(NewsNation) — Former inmate Larry Levine tells “Banfield” that a source close to the Sean “Diddy” Combs investigation believes the entertainment mogul may not be eating in prison because he is “paranoid” and “scared.”
“There’s people out there that he has things on that do have a substantial amount of money. Imagine if someone paid someone off on the inside to actually poison his food, give him a heart attack and he dies, and no one would really think anything of it,” Levine said. “So that may be one of the reasons he’s not eating.”
Other possibilities include a hunger strike or just bad food, according to Levine. He said the food at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center includes “a lot of carbohydrates” and is incredibly bland.
“There’s mold in a lot of that food, the food coming to him is cold. It’s not coming to him warm like it would be in a regular housing unit, because they feed the people in the shoe last,” Levine added. “Maybe he got sick from the food. That’s another possibility.”
Levine said Diddy has been in touch with his kids, a dietitian, a lawyer and a minister during his first week of incarceration.
Diddy’s allegations, arrest
Diddy is accused of using his music empire to engage in sex trafficking and accused of having a pattern of abusing women.
He was arrested Sept. 16 after months of allegations and a federal raid on two of his properties. He pleaded not guilty in New York court the next day.
Both his bids to bail out of jail have been rejected, leaving him in MDC Brooklyn for the foreseeable future.
Diddy at MDC Brooklyn
There are 1,218 people at the Metropolitan Detention Center, which is located in the Eastern New York Judicial District, according to the Bureau of Prisons.
Like the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the MDC is also “plagued by chronic understaffing, constant lockdowns, outbreaks of violence, delayed access to medical care, and a rash of suicides and death,” The Daily Beast reported.
“Several courts in this District have recognized that the conditions at Metropolitan Detention Center are not fit for pre-trial detention,” Combs’ lawyers said in a motion they filed for bail Tuesday, per the news outlet.
Mentioned by Combs’ attorneys in their filing was a June 7 incident; Uriel Whyte, a man who had been at MDC for gun charges, was stabbed to death in the facility. Spectrum News New York reported that Whyte was awaiting trial on gun charges for two years.
A second man named Edwin Cordero died after being injured in a jail fight in August. Cordero’s lawyer, The New York Times reported, wrote about the “awful” conditions his client faced in a June letter to a federal judge.
The prison, Cordero’s lawyer said, is “an overcrowded, understaffed and neglected federal jail that is hell on earth.” Along with the deaths this past summer, suicides and an electrical fire in 2019 that caused those in the prison to be without heat and power for days have been reported at MDC.
Judges and advocates have called out the Bureau of Prisons for “dangerous, barbaric conditions” in MDC, and pressed the agency to make improvements.
In a statement to the Associated Press, the federal Bureau of Prisons said it is “addressing the staffing and other challenges at MDC Brooklyn.”
NewsNation’s Cassie Buchman and Liz Jassin and the Associated Press contributed to this report.