By Noah Goldberg
New York Daily News
NEW YORK — The notorious Manhattan federal jail where Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself in 2019 will be empty by the end of the week, court papers reveal.
The Bureau of Prisons will finish transferring inmates to the Metropolitan Correctional Center’s sister jail in Brooklyn, the Metropolitan Detention Center, and other facilities by Friday.
“We understand that the transfer of all pretrial inmates will be complete by the end of this week,” attorney Sean Hecker wrote in a filing Thursday in an ongoing lawsuit against the BOP.
A source with direct knowledge of BOP’s plans confirmed all inmates would soon be out of the 12-story lockup a judge once slammed as “disgusting, inhuman as anything I’ve heard about (in) any Colombian prison.”
The New York Daily News first reported the plan to close the MCC in August.
The hulking complex in lower Manhattan held more than 700 inmates in earlier years, but the population dwindled to just 75 this week, according to BOP stats.
The jail has housed some of the highest-profile inmates in the country, from drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman to Sayfullo Saipov, who is awaiting trial for the 2017 Hudson River bike path truck attack.
After Epstein’s suicide in 2019, the dysfunctional jail fell deeper into disarray, including a weeklong lockdown in 2020 after someone brought a gun into the building. No one has been charged in that major security breach.
An MCC correctional officer was sentenced in 2020 to three years in prison for sexually abusing at least seven female inmates.
Another was arrested last year for demanding sex from a woman he caught trying to sneak contraband into the facility.
Inmates have described feces leaking from busted pipes into frigid cells. The building also has a “severe pest” problem, according to a doctor who toured the jail in 2020.
MDC in Sunset Park suffers from its own issues, with inmates claiming that the power went out this weekend, leaving them in the dark without hot food or running water.
The BOP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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