a guard to escort visitors up. Pass the time by reading the plaque listing leaders from Attorney General William Barr down to Metropolitan Correctional Center Warden Lamine N’Diaye.
N’Diaye isn’t actually at the MCC, having been “temporarily reassigned” days after Jeffrey Epstein, the highest-profile prisoner in America, killed himself while in custody awaiting his trial for sex trafficking.
Amid endless questions about how a pedophile whose not-so-little black book included Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Michael Bloomberg and Prince Andrew ended up in a cell by himself in what Barr’s called “a perfect storm of screw-ups,” the Justice Department last week indicted the two guards on the overnight shift with conspiracy and falsifying records for allegedly napping and surfing the web rather than making their rounds.
The attorney for one of the guards said that “there’s only two people charged, but for this to happen, the whole system had to fail.”
Epstein’s time in the MCC wasn’t meant to be a life sentence. (AP)
Indeed. MCC, with a capacity of 449 inmates, now holds more than 700. Despite a hiring bonus for new officers there, mandatory overtime and “augmentation” — requiring other prison employees to work as correctional officers when the prison is short-staffed — there aren’t enough COs.
Lawyers, too, have to lock up their phones and watches and sometimes wait hours to see their clients. The clocks in their visiting rooms don’t work. There’s no clock in the “civilian” visiting area, where guards keep watch while vaping.
Those who can’t leave live in cells infested with mold, rodents and roaches, and plumbing that leaks pools of stank water filled with human waste.
Nicholas Tartaglione, the former police officer awaiting trial on quadruple homicide charges, had been Epstein’s cellmate in the Special Housing Unit, or SHU, where he says he helped save the pedophile after his first suicide attempt. Separately, Tartaglione says he’s been punished by prison officials for objecting to the conditions there.
fter his first attempt, Epstein had been placed on suicide watch, which has often been used as a form of punishment, before getting returned to the SHU. Somehow, he ended up without a roommate, and succeeded in killing himself.
In its indictment, the DOJ detailed the procedures meant to confirm guards had properly taken the count in their units, and noted that cameras showed these two hadn’t made their rounds. That begs the question of why they were so unconcerned about those cameras and procedures.
Amid conspiracy theories built on how the wealthy and wired evade justice — like Epstein paying lawyers thousands an hour to buy time out of his cell — two COs, a black man and a black woman, are facing hard time in a place that time forgot.
Richard Berman, who’d been the judge in Epstein’s Manhattan case, wrote last week that “We all agree that it is unthinkable that any detainee, let alone a high-profile detainee like Mr. Epstein, would die unnoticed at the Metropolitan Correctional Center.”
Berman called on Barr to publicly review conditions at the MCC and across the federal system, including “chronic understaffing, subpar living conditions, violence, gang activity, racial tension and the prevalence of drugs and contraband” and “worsened by the absence of necessary services, including meaningful mental health and drug rehabilitation, not to mention adequate heat and hot water.”
Maybe that’s been the real conspiracy.