Annie Correal

It was a clean-out guy he knows. He stops in when he finds something Hecht might like to buy. This time it was a dress form, a big one.

“You want a size 20?” the man asked. It was nearby, he said.

“Nope,” said Hecht, crossing thick arms over a suede apron. “It’s a little too much woman for me.”

As the man left, Hecht said, “I have three or four 20s. You have to have your limits.”

Hecht has a lot of old dress forms in his meticulously crammed storefront on West 38th Street in what is rapidly becoming the former garment district.

He also has nude photos and ticket stubs from Show World, the shuttered Times Square sex emporium, even an old type cutter from the days when The New York Times printed its papers on 43rd Street.

He has an antique lightning rod from a shirt company in Hell’s Kitchen, oil cans found when the old Pennsylvania Station was being dismantled. The bell on the front door once rang in a local boxing ring.

Hecht, 60, is the third-generation owner of Hecht Sewing Machine and Motor Co., a more-than-century-old sewing-machine repair shop that has also become, as the neighborhood’s garment factories and small businesses have died off, a repository of old New York.

“We are the undertakers,” Hecht said.

For years, the collection that quietly amassed in the shop — as the neighborhood was transformed — has remained all but secret, a tip passed selectively from one artist to another.

Robert Frank, the photographer, used to scour the shop for early colorized photographs and lead figurines, according to Hecht, and when friends asked where to get him a gift, he sent them there. James Gandolfini, the actor known for his role as Tony Soprano, shopped at Hecht for tchotchkes and collectibles for his driver, his doorman and Matt Damon.

More recently, hip-hop luminaries have been directed there by the clerks of Nepenthes New York, an unmarked Japanese fashion boutique across the street that deals in glittering track pants and cashmere suits.

Tourists do not fare as well. Most are dispatched before their eyes have even adjusted to the light. Hecht does not permit photography, or accept credit cards. A heavy chain divides the shop.

“The tourist chain,” Hecht says. “It preserves my sanity.”

Most things in the shop are not for sale anyway. Hecht might make an exception for an obsessive collector of, say, thimbles or fountain pens or trench art from World War I, or for a star he recognizes who comes over from Nepenthes: “J. Lo,” said Hecht, referring to Jennifer Lopez, for example. “Fellow Bronx girl.”

But as he tells tourists daily, this is not an antique store — it is a sewing-machine repair shop.

You could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Along with oil-streaked machines and cabinets of parts, Hecht — and his parents and grandparents before him — also filled the shop with 19th-century maritime ephemera (anchors, glass buoys and hand-woven hemp fenders), painted signs, neon signs, animal pelts and taxidermy, pinups and framed photos of New Yorkers, once illustrious, perhaps — and more.

From the time he was a child, he said, there were things you would not expect to find in such a place. They mainly served practical purposes: a glass porthole from a Navy ship with a thick lip became a place to put screws while making repairs; a mammoth bank safe became the workbench.

Hecht expanded the collection — significantly — yet he still relies on the sewing-machine business, which has enough clients, he said, ranging from the Metropolitan Opera to seamstresses in Queens, that he does not need to sell his treasures to pay the rent, though he does lease and sell items to prop stylists for television and film.

On a recent afternoon, a would-be customer touched the glass of a locked case containing pocketknives — not for sale!— and gazed wistfully at one. “It’s little and adorable,” she said. “You can get away with murder with it.”

Hecht looks small from the street. The storefront is narrow, and its yellow sign, faded by time and pigeon slurry, is easy to miss amid a busy pizzeria, the Consulate General of Guyana and an upscale trattoria.

Inside, though, the shop stretches the length of two subway cars, and in places it is packed nearly to the ceiling. Hecht can be found there five days a week, crouched at the workbench, where he fixes sewing machines for the likes of Broadway costumers and the alteration departments of big retail stores, or in what he calls the front office, a wooden booth about the size of a ticket taker’s at the cinema.

Founded by Morris Hecht, Hecht’s Austrian-born grandfather, the business moved from a nearby street to its present quarters around 1920, and actually predates the tall Shampan Building that rises above it, said Hecht. “They built around us,” he said.

In the cavernous old shop, bundles of scissors dangle from columns like chili peppers at a Mexican market. Bushels of whisk brooms, made of straw and horsehair and boar hair, lie on shelves. Large glass bulbs, now containing clippings of a pothos plant, hang here and there.

“Fire grenades,” Hecht said. They once contained a fire-extinguishing liquid and could be lobbed at flames. These items were collected, mainly by Hecht himself, from hundreds of garment district factories.

It began in the 1970s, while he was still in high school, when industry in the neighborhood began to wind down. “That was when the big manufacturers that went in after World War II retired, when there was the downturn,” he said.

“Factories were closing and people were retiring to Arizona and Florida. You’d go up there and the cigar would still be in the crystal ashtray,” he said.

“People wanted nothing to do with it. It wasn’t until ‘Antiques Roadshow’ and the picking shows that people picked up something like this” — Hecht grabbed the nearest item, a candlestick — “and said, ‘This could be worth thousands.’”

The Hechts bought the equipment, and took whatever else was left behind in the factory lofts, sometimes for a small price. “Usually you were doing them a favor,” Hecht said. “It had to be broom-clean.”

Before long, pickers and pushers — rack-pushing garment workers — learned of Hecht’s penchant for collecting, and they began to come to him, bringing the flotsam of the garment district and beyond.

Hecht particularly loves mysteries, salvaged items he had to identify, before Google, using encyclopedias. Extracting from a nook a steel instrument with a curved shaft and a sharp tip, he announced: “Cheese bore. You get a 12-inch read on the texture of the cheese. You get a perfect plug of cheese. It’s a pretty important item! How could you leave that behind?”

His clientele of dressmakers and milliners has by now expanded to include antique dealers, prop stylists, and commercial photographers (including for The New York Times Magazine). The shop has served as the backdrop to a murder scene on TV, though Hecht declines to name the show.

Yet the secret to the shop’s longevity remains the same. “A very simple machine, and a very troublesome one,” said Hecht, patting a sewing machine on a recent afternoon.

He has a few mechanics on staff but handles many jobs himself, and that day, he had received a vintage Elna carried in by an art director in her 20s, Shelby Tuper.

Tuper is something of a regular, hunting for pieces for her freelance gigs, although that day she was getting the machine repaired for a company she was working for.

As Hecht opened the lid of the Elna, she stepped in chunky sneakers over the tourist chain and disappeared.

When she returned, she was holding a velvet purse with a silver clasp, a painted wooden box, a cigarette case the size of her palm. She looked at Hecht hopefully.

“There are a bunch of them back there,” she said of the cigarette compact. “Some had … not so exciting things inside.”

“The lock of hair?” said Hecht.

“This,” she said of the shop, “is my secret jewel.”

This article originally appeared in

The Secret Shop of Forgotten New York Treasures

NEW YORK — A bell rang as a man came through the door, hands deep in his pockets. Steve Hecht looked up.

It looked as if they had been there for days.

Not long ago, the incident would have been just a day’s work for the police: no evidence collected, no investigation, another drug death. But the arrival of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids has transformed the peril of addiction in New York City — and how the city deals with overdose deaths. For the first time, detective squads in each borough have been formed to treat these incidents as crimes to be solved.

On Dec. 4, after the bodies were removed, police sealed off the apartment on Revere Avenue in Throgs Neck as if it were the scene of a murder. An officer put in a call to the narcotics unit in the Bronx, where someone wrote the names of the victims in a big, black ledger: Jerlanne Rojas and Alex Cruz.

The book, which says “Bronx Overdose Log” in Wite-Out on the cover, looks like a relic from another time, but it tracks the latest wave of the nation’s epidemic in the Bronx, where more people die of drug overdoses than in any other place in the city. In 2017, there were a record 1,487 fatal overdoses in New York; the overdose rate in the South Bronx was higher than any place in the country except for West Virginia.

It was amid the dramatic increase in overdoses across the city — around half of which were found to have involved some form of fentanyl — that the Police Department created these dedicated overdose squads in each borough. Last year, the Bronx squad responded to more than 600 incidents, about a third of them fatal. Some victims had collapsed in public bathrooms and parks after shooting up or snorting drugs containing fentanyl, which can be 50 times stronger than heroin. Others, like Rojas, were discovered long after overdosing.

The Bronx has battled heroin for decades, and the stereotype of an overdose victim is a longtime addict. But Rojas, who was 34 when she died, had not struggled with addiction for long. It began with a struggle with insomnia and took just a few years for it to take over her life, her family said. She lost a job; her son moved in with his grandmother. Rojas grew volatile. Then she died.

Such stories have become common.

“Unfortunately, we do get them almost every day,” said Sgt. Joseph Burckhard, one of the supervisors of the Bronx overdose squad. “The potency of the fentanyl is really taking a toll.”

The Bronx has long been a center for heroin trafficking, and with the opioid epidemic it has also become a destination for fentanyl, according to the authorities. In June, nearly two dozen people suspected of being linked to the Sinaloa cartel from Mexico were charged with trafficking heroin and bringing more than 50 pounds of fentanyl into the Bronx, the equivalent of several million lethal doses.

The drugs are being packaged for distribution throughout the region, but in the process, the Bronx has been flooded. Fentanyl has been found there in heroin, cocaine, counterfeit pills and other drugs. It is being sold by large rings and household operations.

Around Christmas, a 1-year-old named Darwin Santana died after being exposed to drugs, including fentanyl, allegedly being mixed in his parents’ apartment in the Bronx.

Soon after the bodies of Rojas and Cruz were discovered, Detective Lee Arroyo of the Bronx overdose squad was assigned to the case.

The apartment, in a brick house on a quiet block, was tiny and sparsely furnished. A small bedroom was strewn with her clothes, some dresses inside-out, as if she had just tried them on.

Arroyo found no signs of violence. Instead, he discovered what appeared to be prescription drug packaging, and a tiny glassine envelope.

“It seems like they went on a binge,” he said.

There were no computers or tablets to scour for information about their dealer; the victims had only cellphones.

From this scant evidence, the detective was tasked with figuring out what killed the couple and where it came from. He called Rojas’ family.

‘Like you and me’

“She was not a lowlife hoodlum,” Rojas’ sister, Tiffany Rojas, said. “Four years ago, she was like you and me.”

The trouble began around 2014, she said, not long after Jerlanne arranged to have gastric bypass surgery. She was not obese, but she had always been self-conscious about her weight, said her sister, who is in her 40s.

Jerlanne was teased in elementary school in the Dominican Republic, where their mother had sent her and her brother to live with their father when they were children. As a teenager, she tried countless fad diets.

After high school, and after her father died of a heart attack, Rojas returned to New York, where she was born. She loved musicals and had recorded a CD of songs, dreaming of landing an audition on Broadway, her sister said. But she got pregnant around age 20.

She gained weight. Then she ended up in the shelter system with her little boy and started eating more fast food, and gained more.

After the surgery, in her late 20s, Rojas seemed to blossom. Her Facebook page filled with photos of clubbing outfits — what she called her “skinny dresses.”

But privately, she was struggling. She had become anemic and vitamin-deficient. Worse, she was afflicted with insomnia, which can be a side effect of bypass surgery.

She eventually lost her job, at a check-cashing place, and wound up living for a spell in her sister’s apartment with her son.

Seeing her up night after night, her sister said she gave her some Ambien. She soon got her own prescription for Ambien and Xanax, her family said.

She seemed to improve. But as the months passed, her family sensed a problem. “She was taking way too many,” said her sister, who once caught her trying to buy Ambien online.

Her mother asked the doctor in 2015 to cut off her prescription. Her sister stopped sharing, too. By then, though, Rojas had discovered other pills.

That year, she asked a childhood friend if she had leftover prescription painkillers after an operation that she could buy. The friend, who gave only her first name, Elizabeth, was alarmed and said no.

When Rojas and her son were back in the shelter system, and out of her family’s sight, her addiction took off. Soon she was buying pills on the street.

The overdose squad

Arroyo inspected the paraphernalia found at the scene. The glassine envelope was stamped with “Halloween” and an image of a ghost — the distributor’s brand.

Back at Bronx Narcotics, in an unmarked warehouse in the north Bronx, he searched the squad’s case management system to see if the brand had turned up in other overdoses. Around him, in a room filled with maps, charts and news clippings, 14 detectives worked their own cases, trying to find the sources of the borough’s spiraling crisis.

Arroyo, 35, a Bronx native, is tall and clean-cut except for the sleeves of tattoos on his arms that he got while in the Army.

Arriving soon after an overdose is important, he said. In the case of Cruz and Rojas, he was late. They had been dead for several days when their bodies were discovered, and any witnesses to their fatal drug score had probably vanished. But he still talked to Rojas’ landlord and people in the neighborhood, he said.

He also checked a digital map of overdose incidents in the borough to see if there had been a cluster of incidents in the neighborhood.

Then he began scouring the victims’ cellphones for clues. An overdose victim’s last texts and calls are often to a dealer.

The case of Jerlanne Rojas and her boyfriend was one of several that Arroyo was juggling. He pored over grainy images captured by surveillance cameras near overdose scenes. He scanned victims’ Facebook and Instagram accounts for conversations with possible dealers.

From this minutiae, the detectives hoped they could root out the big distributors of lethal drugs — working their way up from street dealers to the runners who transfer drugs from stash houses, and from there to the people controlling the packaging, pricing and transport of narcotics into New York.

“The idea is to get to the higher-level people,” said Burckhard, 34, one of the squad’s supervisors.

Before he was tapped to help oversee the overdose squad, in 2016, the sergeant supervised narcotics detectives in two Bronx precincts.

The overdose squads were initially called Heroin Overdose Teams, and the initials “HOT” were emblazoned on the jacket Burckhard wore. But the name hardly seems to apply anymore.

Fentanyl is now usually the squad’s target: Some form of fentanyl is found in about 90% of drugs purchased by undercover officers in the Bronx, he said.

The detectives spend their days between hospitals — where they hand out brochures about treatment and ask survivors where they got their drugs — and fatal overdose scenes.

Cases can be hard to crack, Burckhard said. Even when street dealers can be found, they often say they have no idea what is in the drugs they sell, or where they come from — and it can be difficult to prove otherwise.

Distributors, for their part, insulate their operations with layers of middlemen. They switch out brands, in case a batch is involved in an overdose.

The squad has made arrests, including in the case of a special-education teacher who overdosed in a public school. It has broken up rings, such as one that sold drugs out of a diner in the South Bronx that led to five overdoses.

But hundreds of overdoses have occurred since the Bronx squad was formed. And in dozens of cases, the distributors — and even the dealers — have so far slipped away.

“You basically need all of the ends closed off,” Burckhard said. “You need to be able to prove that that is the individual — or those are the individuals — that caused the victim’s demise. That can take a long time.”

In Rojas’ case, the most promising clue had come from the New York Police Department lab.

While the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner tested the victims’ remains to determine the cause of death, Detective Arroyo had sent the packaging found at the scene to the lab to see what drugs were involved.

The lab reported that the residue in the glassine envelope contained acetylfentanyl, a variant that is less commonly found on the streets in New York than fentanyl — and which is produced only for the black market, not made by pharmaceutical companies.

That clue could narrow the search for a dealer.

Arroyo asked Cruz’s family if they knew anything about where he got his drugs, but they knew little about his habit, he said.

Rojas’ family said she had taken to buying on the street, though they believed she had only ever bought pills. Her sister did not know where she got her supply. But she said there was one person who might.

‘Like Skittles’

While the opioid crisis was worsening in the Bronx, Rojas was falling deeper into dependency. She was going out clubbing more often and had a turbulent, on-and-off relationship with a man who was an exotic dancer.

She was not his only girlfriend, her sister said, and she suffered.

She would come home to find her on the couch. “Crying, crying, talking on the phone and smoking,” Tiffany Rojas said. “My poor sister.”

By 2017, she had lost a new job at a hair salon and stopped paying her share of the rent at the subsidized apartment she had moved into on Revere Avenue. She still regularly saw her 12-year-old son, who had moved in with her mother, often stopping by to make sure he was bathed and ready for school. But the stretches between her visits grew longer.

Once, she turned up limping and with bruises on her face, said her brother, who asked that he and his mother not be named because they had been threatened in the past by Rojas’ dealers over her debts. Another time, she called saying she had been kidnapped by dealers and needed hundreds of dollars.

The person who knew more about what happened in Rojas’ hidden life was a family friend, a taxi driver who had always had a crush on Rojas, her family said, and gave her rides to appointments with people he came to realize were her dealers.

The driver, whose name is being withheld because of his role in the investigation, said one dealer had fallen in love with her and offered to give her medication to wean her off street drugs if she moved in with him. But she refused. Another threatened her, and he and the taxi driver almost came to blows.

Rojas’ bruises came after three women jumped her, a brutal beating that left her walking for a time with a cane, according to the driver.

She bought from many dealers, moving on as she racked up debts or the relationships soured.

Her drug of choice remained painkillers, which go for about $10 per pill on the street in the Bronx, where prescription pills are sold alongside counterfeit ones. “She loved her Percocets,” her mother said in Spanish.

One of the places Rojas went to score, the taxi driver said, was 149th Street and Grand Concourse, near a busy commercial intersection in the South Bronx known as the Hub, which has long been an open-air marketplace for drugs.

At the Hub, the borough’s crisis is visible everywhere. Users sleep on the stairs of a nearby church and perch in scaffolding. Outreach workers approach carrying naloxone, an overdose antidote. Women from a church group serve ​arroz con pollo. Syringes and needle caps litter the ground.

In her last years, Rojas could no longer hide her addiction, and her brother once caught her eating colored pills from a plastic baggie. “Like Skittles,” he said.

She often waited to use until after she saw her son off to school. Then she would nod out in the living room, dropping lit cigarettes in her lap.

Her family begged her to go into treatment, but she insisted that she was only suffering the side-effects of her surgery and that the drugs were her medicine.

“She never admitted she had a problem,” her sister said. “‘Oh, you’re bugging,’ she would say. ‘I’m not high.’”

The final moments

Alex Cruz, 38, was also Dominican and born in the Bronx. He loved music and was good-looking, Rojas told her mother.

The couple had met over the summer of 2018, when Rojas briefly enrolled in a monthlong treatment program, her family said, but dropped out after several days.

The two quickly became inseparable.

The last time her family saw Rojas was the weekend before she died. She had taken her son out for pizza and had his passport photos taken, hoping for a trip to the Dominican Republic.

She wore a green dress, and her mother said she saw a glimmer of her daughter as she had been before — the girl who dreamed of Broadway.

That Saturday night, Rojas sent her mother a text message saying she was home with Cruz, about to go to sleep.

Her last text message: “I hope you’ll give me your blessing, if he is the right one, Ma.”

More than three days later, the police discovered the bodies.

Rojas’ body was so badly decomposed that her family was warned against viewing it, and there was no funeral.

About a week after her death, Tiffany Rojas, her sister, picked up the ashes. She flew to the Dominican Republic, where on a sweltering day, she placed them in the family crypt at a cemetery in Santo Domingo, next to their father’s remains.

“She was sweet, extroverted, obedient — a very decent female,” Tiffany Rojas said. “Please put that in your report. Because it’s so unfair she ended up like this.”

Her friends in the Bronx — who said they had not known Rojas was using — got together shortly after her death and tearfully sang “Killing Me Softly,” raising their cups in her memory.

Rojas’ autopsy results came back several weeks after she died. She had ingested the generic form of Xanax, oxycodone, oxymorphone, morphine and fentanyl.

It was the kind of drug cocktail that has become typical in overdose deaths. But there was a surprise. The acetylfentanyl — the substance found in the glassine — was not in Rojas’ body.

The medical examiner said that drug was found only in Cruz’s system.

Rojas had died hours before Cruz, according to notes from the medical examiner’s investigator, who recorded the temperature of the bodies when they were found.

It was possible, Arroyo said, that after Rojas died, her boyfriend went out and bought the glassine containing the acetylfentanyl. When the bodies were discovered, he lay with his head resting on Rojas, still wearing his coat.

“Something like that,” Arroyo said.

Several months after the couple’s death, the investigation is ongoing. No arrests have been made.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/nyregion/bronx-opioid-overdoses-fentanyl.html" id="1e4ff89c-e756-3ab7-a538-41d8a552f1b1">The New York Times</a>.

'She Was Like You and Me': A Death and Life in the Bronx Opioid Crisis

NEW YORK — In December, police responded to a call from a landlord in the Bronx who could not reach a tenant. An officer broke a window and in the apartment made a grim if increasingly common discovery. The tenant, a young woman, was on the couch with a man; both were dead of an apparent drug overdose.

In a statement, the department said its Office of the Inspector General, which conducts independent, internal investigations, would determine if the Bureau of Prisons correctly handled the crisis at the Metropolitan Detention Center and whether it had adequate contingency plans in place.

The Bureau of Prisons, which oversees federal jails and prisons, is part of the Justice Department. The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The announcement came less than a week after reports of the conditions at the MDC became public, drawing protesters to the waterfront jail. Elected officials who toured the facility expressed surprise at what they described as a lack of urgency by the jail’s management to fix the faltering heat and power amid frigid winter temperatures.

The department also said the bureau would conduct its own review of the infrastructure and emergency plans at the jail.

The jail had been experiencing intermittent heating problems since mid-January, employees said during a court hearing this week. But the problems worsened as temperatures plummeted on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and unrelated electrical problems affected the jail’s power. A Jan. 27 electrical fire plunged much of the jail into darkness as the city experienced some of the coldest weather of the winter. Inmates were locked in their cells, many of them without heat, hot water or warm food.

“Given the inhumane conditions I observed at MDC, this is a badly needed step to determine what went wrong and to root out the culture that allowed these problems to occur,” said Rep. Nydia Velázquez, D-NY., whose district includes the jail.

Velázquez and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., the head of the House Judiciary Committee, have been asking the department to launch such an investigation since they visited the jail over the weekend and heard accounts from inmates.

The MDC, New York City’s largest federal detention center, holds more than 1,600 inmates, most of them awaiting trial and not convicted of a crime.

Earlier Wednesday, lawmakers sent a letter to the Department of Justice stating there was “ample grounds” to review conditions at the jail. “It is still unclear why the facility had prolonged issues with heating and electricity,” said the letter, which was signed by about two dozen lawmakers.

“It is understood that the facility kept detainees on lockdown without appropriate access to medical services. Further, attorneys and paralegal staff reported that detainees lacked access to extra blankets and could not purchase extra sweatshirts at the commissary,” it said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/nyregion/brooklyn-jail-doj.html" id="c064b9e1-dd53-3aad-a4a6-16e2fbce4f1a">The New York Times</a>.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced Wednesday that it had asked its internal watchdog to investigate the jail official’s response to heating and electrical failures at a Brooklyn federal jail last month that left inmates confined to cold, dark cells for days.

Justice Department Calls for Investigation into Brooklyn Jail Where Heat and Power Failed

“They just stay huddled up in the bed,” said June Bencebi, a case manager at the jail and the treasurer of the local chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents about 500 corrections officers at the jail.

The jail, the Metropolitan Detention Center, houses more than 1,600 inmates and lies in an industrial swath near the waterfront in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Some are linked to high-profile drug trafficking and terrorism cases, while other inmates are comparatively anonymous New Yorkers awaiting trial.

The accounts of conditions at the jail were described to The New York Times by six lawyers and paralegals with local Federal Defenders offices, who had spoken with around three dozen inmates at the jail, known as MDC; two union leaders; and an employee at the jail who was not authorized to speak publicly.

A spokeswoman for Herman Quay, the jail’s warden, said in an email that the building experienced a partial power outage on Saturday but denied that it had affected heat and hot water in the jail’s housing units.

Union leaders and defense lawyers rebutted that account.

Federal defenders said they were flooded with calls from inmates this week as temperatures began to drop. “Our phone was ringing off the hook,” said the lead federal defender in Brooklyn, Deirdre von Dornum. She said inmates, using a dedicated line that connects the jail to federal defenders offices, had gathered around the telephones on their floors to report poor heating, little to no hot water and no lights in their cells.

On Thursday, Rachel Bass, a paralegal at the Brooklyn office of the Federal Defenders said that she had fielded calls from about 15 inmates. “In the past hour I have gotten 11 calls,” she said. “People are frantic. They’re really, really scared. They don’t have extra blankets. They don’t have access to the commissary to buy an extra sweatshirt.”

She said many inmates complained of congestion and sore throats.

The president of the local chapter of the union, Anthony Sanon, said the problems began around Jan. 5 when the jail lost power for the first time. The heating issues began last week, leaving inmates and staff to face freezing weather for the first time. “We didn’t have heat in the building, we didn’t have light,” Sanon said. “The weather was actually unbearable.”

An electrical fire on Sunday further hobbled the functioning of the jail. The jail switched over to emergency power, leaving the corridors lit only by dim emergency lights, the cells dark and the building poorly heated during the coldest days of the winter so far. This week, the temperature plummeted to 2 degrees in New York City, as frigid weather swept over the Midwest and Northeast.

“The heat isn’t coming out properly,” Sanon said.

One inmate told a federal defender that a corrections officer had taken the temperature in a housing unit, which was warmer than the cells, and it was 34 degrees.

New York City’s Fire Department confirmed that it responded to a small electrical fire in the jail’s control room on Sunday.

But the warden’s spokesman, who signed her name V. Logan, said in the email the power outage had “minimally impacted” housing units.

“All housing units have functional lighting,” she said. “Heat and hot water has not been impacted. Likewise, inmate meals are not impacted; inmates are receiving regularly scheduled hot meals each day.”

Taken together, the accounts of nearly three dozen inmates given to federal defenders painted a different picture of conditions inside the jail.

Heat was the main complaint. The heat was spotty to nonexistent, depending on the floor. Hot water was scarce. Hot food had not been served for several days, with canned food handed out cell by cell. One inmate, who kept kosher, said he had only been given canned sardines.

The inmates were promised extra blankets, but they never came. The commissary, because of the limited electricity, was closed.

“All said they were wearing whatever they could to stay warm,” said Randi Chavis, a federal defender in the Central Islip, New York, office who spoke to several people. “Extra pairs of socks, towels wrapped around their heads, durags, thermals if they have them.”

The conditions were aggravated by the lack of electrical power, inmates told the lawyers and paralegals. The jail had abandoned its usual routines, with inmates kept on partial lockdown for safety reasons.

Because power outlets were not working, the inmates could not use the computers that usually allow them to communicate with relatives and place requests for prescription refills.

“One man takes anti-seizure medication which he is allowed to keep with him,” Chavis said. “He takes two pills a day and is down to his last three pills.”

Legal visits and family visits had been canceled since Sunday, the lawyers said.

The recent events come on the heels of the government shutdown, which impeded the ability of lawyers to visit their clients in federal jails, including at MDC. It was not immediately clear whether the power and heat issues were related to the shutdown.

On Thursday, the federal defenders filed an emergency motion to remove from the jail an inmate whose asthma had worsened from the cold. The inmate, Dino Sanchez, a Brooklyn man in his 40s, had recently entered the jail, a federal defender, Benjamin Yaster, said.

Yaster said in an interview that his client had been among those left in a dark cell, illuminated only by sunlight from the windows, virtually around the clock. “The population was kept in their cells for 23 hours,” he said. “He’s stuck in these cold conditions in a short sleeved jumpsuit and a short sleeved undershirt.”

“He feels short of breath and is wheezing and coughing more than he normally would,” Yaster said.

The federal defenders initially requested that MDC management provide backup heating or more blankets. They later requested that inmates be moved to an adjacent building, now empty but for a few dozen female inmates.

They said they received no response. “Not only have the conditions been disgraceful but we have peppered them with questions and we get nothing but silence,” said David E. Patton, head of the federal defender office. The office represents thousands of indigent defendants.

“They might say, ‘an incident occurred,’ or ‘visiting is canceled’ but when we follow-up to ask if people have heat, hot water, or adequate access to their families or attorneys, they stonewall us,” Patton said.

The building next door, also run by the jail, has full power and heat.

Sanon, the labor union leader, said he contacted the warden beginning early last week and toured the jail with him. He was assured heat would be monitored. “To no avail,” he said on Thursday.

“This morning again I got a call,” he added. “It was freezing.”

Bencebi, the union treasurer, said she was particularly concerned for older inmates. “I have several inmates that are very elderly,” she said. “One of them complained that he’s been sick for the last few days. He looks sickly. He’s walking slower. Talking slower.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/nyregion/mdc-brooklyn-jail-heat.html" id="1700e536-59d8-3c39-a09e-9f5d8a01db79">The New York Times</a>.

No Heat for Days at a Jail in Brooklyn. Hundreds of Inmates Are Sick and 'Frantic'.

NEW YORK — More than a thousand inmates have been stuck in freezing cells at a federal jail on the Brooklyn waterfront that has had limited power and heat for at least this week, according to federal public defenders and leaders of the union representing the jail’s corrections officers.

Annie Correal

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