Larry Levine
Appearances
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
An inmate calls you. It's almost like a speed dial. Okay, well, these numbers are entered in. And then when you go to the phone, it's a blue telephone. You pick it up. It's got an armored cord on it that's really short. So you can't crack someone over the head with the handset. I've seen that. And you put in the number that you want to call and then you put in your personal access code.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
And when you do that, the call just goes out. So it's almost like it's speed dialing as far as where you're calling. So if you try to call a number that's not in the system, it's not going through. If you don't have the PAC code, the personal access code, call's not going out. So again, the only real way he could get all this in the system is if he had access to other people.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
This isn't something that could be done and shouted over the vents because the cops would hear it. You know, I don't see it. Either he used the phone and he had access to other people or he doesn't. The U.S. attorney put in, remember, in that motion to deny bail, The U.S. attorney said that he had people's PAC codes, that he had other phone numbers in there.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
But keep in mind, they never said how he did that, did they?
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
That's a wise idea. They need to concentrate on getting his issues resolved. Apparently, they're giving him the best defense that they can.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
It's like a plastic bag. It's a square plastic clear bag. It's almost like a big pillow. And over the years, it has shrunk. I know this because I was locked up for 10 years myself. I got several of these. So they've got like some off-brand cookies in there. off brand potato chips in there, some candy in there.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
Maybe they have a pair of gloves in there or they'll have a coffee mug, a beanie to wear, but he's not going to need any of that because you know where he is and it's all knockoffs. And I got a client in Lompoc just called me yesterday that just got the bag and he told me it was the worst holiday bag that he's ever gotten. And this guy's been locked up for several years.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
It's a bunch of crap that probably was purchased because it was out of date, because the prison system sells you out of date stuff. And they're trying to act like they're doing the inmates a favor. It's like, oh, here's your Christmas gift. You know, one year a place I was at, they gave everybody an individual little Cornish game hen.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
They gave you a Ben and Jerry's ice cream and they gave you like a little carton of eggnog. He's not going to get that sitting in MDC. I mean, I'm sure they'll give him something special, something. But other than this mediocre holiday bag, there's not much more he's going to get. If he was in a regular housing unit, then he would be exposed to all that other food.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
Yeah, but in the SHU, you have a different commissary list. In other words, you could go to BOP.gov, BOP.gov, click on MDCLA. You can actually pull a copy of the commissary list and you can see all the stuff the inmates can buy. The only thing is that's for inmates in general population. Inmates that are in the special housing unit, they don't get all that stuff.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
Maybe there's a dozen items they can buy. Maybe they can buy some sweats and some candy bars, again, potato chips, some cookies. They try to limit what you can have in your cell.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
I have some clients. I have actually one client there because the other clients got transferred to real prisons. They got sentenced. They don't hear anything. They're on a regular housing unit. They know what you and I know. Maybe some of the staff are talking about particular things, but you're isolated. Nobody knows what's really going on in the chute.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
Sometimes there's inmates that get into trouble. They send them up to the SHU to do a couple weeks or a month up there. They may pick up some information and then come back down to their regular housing unit. But really, the inmates on a regular housing unit, they're not aware of what's happening in the SHU.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
It's God was two years ago in the winter. The heat went out. The hot water went out. These buildings are old. All right. At least how I was there 26 years ago and it was 10 years old. OK, so these these buildings are like 45 years old. And there were two of them in New York. There was MCC New York and MDC Brooklyn.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
And they closed the one, okay, they closed the one Epstein was at for obvious reasons. But the buildings are falling apart. The whole purpose, I mean, look at the name. MDC, Metropolitan Detention Center. These people that are there are going through the court process. They're being detained. MDC was not designed to hold people for several years. It's designed to move people through.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
And they just don't have the staff and they don't have the funding to do the repairs on the facilities that are out there. That's one of the reasons they closed all these places. They're in such disarray and they need to be repaired and they just don't have the people and the financial resources to do it.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
I was an MDCLA for two years. Yeah. Yeah. There was a guy named Kevin Mitnick. Kevin was there like almost four years fighting his case.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
People are lonely during the holidays. They miss their families. They miss people, their friends. At some institutions, riots, well, I don't want to call them riots, disturbances jump off. People are depressed during the holidays. Absolutely. And nothing is moving. It's like dead time because the courts have closed down for the holidays. Prosecutors are on vacation. Judges are on vacation.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
Your lawyer, they're spending time with their families. They don't want to talk to you anyway. So you're just sitting there isolated. And at a regular institution on a holiday, there are so many people that are coming in to get a visit that they have to limit the amount of time in the visiting room. So that two-hour visit you might have normally got may only be 30 minutes long.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
And this creates a lot of tension among the inmates because where I've seen more fights break out during the holidays between inmates than any other time. And I'm talking based on my 10 years of experience at 11 different places. Holidays are the worst.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
About myself. I spent 10 years in federal custody. I was in 11 different federal prisons. I got charged and sentenced for narcotics trafficking, securities fraud, racketeering, obstruction of justice, and machine guns. They moved me around to 11 different federal prisons across the U.S., I got two 10-year sentences and a five-year sentence all ran concurrent.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
And when I got out, I started a company called Wall Street Prison Consultants. And I am the very first prison consultant in the United States. Matter of fact, I started the industry And now I help people that are going into custody, get out early. I help people going through their criminal case, you know, before they've been sentenced.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
OK, first of all, the BOP, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, they give you a gift bag. It's a big plastic bag. And when I went in in 98, I mean, it was a big fucking bag. And it had cookies and candy and potato chips and all this crap in it. And they act like they were doing you a favor giving you this gift bag. But what they didn't tell you that they mark up the stuff on the commissary 30%.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
They take that 30% markup and they buy the holiday bag. So you're actually, they're not giving you shit. You paid for that bag. And that bag over the years, it shrinks every year. So that's your holiday festivities. There'll be candy canes in it. They may serve, I'm going to say may, serve a special meal on Christmas. I was, like I said, in 11 different facilities.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
And we had Cornish game hens and we had ham. But that's, you know, we could go to the regular dining hall. This guy's not going to the dining hall because he's locked in a cell. Now, it gets to another question. Is he really in the shoe? This has racked my brain after reading the U.S. attorney's motion against him getting bail. And they said he was using other people's telephones.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
Now, if he's in the shoe, if he's locked in that cell 24-7, he doesn't have contact and access to other people. He does not. Maybe he can have a conversation through the vents and they can shout and lie about things to each other. But for him to use other people's telephone service... he would have to have their PAC number, their personal access code.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
In other words, you go up to the phone and you punch in the number and it has numbers that you've entered in on speed dial. Well, in order to set all that up and get all these PIN codes from people, he'd actually have to have physical access to them. This is not something that you could just do.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
The SHU is the Special Housing Unit. In other words, in a regular housing unit at MDC, and I spent two years at MDC myself in LA. So I'm real familiar with what happens. In a regular housing unit, you have a common area and you have all these cells like around the walls and they don't have bars or anything. They have steel doors with like little slats on the bottom.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
They can slide food in and like a rectangular window that goes up and down. Well, if you're in the shoe, you're essentially locked in there by yourself. You're not going out into a housing unit. You're not going anywhere. And it's not really solitary confinement. Because they could, big could in quotation marks, they could put somebody in there with you.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
But you're not getting the same kind of visits people get. You're not socializing with people. You have limited access to the showers. You have limited access to the telephones. Really, the only people you can see are your lawyer and maybe one or two people on your visiting list. So they limit you. They limit your access. Your whole day is... I don't know.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
He's probably got a radio in there with him, and he's listening to the local New York stations. I'd imagine that. He's got a Bible in there with him. They'll give him a Bible, but maybe some discovery. Maybe they won't let him have discovery because he's got like a fob that he can go and plug into a computer there in the shoe, and he can read his discovery.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
That's because the U.S. attorney said that he was using other people's phone numbers and phone access. And that would be if you're locked in your cell, A, how are you going to get other people's access codes that are also in the shoe in different cells? I don't want to say it's impossible, but it'd be pretty much fucking impossible to do.
The Trial of Diddy
Lonely This Christmas
And then you're going to add all your telephone numbers to other people's account. If you were in a regular housing unit, that would be pretty easy to do. And if you got caught... They would pull good time from you. They'd send you to the shoe or whatever. They'd restrict your phone access.