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Inside the ‘hell on earth’ Brooklyn jail reportedly housing Nicolás Maduro

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Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores are reportedly awaiting their first court appearance at a Brooklyn jail famous for its poor conditions.

Numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal, have reported that the pair were escorted to the Metropolitan Detention Center late Saturday after arriving by plane in New York.

MDC, which has yet to confirm the transfer to Business Insider, has been home to numerous high-profile defendants facing trial in New York City, including music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of fallen bitcoin exchange FTX, and Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of aiding the sex trafficking operation of the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Luigi Mangioni has been housed at MDC while awaiting trial for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. He has pleaded not guilty.

The jail has been widely criticized over the years for its poor conditions, having been described as “inhumane” and “hell on earth.”

Last year, the Legal Aid Society issued a press release lamenting the jail’s “documented history of violence, medical neglect, and human and civil rights violations.” It cited reports of no heat during the winter and “maggot-infested food.”

In 2024, a federal judge in Brooklyn made headlines when he carved out a special exemption during sentencing to help a defendant avoid the MDC. The judge ruled that if the 74-year-old, convicted of tax fraud, were assigned to the MDC, he could serve his time under house arrest, The New York Times reported.

In March, Brooklyn federal prosecutors announced charges against 25 defendants in 12 separate cases tied to violence and contraband smuggling at the jail, which is located in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn.

“Over the years, MDC has become synonymous with egregious neglect and abuse with the people incarcerated,” the Legal Aid Society said in a June press release opposing ICE detentions at the jail.

President Donald Trump shocked the world on Saturday when he announced that the US had captured the Venezuelan president and his wife after a “large-scale strike” on Venezuela.

Trump has said the US is “going to run the country” until it can facilitate a safe transition of power, and that US oil companies will now be free to “spend billions” on development in the South American nation.

Maduro has been in the US Department of Justice’s crosshairs for years, and in 2020, Manhattan federal prosecutors indicted him as a leader of the Cartel de Las Soles, its name for the alleged drug-trafficking organization run by Venezuela’s military and political elite.

An expanded indictment unsealed on Saturday added as defendants Maduro’s wife and son, Nicolás Ernesto Maduro Guerra, identified in the indictment as “The Prince.” It accused them of participating in a wide-ranging effort to traffic drugs to the US to enrich themselves.




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Brooklyn man, 23, is charged in $15 million Coinbase ‘customer-care’ scheme

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A young Brooklyn man has been charged with stealing $15 million by impersonating a Coinbase customer care representative.

In a criminal complaint, Ronald Spektor, 23, is accused of tricking some 100 victims from across the United States into turning over the passwords for their cryptocurrency accounts, under the guise that their assets were at risk.

The “long term larceny scheme” began in April 2023 and continued until his arrest on December 4, the complaint alleges. Since then, Spektor has been held in Rikers Island, in lieu of bail set at $500,000 cash or $1 million bond.

Spektor faces top charges of grand larceny and money laundering, each carrying a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison. He is also charged with possessing stolen property and the personal information of his alleged victims.

“Mr. Spektor has pleaded not guilty,” his attorney, Todd Spodek, told Business Insider. “We’re working to secure his release early next week and will challenge the charges in court.”

Some 70 victims have been interviewed by investigators with the NYPD and the Kings County District Attorney’s Office, the complaint alleges.

“Each Coinbase user confirmed that prior to the loss of their cryptocurrency, said Coinbase users were contacted over the phone by someone who purported to be a legitimate Coinbase employee,” prosecutors allege in the complaint.

“The purported employee informed them their assets were at risk and needed to be moved to a new wallet,” the complaint alleges, using the term for the applications that store cryptocurrency.

Believing they were communicating “with a legitimate employee,” the victims then gave Spektor their seed phrases — a sequence of 12 to 24 words that act like a password — and moved their cryptocurrency to wallets that Spektor controlled, the complaint alleges.

“Their cryptocurrency was immediately withdrawn without their permission,” the complaint continues. The stolen crypto then “passed through cryptocurrency wallets belonging to the defendant,” it says.

Last year, a Coinbase user in California lost more than $6 million, and another user from California lost $1 million, the complaint alleges.

Investigators traced more than $5 million in stolen funds to Spektor’s accounts with two online gambling services, the complaint alleges. Millions more were converted into cash or laundered through online coin swapping services, according to the complaint.

Spektor’s iPhone contained a wealth of incriminating evidence, investigators said.

The complaint alleges that this includes conversations on the online platform Discord in which he bragged “that he had made millions of dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency through scamming, used social engineering to obtain Coinbase seed phrases, and had lost six million dollars worth of cryptocurrency through gambling.”

The phone also contained communications with his father from November 2024 in which “they discussed, in sum and substance, concealing the financial proceeds of the Coinbase scheme.”

The complaint continues, “Other messages show that the defendant asked his father to dispose of his hardware wallets” and asked his mother “to purchase a new hardware wallet.” Hardware wallets are devices resembling USB drives that store private cryptocurrency data offline.

Spektor’s Telegram handle was “@LOLIMFEELINGEVIL” and his account included discussions “of successful Coinbase phishing attacks, and efforts to recruit others to join the scheme,” the complaint also alleges.

According to the complaint, a Google account associated with Spektor contained “approximately 29 text messages containing personal identifying information in the form of tens of thousands of individuals’ email addresses and associated passwords.”

Spektor’s attorney, Spodek, told Business Insider that his client has been aware of the investigation by Brooklyn prosecutors’ Virtual Currency Unit “for over a year.”

“The allegations are speculative and based on incomplete information,” said Spodek, whose other cryptocurrency cases include Instagram influencer and crypto-scammer Jay Manzini (sentenced to seven years in prison last year) and Amir Bruno Elmaani (sentenced to four years prison in 2023).

“Once the full picture comes out, this case will look very different,” Spodek added.




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