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Sean Combs’s hair and beard, once jet black, are gray now. Hair dye is not allowed at the Metropolitan Detention Center.
Breakfast is at 7 a.m. The exercise room has yoga mats and a small basketball hoop. The communal space in the dorm-style housing he’s been assigned has pingpong and television. There is phone access that has allowed him to speak to the rapper Ye and also to his children who, on his 55th birthday, serenaded him on speakerphone.
“Thank y’all for being strong and thank y’all for being by my side,” Mr. Combs said in a video released by his family.
The Brooklyn jail has drawn complaints over the years as a place filled with mold, vermin and neglect, which the Federal Bureau of Prisons has pledged to address. For nearly seven months, its most famous tenant has been Mr. Combs, who is awaiting trial in circumstances far removed from the life of personal chefs and enormous mansions he once enjoyed.
He is facing years in prison if convicted on the racketeering and sex trafficking charges he faces when his trial begins next month. His lawyers argued strenuously after his arrest last September that Mr. Combs should be free until trial.
Motion after motion, and three hearings, were devoted to arguments over whether he posed too much of a threat to the community — and of witness tampering — to be released on bail.
Three judges decided he did, so Mr. Combs, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges, has been forced to make do at the long-troubled facility that houses more than 1,100 inmates and is beset by a reputation for attrition among its guards and violence within its walls.
The government has depicted Mr. Combs in court papers as the boss of a violent criminal conspiracy that committed kidnapping, arson and drug crimes, while enabling Mr. Combs’s sexual abuse of women.
Mr. Combs’s lawyers have asserted that the charges actually center on consensual sex with long-term girlfriends. The defense has acknowledged that Mr. Combs has had “complicated relationships” with significant others, as well as with alcohol and drugs, but has argued that those troubles do not “make him a racketeer, or a sex trafficker.”
As he prepares for trial, the music mogul has been staying in an area of the jail known as 4 North, a fourth-floor dormitory-style unit where roughly 20 men are housed.
The unit tends to hold high-profile inmates, including, up until recently, Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency mogul who was convicted of fraud. Other common detainees in 4 North are government informants, such as former gang members the government wants to separate from the general jail population.
When Mr. Combs was first arrested, his lawyers expected that he would be assigned to the jail’s Special Housing Unit, a restrictive designation that typically means spending 23 hours a day inside a cell.
The conditions in 4 North are far more lenient.
Gene Borrello, a former inmate who said he was placed there because he helped the government convict members of the Mafia, said that compared to other units in the jail, “you have nothing to worry about.”
Inmates are generally free to move around the unit, which has rows of bunk beds, televisions, a microwave and the room where inmates have in the past worked out on mats with exercise balls, Mr. Borrello said.
For Mr. Combs’s unit, visitors are allowed on Tuesdays. Phone calls are capped at 15 minutes each and can be monitored by the government.
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