R. Kelly, Tiger King, the Unabomber. These infamous inmates have spent time in NC prison
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- Butner prison has housed high-profile criminals including R. Kelly and Bernie Madoff.
- R. Kelly alleges prison mismanagement after a June 2025 hospitalization at Duke.
- Federal Bureau of Prisons confirms past Butner inmates include the Unabomber & Joe Exotic.
This story originally published April 24, 2023, and was updated June 17, 2025.
Butner’s federal prison facilities have long been home to some of America’s most notorious white-collar criminals, including fraudsters, computer hackers, drug lords and murderers.
That includes disgraced R&B singer R. Kelly, who has been held in Federal Correctional Institution Butner Medium I since 2023, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
The 58-year-old recording artist has been in the news in June 2025 after being rushed to Duke University Hospital on June 12 after “he began to suffer dizziness, inability to walk, and unconsciousness,” Us magazine reports. His lawyers say he suffered an “overdose” at Butner prison and was “nearly killed” by prison officials.
Sources tell ABC News that Kelly was taken to the hospital for routine care for two days and returned to prison.
Kelly, whose legal name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, is serving a prison sentence for sexual exploitation of children and other offenses, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. His release date is Dec. 21, 2045, according to the prison bureau’s database.
Kelly isn’t the only high-profile inmate who has served at Butner currently or in the past.
Bernie Madoff, one of the most notorious Ponzi schemers in history, died at the medical center April 14, 2021.
In 2021, Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, known as the “Unabomber,” was transferred to Butner from Colorado, according to The Washington Post. He was found dead at the prison on June 10, 2023. He was 81.
The Butner federal correctional institutions, which include medium- and low-security facilities for male inmates and a federal medical center, are located about 15 miles north of downtown Durham.
Here’s a look at some of the high-profile prisoners who have passed through Butner.
R. Kelly
Kelly was convicted in 2021 after a six-week trial on charges of “racketeering predicated on criminal conduct including sexual exploitation of children, forced labor and Mann Act violations involving the coercion and transportation of women and girls in interstate commerce to engage in illegal sexual activity,” according to the federal U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
He was sentenced in June 2022 in a New York federal court to serve 30 years in prison for sexual exploitation of children, among other crimes. In February 2023, a federal judge in Chicago sentenced Kelly to serve 20 years in prison for child pornography charges with one year to run consecutive to the 30-year sentence.
He was moved to Butner from an Illinois federal prison on April 19, 2023, The News & Observer reported.
Kelly has denied any wrongdoing, media outlets reported. Us magazine reports that Kelly has filed an emergency motion to serve the remainder of his sentence at home.
In a court filing June 17, 2025, his Chicago-based lawyer, Beau P. Brindley, alleges mismanagement by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and that his hospitalization was part of a plot to “kill him,” ABC News reports. The filing said “prison officials did leave him with blood clots in his lungs and remove him from a hospital that sought to do surgery to remove them.”
Joseph Maldonado-Passage
Maldonado-Passage, known as “Joe Exotic,” starred in the 2020 Netflix documentary series “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness.” A federal jury found him guilty in 2019 on two counts of hiring someone to murder a woman in Florida, along with multiple counts of falsifying wildlife records and violating the Endangered Species Act.
He moved to the Butner Federal Medical Center in 2021 for cancer treatment. The 60-year-old has since moved to a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, and is set to be released in 2036, prison records show.
Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski
Kaczynski was serving multiple life-in-prison sentences after killing three people in mail bombings, and injuring others. He pleaded guilty to the crimes in 1998 in a deal that allowed him to avoid the death penalty.
At the time he moved to Butner’s medical facility, a federal prison spokeswoman declined to provide details about his medical condition or why he was being transferred, The Washington Post reported.
On June 10, 2021, staff at the prison found Kaczynski unresponsive in his cell at 12:25 a.m., according to a Bureau of Prisons release. The staff began “life-saving measures,” but he was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. No cause of death was provided.
Bernie Madoff
After Madoff swindled investors out of billions of dollars, he was sentenced in 2009 to 150 years in prison on securities fraud and other charges. He pleaded guilty to cheating as many as 37,000 people out of billions of dollars over the course of four decades, McClatchy News previously reported.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, his lawyers asked a judge for compassionate release from prison as Madoff was suffering from “chronic kidney failure” and only had a year or so to live. While the prison had major COVID-19 outbreaks, the judge denied the request.
He was 82 when he died at the North Carolina prison.
Samuel Israel III
The former hedge fund manager was sentenced to 22 years in prison for running a $450 million fraud from 1996 to 2005, according to Reuters. Israel, 65, was housed in Butner’s low security prison but is now at a residential reentry management field office in Dallas. He is scheduled for release in June 2026, according to prison records on June 17, 2025.
Al Parish
The former Charleston Southern University economist was convicted for running a Ponzi investment scheme. He was sentenced to 24 years behind bars in 2008 and ordered to forfeit $63 million, news station WCVI reported.
He was granted a compassionate release in March 2021, having served 13 years of his term. A judge allowed him to be released due to his chronic health conditions that could make COVID-19 dangerous for him, WCSC reported. He was ordered to be on probation for three years and owed millions of dollars to his victims, ABCNews4 reported.
Roman Valerevich Seleznev
The Russian computer hacker was sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2017 for his involvement in a $50 million cyberfraud ring and for defrauding banks of $9 million through a hacking scheme, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
He is 40. He was released after serving 10 years as part of a 2024 prisoner exchange that included Russia releasing Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former Marine Paul Whelan.
Gilberto Rodriguez-Orejuela
Rodriguez-Orejuela was called “one of the world’s most infamous drug lords,” by the Miami Herald and ran a family drug cartel in Colombia that trafficked roughly 200 tons of cocaine to the U.S. He died at 83 in Butner’s medical facility in 2022, according to Colombian newspaper El Tiempo.
Jessica Banov and Hayley Fowler contributed to this report.
This story was originally published June 17, 2025 at 6:35 PM with the headline "R. Kelly, Tiger King, the Unabomber. These infamous inmates have spent time in NC prison."