The jail food stinks
Convict cites mold, worms at B’klyn lockup
Life’s no piece of cake at a Brooklyn federal jail.
One inmate claims the food he’s served at the troubled Metropolitan Detention Center is so vile, he mailed his lawyer a piece of moldy pound cake.
“It looks like if you saw it, you’d throw it out. More than half of it maybe 60 or 70% is moldy or stale, like it’s been sitting in the cabinet for months,” attorney Andrew Frisch told the Daily News.
Frisch’s client, Anton Bogdanov, a convicted fraudster, sent the tainted treat to prove his case.
“He told me on the phone that the food situation there was horrible and he was going to send it to me,” Frisch said.
The moldy cake is only the start of the food issues at the jail, Frisch said.
Led by Bogdanov, 25 inmates wrote a handwritten letter to jail staff about the food and conditions during lockdown.
“During ‘stay-in-shelter,’ MDC Brooklyn has violated all our human rights. Animals are treated better than we are being treated,” the detainees wrote. “Meat with worms, rotten bananas, rotten potatoes with mold, milk with expired date, syrup with mold, not cooked pancakes, etc. All food was cold and in small portions.”
Bogdanov sent Frisch a single face mask that he was made to wear in the jail for weeks on end.
“I never opened it. I didn’t want
to open it obviously for fear of contagion,” Frisch said.
Bogdanov, a Russian citizen, was arrested in Thailand in 2018 on charges that he and his crew hacked into computers, stole people’s personal information, and swindled the government out of $1.5 million in tax returns. He pleaded guilty to some of the fraud charges and claims he committed the crimes to raise money for his
wife’s in vitro fertilization.
Bogdanov likens his treatment at MDC to time he spent in a Thai jail after his arrest.
“I am dirty, I stink, my hair need a cut, I am always hungry, my teeth are not cleaned, I practically have no contact with my lawyer and my family, I have no medical help, I have no access to fresh air and I am always in deadly danger from the guards and other inmates
... That is how in our modern age a person is humiliatingly deprived of his primary needs.”
In a presentencing filing, Bogdanov’s lawyer argues that the conditions at the MDC are so onerous that, at sentencing on Dec. 2, his client should be released.
The Bureau of Prisons did not immediately respond to a request for comment.