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STORY: It has 1,600 inmates.

It's been plagued by power outages and maggots in inmates' food.

And some defense attorneys have compared it to Hannibal Lecter's prison from the movie "The Silence of the Lambs."

This is the Metropolitan Detention Center prison in Brooklyn.

And now, it's where Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has been ordered to be held pending his fraud trial after he was accused of tampering with witnesses while free on a $250 million bond.

So what else do we know about this notorious facility?

The Metropolitan Detention Center is almost 30 years old and has held convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell...

... whose lawyers said raw sewage seeped into her cell...

... R&B singer R. Kelly, whose lawyer compared the jail to a gulag...

... And it also held Donald Trump's one-time lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen.

In recent years it's been plagued by persistent staffing shortages and power outages. One electrical fire in 2019 cut the lights and brought temperatures to almost zero degrees Fahrenheit, far below freezing.

Earlier this year, a guard pleaded guilty to accepting bribes to smuggle in drugs. Public defenders have called conditions "inhumane."

Bankman-Fried's lawyers had urged the court not to send him to the MDC, saying a quote, "staffing crisis" meant that there weren't enough guards to escort him to the special computer room where he could review prosecutors' evidence against him.

The judge said that while MDC "is not on anybody's list of five-star facilities," he was not sure whether housing Bankman-Fried at a minimum security jail, as prosecutors had requested, was "doable."

A spokesperson for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, which runs MDC, said in a statement the agency makes, quote, "every effort to ensure the physical safety of individuals confined to our facilities through a controlled environment that is secure and humane."