A gang member was so violent at MDC Brooklyn — the notorious federal lockup that houses Sean “Diddy” Combs — that he should get a penalty, not a discount on his sentence for the atrocious conditions there, the feds argue.
Federal prosecutors made their case against Naresh Deonarrain in a letter Sunday to Long Island Federal Court Judge Gary Brown — the same judge who ruled in August that he would vacate an elderly inmate’s sentence if he wound up serving it in the “barbaric” MDC Brooklyn.
Deonarrain deserves no such consideration, the feds say, because of the violence he waged during his pretrial incarceration, which included a bloody stabbing this past May and an assault on correction officers in March 2023.
Deonarrain took a plea deal last year, and prosecutors agreed to ask for a 13-year prison sentence. But they’re now saying he should serve between 17½ and 20⅔ years behind bars.
“The defendant is a significant contributor to the current conditions at the MDC. The government expects that the defendant, like many other MDC inmates, will use those conditions as a reason for this Court to impose a lesser sentence,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Samantha Alessi wrote to the judge.
“But he cannot simultaneously contribute to the lawless, violent conditions at the MDC and claim them as a reason he should be granted leniency.”
That sentencing is scheduled for Friday, but Deonarrain’s lawyer, who did not return messages seeking comment, has asked Brown to postpone it so he can respond to the government’s request.
Deonarrain is a member of the “Route Boys,” a drug-trafficking gang that waged a burglary spree in 2020 targeting bodegas, check-cashing businesses and laundromats, stealing cash, tobacco products and ATMs.
They graduated to stealing oxycodone and other drugs from mom-and-pop pharmacies across the tristate area.
Deonarrain personally took part in a dozen of those burglaries, including a Dec. 9, 2020, attempted break-in in Brooklyn that ended with a high-speed escape from the NYPD, according to the feds.
The gang member has been locked up in MDC Brooklyn since June 2022, and his behavior there added to the lawlessness and chaos at the jail, the feds say.
This past May, he and two accomplices fought with another detainee, Devante Carpenter, then followed him into a cell, according to Alessi’s letter. Carpenter came out with his face slick with blood and covered in a towel, and it turned out he’d been repeatedly stabbed in the face and back.
Deonarrain had injuries on his hands consistent with holding a stabbing weapon, the feds allege.
He also fought with correction officers in March 2023 after they tried to pat him down in a contraband search, according to the feds. He had a package with 100 cigarettes, a sharpened piece of plexiglass and 18 oxycodone pills on him at the time, the feds allege.
Prosecutors also laid out three more instances where Deonarrain was caught with a cell phone, a charger, pot and two 7-inch metal shivs.
Deonarrian’s lawyer did not return messages seeking comment.
Brown, the sentencing judge, stated in August he would vacate a 75-year-old tax scammer’s nine-month sentence and give him house arrest instead if the man was sent to MDC Brooklyn.
The judge railed against violence at MDC Brooklyn in his written opinion, citing a litany of recent incidents — including a caught-on-video April 27 attack where three MS-13 members stabbed a man 44 times before a lone correction officer intervened, and two stabbing murders six weeks apart at the jail in June and July.
“Each of the five months preceding this opinion was marred by instances of catastrophic violence at MDC, including two apparent homicides, two gruesome stabbings and an assault so severe that it resulted in a fractured eye socket for the victim,” Brown wrote.
His opinion also singled out the “Route Boys” case, pointing out that the gang’s members were taking photos of themselves in their cells and posting them on the same Instagram account they used to sell drugs.
Over the past year, the Daily News has chronicled a string of violent incidents and instances of medical mistreatment at MDC Brooklyn, where inmates often complain about near-constant lockdowns, rotten and infested food and filthy conditions.
On Oct. 28, multiple federal agencies staged what sources described as a sweeping contraband raid, as part of a Bureau of Prisons effort to clean up the jail. The initiative also included a significant spike in correction officer pay meant to reverse a severe staffing shortage.