Brooks complains Brooklyn jail digs 'inhumane'

David Brooks, the former body-armor producer, claims conditions at the federal detention center to which he was transferred Monday are as "inhumane" as the treatment he got at the Nassau County Jail.

In a court paper Thursday requesting a change in his conditions at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, Brooks said he is "shackled when outside his cell" and "is housed in solitary confinement 23 hours per day in a cold, dirty, windowless cell approximately 8 by 6 feet."

In addition, Brooks - who has been suspected of violating security regulations by federal marshals three times - says he has been "cut off from the general inmate population" and "will be given a change of clothes only one time per week; and is not permitted to have clothes sent to him . . . notwithstanding he is [on] trial."

One of his attorneys, Richard Levitt, said in U.S. District Court in Central Islip, where a jury is deliberating fraud charges against Brooks, that the conditions in the Brooklyn jail are "virtually identical" to those that Brooks complained of in the East Meadow facility.

Officials at the detention center did not immediately return phone calls Thursday.

Timothy Hogan, the chief deputy U.S. marshal for the Eastern District, said Thursday he could not discuss the treatment any detainee receives but security determinations are made based on several factors and "every case is specific."

Federal marshals have said on three separate occasions that Brooks - ex-chief executive of DHB Industries, which was based in Westbury - concealed tranquilizers in his clothing and a pen in a body cavity; had someone slip him pens containing tranquilizers; and was found with a handwritten note among his legal papers.

The handwritten note has set off an FBI investigation into possible jury tampering, and the incident of the tranquilizers in the pens has prompted a separate investigation into who passed him the material.

Brooks' attorneys had initially filed the complaints about their client's treatment at the Nassau jail under seal and demanded to know the sources of a Newsday story about Brooks' complaints about treatment there. Judge Joanna Seybert denied their request this week.

Thursday, the attorneys said there was no point in sealing Brooks' complaints about the situation at the Brooklyn detention center because of Seybert's ruling in the Nassau case.

In another development, a juror who says she is due to give birth in five weeks sent out a note saying that "it is very hard for me to sit in [the jury] room all day. . . . I am already having contractions and I do not want to go into labor prematurely."

Seybert said she would arrange for more comfortable seating arrangements for the juror.