The New Yorker·Apr 21What Nicolás Maduro’s Life Is Like in a Notorious Brooklyn Jail
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
