Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll find out about the latest court appearance by the music mogul Sean Combs, who is known as Puff Daddy and Diddy — and about conditions in the jail unit where he has lived for seven months. We’ll also get details on why a relatively small number of restaurants have applied for permits for outdoor dining structures under new city regulations.
On Monday, Sean Combs, the music mogul known as Puffy Daddy or Diddy, was in court — again.
He pleaded not guilty — again.
Then he was taken back to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he is Inmate 37452-054.
He has been a resident there despite his lawyers’ arguments that he should be free until his trial begins. Several hearings were devoted to arguments over whether he was too much of a threat to the community and too likely to orchestrate witness tampering to be released on bail. Three judges decided that he was, so Combs has remained at the long-troubled jail.
The hearing on Monday, in Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York, was the latest since his arrest on racketeering and sex trafficking charges last year. The government had filed a document called a superseding indictment, which added a second major sex-trafficking charge to the allegations.
Combs, wearing a tan prison shirt and slacks, walked into court smiling. His once-jet-black hair was whitish gray. So was his beard.
Judge Arun Subramanian asked if Combs had seen the latest version of the indictment and understood the charges. Combs said he had and, as before, pleaded not guilty. It was the same plea he had entered at his arraignment after the original indictment last year.
Combs’s lawyers and the prosecutors sparred over whether there were emails from a woman identified only as Victim 4 that should be turned over to the defense and whether additional time was needed to go through them. When Combs’s lawyers indicated that they might ask for a two-week adjournment, Subramanian gave them 48 hours to submit a request, saying, “We are a freight train moving towards trial.” Jury selection is scheduled to begin on April 28.
The government has described Combs in court papers as the boss of a violent criminal conspiracy that committed kidnapping, arson and drug crimes while enabling Combs’s sexual abuse of women.
Combs’s lawyers have countered that the charges actually center on consensual sex with long-term girlfriends. The defense has acknowledged that Combs has had “complicated relationships” with significant others, as well as with alcohol and drugs, but has argued that those troubles do not “make him a racketeer, or a sex trafficker.”
For Combs, jailhouse life is different from the enormous mansions with personal chefs that he once enjoyed. My colleague Julia Jacobs writes that he has been staying in an area of the jail known as 4 North, a fourth-floor dormitory-style unit where roughly 20 men are housed. It has often held high-profile inmates. Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency entrepreneur who is appealing his fraud conviction, was a neighbor on 4 North until recently. Luigi Mangione, who shares a lawyer with Combs, is awaiting trial from the same jail, but is not being held in 4 North.
The conditions there are not as restrictive as in a separate unit where inmates typically spend 23 hours a day in their cells. Detainees on 4 North are generally free to move around the unit. It has televisions, a microwave and a room where inmates have in the past worked out on mats with exercise balls, said Gene Borrello, a former inmate who said he was placed on 4 North because he had helped the government convict members of the Mafia.
Detainees in 4 North do not have access to the internet, but they could watch movies and listen to music on tablets purchased in the commissary, he said.
Combs meets with members of his legal team frequently, sometimes in a conference room off the common area of 4 North. He was provided a laptop without Wi-Fi — at his lawyers’ urging — to work through the mountain of evidence that prosecutors have turned over before trial. He can use the laptop between 8 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. each day in the unit’s visiting room or in a room reserved for inmates to take video calls.
Telephone calls are limited to 15 minutes each. But prosecutors have said that Combs bought the use of other inmates’ phone privileges. On some of those calls, the government said, Combs strategized about using public statements to affect the potential jury pool’s perception of him. They also said he had tried to contact potential witnesses through three-way calling, which allows him to reach people outside his approved contact list. The defense says Combs’s communications have not been illicit.
Prosecutors have also said that Combs orchestrated a video, later posted to his Instagram account, that showed his seven children wishing him a happy birthday, with Combs on speakerphone. After it was posted, prosecutors said, Combs — long known for his attention to marketing — monitored the analytics from jail.
Weather
Expect a mostly cloudy morning with a chance of rain and thunderstorms in the afternoon and eventually some sun. The temperature will reach into the mid-60s. In the evening, there will be a chance of rain or a thunderstorm and a dip into temperature to around 43.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Thursday (Holy Thursday).
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Why outdoor dining is faltering
Whatever happened to outdoor dining? Only a small portion of the city’s restaurants have applied for permits for dining structures under new regulations.
Restaurant owners say the process is complicated and expensive.
“It was kind of presented as a lifeline, and then you get into it and you’re like, ‘Wow, I think I’ve been duped,’” said Megan Rickerson, the owner of the Someday Bar in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. “If you had known upfront what it would entail, would you have done it? Because I can tell you my answer would’ve been no.”
The city told restaurateurs who wanted to replace ad hoc dining setups with modular structures to reapply for permits by August last year.
But only about 3,400 have done so, according to the city’s Department of Transportation. By April 8, only 32 had received full approval for a roadway structure. The department has granted conditional approval for 623 roadway structures and about 1,850 sidewalk cafes, allowing businesses to construct their setups while their applications are processed.
My colleague Olivia Bensimon writes that most of the establishments with roadway permits are concentrated in wealthier areas. At the height of the pandemic-era outdoor dining program, authorized on an emergency basis to keep restaurants afloat, there were at least 12,500 “streeteries,” and they were equitably distributed citywide, according to data from the comptroller’s office.
METROPOLITAN diary
Summer clearance
Dear Diary:
This occurred years ago, when I was a newly married New York City public-school teacher furnishing the new apartment my husband and I had moved into.
One late-August afternoon, I met two friends for lunch at a restaurant on the Upper East Side. Afterward, I walked to Bloomingdale’s to see if they had any items I could use in the apartment.
As I entered the store, I saw a sign hanging above the lower level: “Big Summer Clearance Sale.”
I went downstairs. To my amazement and delight, I saw tables overflowing with kitchen items like dishes and small electrical appliances; bathroom towels; and blankets, comforters, sheets and pillows for the bedroom. Everything I needed.
A young saleswoman offered to help me. I soon realized that I could not carry all of my purchases home on the subway.
The saleswoman said that Bloomingdale’s would deliver everything to my home at no charge and within a week.
I gave her my address: 495 East 55th Street.
She looked overjoyed.
“Sutton Place?” she asked.
I smiled.
“No,” I said. “Brooklyn.”
Her smile vanished. But my purchases were delivered within a week, as promised.
— Evelyn Oberstein
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Julia Jacobs, Stefano Montali, Ben Sisario and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
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