Court filings from several recent arrests at MDC Brooklyn show the creative ways inmates sneak drugs and other contraband into the troubled federal jail — including one elaborate scheme devised by hip-hop podcaster Taxstone involving a 50-foot rope used to “fish” goods through an open window with the help of an outside accomplice.
Taxstone — who’s serving federal and state sentences for fatally shooting rival rapper Troy Ave.’s bodyguard — orchestrated the smuggling attempt using a contraband cell phone, federal prosecutors allege.
Taxstone, real name Daryl Campbell, 39, got his hands on the phone in April 2024 and started scheming to bring pot and cigarettes into the jail, according to voice recordings found on the phone detailing how an outside accomplice should get a 50-foot rope and “hook” it to a line dangling from the window of a fourth-floor recreation area, according to a criminal complaint.
“We gonna throw the line out from that gate so you just run right in the gate and you hook it to the line cause there’s a hook on the end of the line we got right now. You just going to hook it and just dip back out. Sturdy,” Campbell said in an April 19 recording, according to the feds.
Court documents
Correction officers recovered the rope, which the men were pulling through the window, and found contraband including pot, a scalpel, a cell phone charger and more than 400 cigarettes. (Court documents)
Campbell explained how to tape sandwich bags filled with drugs and other items to the rope, even telling his accomplice that he’d go on FaceTime to provide more details, “so I don’t gotta baby you.”
“I don’t wanna make no mistakes because this run that we do is gonna be a run that put me right back where I need to be to pay these white people off, and I’ll be able to bust the moves that we really bust, because this is really like light money moves to us,” he said. “You smell me?”
On May 12, a Campbell cohort took an Uber to the Sunset Park jail, apparently to deliver the goods, according to the complaint.
But the scheme didn’t go off as planned when they tried again on June 30.
That afternoon, Campbell’s accomplice on the outside drove to the Sunset Park jail and succeeded in hooking a rope to a line hanging from a window. But a jail staffer confronted him and he fled.
Inside, four MDC inmates — Ian Diez, 20, Jonathan Guerrero, 34, Abel Mora, 23, and Mayovanex Rodriguez, 30, got to work, the feds allege.
Court documents
MDC inmates stacked a chair and a garbage bin atop a food cart and wheeled it to a window to receive contraband, according to the complaint. (Court documents)
They stacked a chair and a garbage bin atop a food cart and wheeled it to the window. But one of the men fell off the cart as they were pulling the rope in, and they all scattered. Correction officers recovered the rope and found contraband wrapped in duct tape all along its length — including a large quantity of Suboxone and nearly 30 small bags of pot, plus a scalpel, cell phone charger, two lighters, and more than 400 cigarettes.
Each of the men face up to 10 years behind bars for the smuggling attempt, the feds say.
Campbell is already serving a 35-year state sentence, along with a concurrent nine-and-a-half year federal sentence, for killing Troy Ave.’s bodyguard Ronald McPhatter at a 2016 T.I. concert in Irving Plaza.
His lawyer declined comment Monday.
Assignment – IRVING
Theodore Parisienne/for New York Daily News Daryl Campbell, aka Taxstone, is pictured in police custody in 2017. (Theodore Parisienne for New York Daily News)
Campbell and friends weren’t the only ones to go fishing for contraband— Jairon Ortega-Corea, a relative of a high-ranking MS-13 member locked up at MDC, tried a similar scheme on Dec. 1, the feds say.
He packed up 18 cell phones, about 345 grams of pot, and a liter of booze and attached it to a rope, the feds say. MDC staff found the package on a fourth-floor roof, and realized that it had been pulled up through the window of an empty cell in a unit that houses MS-13 members, according to a complaint.
A grand jury indicted Ortega-Corea on contraband charges, and authorities arrested him in Minnesota on March 3.
Gardiner Anderson for New York Daily News
The Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. (Gardiner Anderson for New York Daily News)
In another contraband case, murder-for-hire suspect Angel Villafane tried to smuggle in 21 ceramic scalpel blades after a visitor handed them to him in a Doritos bag in October, the feds allege.
Last month, Devone Thomas — who is accused of murdering fellow MDC inmate Uriel Whyte last year — was caught trying to sneak a blade into the jail by hiding it in his groin after he returned from a court appearance, the feds allege.
Brooklyn U.S. Attorney John Durham’s office described the smuggling schemes in an announcement last week detailing 25 arrests inside the infamous lock-up.
Over the past year, the Daily News has chronicled a string of violent incidents, including two murders, as well as instances of medical mistreatment at MDC Brooklyn, a near-constant lockdown and infested food.
On Oct. 28, multiple federal agencies staged a sweeping contraband raid as part of a Bureau of Prisons effort to clean up the jail. The Bureau of Prisons has also significantly increased correction officer pay in an attempt to reverse a severe staffing shortage.
Even after the raid, violence at MDC has continued, including a bloody gang brawl involving several inmates carrying shivs on Feb. 22 that ended with at least 10 inmates stabbed or slashed — including Karl Jordan, who’s awaiting sentencing for killing Run-DMC icon Jam Master Jay in 2002.
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