John Kiriakou's Dead Drop - S2E1 Welcome To Loretto

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

THE BLURB: In season one, we told the story of how CIA counter terrorism officer John Kiriakou chose to tell ABC journalist Jonathan Ross the truth - that the CIA had tortured and waterboarded detainees like Abu Zubaydah. The CIA went on the warpath against John, finally forcing him to accept a plea deal of thirty months reducible to 23 months in federal prison. In season two, John arrives at Loretto Federal Prison and enters a world unlike anything he'd ever encountered before. Though John had expected to serve his sentence at a "Club Fed" style work camp, the Bureau of Prisons chose instead to put John in a more prison-like prison with drug dealers, mafiosi and child molesters. Every bit of John's training as a spy would serve him well as a prisoner.SHOW NOTESIf you are enjoying Dead Drop, please check out our other podcasts at Costard & Touchstone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast, it's a Costerton Touchstone production. There are moments in life where you think you know what's happening. The scales have fallen from your eyes, and as you gaze ahead into the future, you do so with a remarkable amount of confidence and faith that the future will be exactly how you expect it to be. And then reality flattens your expectations. We ended season one of this podcast story with my arrival at Loretto, the federal prison I had been assigned to following my conviction, a punitive punishment for ratting out the CIA's torture program, I believe.

I'd gone from being a villain in the public's eyes to being, well, a hero for a lot of people, for doing the right thing, consequences be damned. If you remember in the days leading up to me turning myself in, I'd been fetid by friends, journalists, publishers, and other whistleblowers, all very heady stuff. A few of those friends, along with my lawyers, made the drive with me from D.C.I. Loretto about 90 miles east of Pittsburgh. At the work camp, where I expected to be housed and incarcerated, they told me to check in across the street at the

main prison. Someone would then walk me back to the work camp. My friends and lawyers, they all waved. Then they got into their cars and drove off. In a weird way, it was kind of nice. I headed across the street, resigned to my fate, thinking I had a pretty good idea of what my near-term fate was going to be. spying, the thing that always scares you the most is whatever you don't know. That's the thing lurking beneath the surface, just waiting to devour you. I was utterly convinced that whatever the next 30 months reducible to 23 was about to throw at me, I was ready for it. What's that old joke? How do you make God laugh? Tell them your plans? Yeah, I was telling God my plans as I knocked on the

prison door totally oblivious to the fact that I was about to get fucked. big time. Welcome to Loretto. John Kariaku. Welcome to Dead Drop. What Makes a Spy Tick? Season 2. As you can hear, we're trying out some new theme music for season 2.

That we're even having a season 2 in the first place is entirely because of you, our listeners. Your kind embrace of this story, just your interest in it, is already a huge reward. That so many of you urged us to continue telling the story, wow, and thank you. That's also a thank you from the very tight team that makes this podcast. We promise to do everything we can with your constant guidance via your likes, ratings, reviews, and comments to keep the story and more episodes coming. As season one ended, I faced 30 months in federal prison, 23 months if I behaved myself. In an actual prison, instead of the open door minimum security club fed work camp I thought I'd been assigned to that was literally right across the street. A taciturn CO, a corrections officer, had just delivered me to an overcrowded cubicle,

goat for four prisoners, that now housed six. Home sweet home, was all he said, and then he walked away chuckling. That was the second thing he'd said to me during our time together. The first delivered moments before, as I now stood inside that overcrowded cubicle with the three bunk beds, was that if anybody entered myself uninvited, I should consider that to be an act of aggression. That's what Home Sweet Home was punctuated. My head was swimming against a violent riptie. I literally had no idea what to do or even what to do next.

Nobody among my friends had ever been to prison. I had no frame of reference other than what I'd seen on TV or in the movies about places like this. The CIA recruited me in the late 1980s when I was in graduate school. A professor from my alma mater, George Washington University, a CIA legend himself. saw the kind of qualities in me that he thought belonged at the CIA. Once I got through the vetting process and officially became a CIA officer, I learned great survival skills, how to surreptitiously gather information, how to break into houses, how to use various weapons in dangerous situations,

like James Freakin'Bahn. Out in the field in places like Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Greece, I learned how to survive and even thrive, when surrounded by idiots, terrorists, dangerous criminals, crooked cops, corrupt administrators, sex perverts, the very scum of society. I told you in season one what a CIA psychiatrist once told me when I first interviewed with the agency. He said that the CIA didn't want sociopaths because nobody can trust them, but it did want people with sociopathic tendencies.

People with sociopathic tendencies see black and white just like most people do. But people with sociopathic tendencies also see all the gray moral ambiguity that separates the black from the white. They don't mind navigating that morally ambiguous gray. That kind of person, me, for instance, we're open to bending the rules, maybe even breaking them for a greater good like America's national security,

or saving its democracy. In his published paper, Who is James Bond? New Mexico State University professor Peter Johnison wrote, quote, successful intelligence officers have a specific triumvirate of personality traits. There's the stratospheric,

self-esteem of narcissism. Add to that, fearlessness, ruthlessness, impulsivity, the thrill-seeking rush of psychopathy, and a Machiavellian bet toward deceitfulness. But unfortunately, I wasn't feeling any of that right there and then. As I stood in that stinking little cell, my mind reeling, I simply couldn't think anymore. Everything felt just too hard, too pointless. I climbed up onto the bunk the CO had pointed to, the one awaiting my personalization, and I fell asleep. Despite how awful the mattress was, and despite the fact that I had no pillow, because they were out, my tough luck. Two hours later, I awoke, keenly aware that I wasn't alone in the cell. Some of my cellmates had come home.

That club would include two Mexicans serving 24 and 20-year sentences for drugs, another Mexican serving 15 years for drugs, a Puerto Rican serving seven and a half years for drug conspiracy. You seeing a pattern here? The one exception among my cellmates was the former auditor of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. who was doing a long sentence for corruption. In fact, all of my cellmates were decent guys. We actually enjoyed each other's company. It wasn't until day five that I finally got telephone privileges

so I could call my attorneys and tell them where I was and what the hell had happened. My lawyers were surprised, but not that surprised. It turns out judges can only make recommendations as to prison assignments. The Bureau of Prisons has the ultimate word and they decided that I should serve my sentence in a real prison. Even if my lawyer had filed a motion asking the judge to move me, it would be another two years

before I would even get a hearing. As my sentence was reducible to 23 months, I'd likely be home before the hearing even took place. I was just going to have to tough it out. By then, I'd already begun to figure out at least a little bit of how life worked at Loretto. Bad as the unit at Loretto was, it could have been a thousand times worse. Violence was relatively rare. At Loretto, most of it would break out over what to watch on TV. The kind of violence we associate with prisons is much, much more prevalent in medium security facilities and in maximum security penitentiaries or pens. Their violence really is a way of life. Serious, injury-inducing fights are routine. By contrast, Loretto is what's called a low-security prison. Yeah, there are double fences topped with

concertina wire, motion detectors and roving patrols, but there are no guard tower. and none of the COs were armed. Much of that sense of order flowed from the larger pecking order and from the smaller pecking orders within each faction. Each faction had a shot caller, a trusted advocate from the group who could mediate disputes within the group. Shot callers regularly sat with each other to mediate on their faction's behalf. The system worked out most problems before they led to violence.

As the new guy, I immediately drew plenty of attention. Where you sleep, which bunk, in which cell, that's all assigned by the prison. Where you eat, the tables where you'd be accepted, that is decided by the prisoners sitting at those tables. On my very first day, the tall, pasty skinhead with a swastika covering his entire neck asked me point blank, are you a fag? No. The shorter, fatter one with a white power, swastika tattoos covering his arms had the next question. Are you a rat? No. To be honest, the question surprised me. I blurt it out.

I didn't have anybody else in my case. And then they had one last question. Are you a chomo? I had never heard the term before. Chomo, the tall one repeated slowly, like I was stupid. Child molester. Of course I'm not a child molester, I said. Their questions answered, my two new, I guess I could call them friends,

informed me that I was now invited to sit with the Arians in the cafeteria. Great. In prison, factions, are a fact of life. There's very little mixing of the races other than during sporting events. Whites eat with whites, blacks eat with blacks, Hispanics with Hispanics. You could have friends who were from different factions or different races, but you could never, ever eat with them. Or watch TV together. The TV room was also segregated. In addition to the Aryans, who were mostly just hillbillies, and the Chomo rat faction, there were blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, Muslims,

At the time I became part of its community, Loretto had 1,369 prisoners. For the record, I never, ever called myself an inmate. I never thought of myself that way. In my mind, I was always a prisoner. About 50% of the prison population was black. 30% was Hispanic and 20% was white. But here's where Loretto was unique. Most of those white prisoners, that 20% of the prison population, they were pedophiles.

Pedophiles are reviled throughout the prison system. But Loretto had a reputation as being a haven for pedophiles. In other low-security prisons, pedophiles are frequently banned from the TV room. If they want to watch TV, they have to do it while standing in the hallway, outside the TV room. At Loretto, they hung out in the TV room mostly without anybody bothering them. They walked around freely in the yard. Some carried on as if they owned the place. But life wasn't exactly perfect for them.

Though violence was rare, whatever violence there was usually landed on the pedophiles. Many weren't allowed in their own rooms by their roommates except to sleep and during count times. Occasionally, one would get banned from the yard altogether. Here's a fun fact. There are no pedophiles in medium security prisons or in penitentiaries because it's too dangerous for them. Now, if they happen to kill the child or children that they molested, in that case, they would spend their sentences in a medium security prison's solitary confinement unit for their own safety. Let's go back to the Aryans and explore them and

their motives here. Most of the guys calling themselves Aryan were pretty much, I hate to say it, toothless, dim-witted rednecks who'd spent most of their lives in prison, almost always for manufacturing meth or dealing in huge quantities of marijuana. Their tattoos were prolific. A boring mix of swastikas, so many swastikas, German SS insignias, and lots of unoriginal, meaningless cliches like death before dishonor with the letter B and the number four standing in for before. Or there was bloodline of champions and last of a dying breed, whatever those were supposed to mean. You could talk to them about NASCAR, weightlifting, making meth, or get rich quick schemes. They had spent considerable time thinking about these things, but bring up literally anything else and they were clueless.

The blacks tended to have three shot collars, an overall boss, a representative of the Bloods gang, and a representative of the Crips gang. The Bloods and the Crips generally kept their distance from one another. Remember, this was a low security prison, a very real step-up in prison conditions and living standards. Most prisoners did not want to risk going back to a medium or to a pen. That said, most of the violence having to do with what to watch on TV was Black on Black or Black on Hispanic. The Hispanics as a group were complicated. Every Hispanic prisoner had to belong to the Pisces prison gang. If they didn't join, they would get a good, hearty beating, and then be forced to check themselves into protective custody.

Then they'd get shipped off to another prison where the exact same experience would almost certainly repeat itself. An unwritten rule demanded that all Pisces members had to work out every single day. That included calisthenics, weightlifting, and cardio. When the weather was good, there was also soccer and baseball. Every single day. Why? Because if a race riot ever broke out, the Hispanics knew that they'd be able to defend themselves and hold their own.

Still, Hispanics were not monolithic. Hispanic prisoners also identified by country of origin and by street gang. Dominicans, for example, tended to associate only with other Dominicans. Mexicans associated with Mexicans and Puerto Ricans with Puerto Ricans. Puerto Ricans and Mexicans generally look down on each other, while everyone looked down on the Dominicans. The Costa Ricans, the Venezuelans, the Colombians thought they were better than everyone else, while no one really respected the Salvadorans or their Hondorans. Each subgroup had their own shot color. Outside the prison walls, gangs like MS-13, the Nortenos, the Buracos, and

the Zetas were all deadly rivals. But on the inside, everyone's gang identity was subjugated, to the Pisces identity. Infighting was strictly forbidden. Muslims were also a diverse group with lots and lots of surprising pockets. There were several Arab, Kurdish, Indian, Afghan, and Pakistani prisoners at Loretto who were all either Sunni or Shia Muslim. But the largest Muslim faction at Loretto by far was African American converts to the nation of Islam. Also on my first day, not too long after the Aryans embraced me, so did the nation of Islam. Two hugely built African Americans wearing skull caps approached me holding a newspaper.

One of them said, you're the dude from the CIA? Yes, I said warily. Reverend Farrakhan says you're a hero of the Muslim people. We want you to know that you won't have any problems with us. I said, thanks. And they just walked away. We never spoke to each other again. And I never had any problems with the black Muslims.

One group that didn't approach me that day, though I had more respect for and in time closer ongoing contact with them were the Italians. I found the Italians to be honest, honorable, and generous. Hanging out with them could make you feel like you were in a Scorsese movie. Dinner was always served at eight. Usually, it was pasta with three cheeses, shredded chicken, fresh tomatoes, mushrooms, basil, lots and lots of garlic, a delicate white wine sauce, maybe even some sweet and hot Italian sausage. I never understood how in the world, They got all that stuff into Loretto, and I never asked. What I do know is this.

My good friend Mark Lanzalotti made fine dining, restaurant-quality Italian food with a garbage bucket full of water and a live electrical wire. It's truly mind-blowing, how clever people can be when they really, really want something. Most of New York's five families were represented at Loretto, Gambino, Banano, Lucchese, Colombo, and Genevice. There was a sizable contingent from Philadelphia, the Bruno Scarfo. family. And from northern New Jersey, the Decalvocantes, Boston and upstate New York were also represented. A half dozen of these guys were made men. The rest were not. Unlike all the other factions, though, the Italians did not have and did not need a shot collar. They were very tight as a group,

always eating, working, and socializing together. Because they were direct and honest in their dealings with others, the Italians commanded and received respect and admiration from pretty much every other faction in the place. They were by far my favorite people and my closest friends at Loretto. Oh, have I got stories to tell you? We're going to get there. If you're enjoying Dead Drop and, of course, we hope you are, then while you're waiting for new episodes, I'd like to suggest another great granular story podcast from the Custard and Touchstone family. Just the photographer with David Swanson does for photojournalism what Dead Drop does for spies. Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Swanson tells you stories his

amazing news photos just can't. What it felt like being in all those dangerous places like war zones and natural disasters doing his job taking pictures. Having been to a few war zones myself, I can tell you this. Just the photographer will put you right there on the ground right next to David. Inside his head, in fact. It's a hell of a podcast and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts or at costard and touchstone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at costard and touchstone. Like the donor, a DNA horror story, the hall closet, sage wellness within,

and the how not to make a movie podcast. Who knows, your next favorite podcast might be just a click away. Now back to Dead Drop. The pedophiles also had something of a shot call. Not that any of the other shot collars would actually sit down and speak with him. But for the chomos, even just having a shot collar gave pedophiles a feeling of representation, kind of like belonging to a weak labor union in a strong industry. The chomo shot caller could do nothing to prevent a pedophile from having ice water poured

on him while he was sleeping, or from being thrown out of the TV room, or from being bullied in his own cell. But the chomo shot collar was there every other Friday to meet the transfer bus from other prisons and to provide each newly arrived child molester with soap, shampoo, toothpaste, a toothbrush, and shower shoes. He was more like a welcome wagon than any kind of advocate. As for the other factions, the rats, the snitches, nobody was looking out for them, except, of course, the cops. The prisoners and their factions were all one thing. I felt early on that I could navigate these tricky waters. I knew in my gut when I arrived, maybe it was the way the first CO2 chuckled at my surprise at going to the prison and not to the work camp, that the COs were going to

be my biggest challenge. But consider some of the awful people that I had dealt with in my CIA career. The COs might be a challenge, but they were a challenge that I could master. To be fair, there were decent COs. There were even COs whom I respected. One recreation department CEO was a genuinely good guy, cheerful, friendly, respectful. My regular afternoon unit CO for most of my sentence was also a decent guy. He had 23 years of experience and was respected by everyone because he showed respect. The CEOs who usually manned the visitor's room, well, they were all right too. They didn't take their jobs overly seriously.

They engaged in small talk and they responded to the occasional hello. People responding to hello is actually a very unusual. unusual in prison. Unfortunately, those couple of COs were the exception to the CO rule. Most COs were total assholes. They're power-mad bullies, passive-aggressive instigators, and just all-around dicks. You have to ask yourself, were they born this way and so gravitated toward this line of work? Or were they decent people who turned into dicks because, well, that's what being a CEO makes you? Dr. Peter Moscos, a professor of criminal justice at New York's John Jay College and author of the book, In Defense of Flogging, and a former Baltimore policeman

himself, says that the Bureau of Prisons is really little more than an employment agency for otherwise unemployable, uneducated, rural white men. Judging by all the CEOs I ever came into contact with, I'd say Dr. Moskos is 100% right. Do you remember 7th grade? Remember that there was always a kid who was bullied and teased. It sucked being that kid. But they weren't smart and aggressive enough or skillful enough to make something of themselves as adults? Well, that kid grew up to be a CO. He's no smarter than he was in seventh grade, but he's even more pissed off now than he was then. He can't get revenge on the bullies who beat him up in seventh grade, but he sure can't take out every bit of his fury and rage on prisoners who have absolutely no recourse and no way to

protect themselves. More experienced officers and prisoners who work their way down from a penitentiary have told me that disrespectful COs obviously started in low security prisons. If they had treated prisoners in the pens the way they treat them in the lows, they wouldn't have lived to see the end of the shift. One prison administrator told me that when he was working in a penitentiary, there was a Hispanic prisoner with the first name Undy. One day as Undy walked past a CO, the CEO shouted at Undy and demanded to know his name. The CEO responded when Undy told him,

Undy, like underwear? Who gave you that fucking name? Your mommy? Without saying a single word, Undy pulled out a shank and plunged it into the CO's neck, repeatedly, and the CO bled to death on the spot. That same administrator, always good for a cheery story, told me that he had a CEO friend at the penitentiary

who caught an inmate cooking with a stinger, like my friend Mark Lanzolotti, the Italian chef. A stinger is that live electrical wire. A stinger is a piece of metal. actually, like the faceplate from a wall plug. That's attached to two live wires. The faceplate then goes into a bucket of water and the wires go directly into a wall outlet. The electricity causes the water to boil quickly. Then the food you want to cook goes into a plastic bag, which then goes into the boiling water. Pasta can cook directly in the water, no plastic bag needed. As cooking methods go,

it's incredibly dangerous. But cooking this way happens every single day and 99 times out of 100 COs will just ignore it. But this COs didn't ignore it. Instead, he made a scene, and he screamed at the prisoner for cooking. He shouted, are you fucking stupid? How many fucking times do I have to tell you no fucking cooking? Prisoner pulled the stinger out of the water by the wire, still attached to the wall socket,

and tossed it to the CO who caught it without thinking. Zapp! He got fried. He died in the hospital three days later. In Penn's, both COs and Prisoners, learn to respect one another. The COs don't want to die. It's not like that in the lows like Loretta, though. The COs behaved abominably, and the prisoners more or less let them. Considering the people I'd been around in my work environment and considering the prison environment,

I was still taken aback by the filthy language flowing from COs to the prisoners, myself included. I was so taken aback that I went to the prison's law library to look up the regulations regarding obscene language. actually was pretty clear. Quote, in their official capacities, employees may not use profane, obscene, or abusive language when communicating with inmates,

fellow employees, or others, unquote. The penalties for verbal abuse are official reprimand for a first offense, 14-day suspension for a second offense, and removal from the job for a third offense. I saw prisoners verbally abused every single

day of my incarceration. I was luckier than most, though. A few months after I arrived, I began writing my letters from the Redo blog. We'll go into greater detail about that in another episode. It's success. The first two postings got more than a million hits each, brought me a bit of grudging respect. Most COs knew to stay out of my way. The semi-literate bullies, though, would still try to bait me.

But I had figured out their world, and this was their world, not mine. I was merely visiting for 30 months, reducible to 23. I gave as well as I got to those cretons, but I was always. always careful not to cross the line. The COs, they also knew when to back down. I could get away with saying things that landed other prisoners in the shoe, the special housing unit, solitary. The prisoners gave most of the COs descriptive nicknames. Some were more descriptive than others. At Loretto we had Sarge, Big Dummy, Blue, Honey Boo Boo Boo, Big Bottom, Horse Face, and her daughter, spawn of Horse Face. COs who showed prisoners respect were shown respect in return. We call

them by their actual names. On my fourth day at Loretto, I heard my name over the loudspeakers. Kiriaku! Lieutenant's office! Immediately! I glanced at my new friend that I was standing with. We both knew this wasn't good. I scribbled my wife's phone number.

Call her if for some reason they send me to the shoe, I told him. When I got to the lieutenant's office, they ushered me into the office of the SIS, the special investigative service. This is the prison version of every police department's detective bureau. On the desk was a copy of The Reluctant Spy, my first book, as well as DVD copies of all the documentaries I'd been in. The CEO showed me a picture of an Arab. Do you know this guy? He asked me.

I did. I had met him a day earlier. Our conversation had been limited to, nice to meet you. Well, said the CEO with a hint of smugness, that guy was the uncle of the Times Square bomber. After we had exchanged our pleasantries, the uncle called a phone number in Pakistan, reported the meeting, and was told to kill him. me. I scoffed. Please, I could kill this guy with my thumb. He's maybe five foot four, 125 pounds. I'm six one and two fifty. The CEO nodded. All the same, I should stay away from him while they arranged to ship him out to another prison. With that, they sent me on my way,

but I was already poking at it in my head because it simply didn't make any sense. Why in the world would the uncle of the Times Square bomber be in a low security prison? He should be in a maximum security penitentiary. I asked my Muslim friends to check him out. Turned out he was an Iraqi Kurd from Buffalo, New York. He was the imam of a mosque there and had nothing to do with terrorism. The FBI pressured him to testify against his parishioners. He refused and he got five years for obstruction of justice. In the meantime, SIS had told him that I had made a call to Washington after we had met and that I had been instructed to kill him. We both laughed at the SIS's ham-hand. We both laughed at the SIS's ham-handedness in trying to get us to attack each other. If we had, we would have spent the rest of

our sentences in solitary. Instead, we became friendly. We exchanged greetings in Arabic and English, and we chatted. I think about two weeks in, I just about found my equilibrium at Loretto. I understood the lay of the land, who was who, and what was what. I understood the politics and how to play them. By then, I was already getting a lot of mail, a lot of mail. I answered every, single letter. Monday through Friday, prisoners would gather in front of the unit COs' office for mail call. As I said, my last name was impossible for most of the COs. One female COSO massacred my name every single time she tried to say it. By then, I had already heard Kirakow, Kirilloo, even Terriaki. One day after mail call, I was walking with a friend and I

passed her in the hall. She turned back and said, Are you the motherfucker whose name I can't pronounce? I said, Hi, Riaku. She said, how but if I just call you fuckface? I walked away. Classy, I said to my friend, loud enough for her to hear,

white trash is more like it. An hour later, four COs descended on both of ourselves, trashing all of our possessions. It was my first shakedown. I like to think of myself as being a pretty nice guy.

If you've listened to season one of this podcast, I hope you would agree with that. I was a good father, a good husband, and a patriot. But, spoiler alert, before too too long, I would develop a reputation in prison for being an asshole. As you'll hear, I was comfortable in prison plotting against people, cutting off those who crossed me, and trying always to stay ahead of the COs and other prison administrators.

In the next episode, I'll take you even deeper inside what it was like doing time like a spy. There were an awful lot of similarities between many of the CIA officers I worked with over the years and prisoners whom I encountered at Loretto. The CIA is filled with people always jockeying for a better position than the one they're in. So are prisons. The CIA is filled with aggressive alpha personalities. So are prisons. The CIA is filled with people constantly plotting against each other and so are prisons.

Yes, my training as a spy was going to serve me well. If I was going to stay atop the prison's heat, keep out of real trouble, and get what I wanted, I was going to have to tap deeply into another thing the CIA had nurtured inside of me, the ruthlessness necessary for self-preservation. Until next time, I'm John Kirooku. Dead Drop is written by John Kriaku and Alan Katz. Costard and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast, and John Kriaku, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers.

This podcast, it's a Costard and Touchstone Production.