John Kiriakou's Dead Drop - S2E15 The Home Stretch

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

IN THIS EPISODE When John first entered the gates of Loretto Federal Prison, his goal was to use all his training as a spy to survive prison. But, just as with spying, prison can be very unpredictable. In fact, John found that he'd been fooled by one of his roommates - who'd been betraying him from the jump. As he enters the home stretch of his sentence, John doubles down on his mission to use everything he learned as a spy to survive prison to the bitter end. SHOW NOTESIf you enjoy this podcast, please check out our whole exciting range of podcasts at Costard & Touchstone Productions. Your next podcast obsession is just a click away! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast, it's a custard and Touchstone production. One of the core elements in life in prison is this. Roommates come and roommates go. That's both a good thing and a bad thing, of course, depending on the roommate or cellmate since it's prison. But we've thought of them more or less as our rooms. On the plus side, even if you got stuck with an idiot or a child molester, the chances are very good that before too long,

either he'll move on to another room for whatever reason, or he'll get released or end up in solitary. Having a good room with good people who you mostly like and can get along with makes a huge difference. People's annoying habits get magnified inside cramped spaces. That's why good rooms deserve the extra work they demand to keep them as good as possible.

A few episodes back, I told you the story about Schaefer, the chomo with a taste for ballet. Dave had planted a shank in Schaefer's cell. That had gotten rid of Schaefer, but at the cost of Dave getting sent to the shoe to solitary. When shit like that happens, a prisoner's friend's circle should act, and I mean act quickly, as we did for Dave.

Even before Dave was out of the unit, Frank and I were belining for Dave's locker to clean it out and get it squared away before the cops got to it. If your friends don't do anything with your stuff, the cops will just set aside the uniforms for reuse and then throw everything else away. Food, books, legal paperwork, whatever you have in there. Sometimes there can be a surprising amount of stuff for people locked up in prison. Frank and I got two

empty laundry bags and filled them with Dave's belongings, which we then stowed under our own bunks. Except Dave wouldn't be rejoining the room. The SIS told me not long after they took Dave, that was going to be the case. It was a little strange. Dave hadn't received a charge or even a disciplinary report related to Schaefer, but then Dave was extremely unpopular among the Ariens and other whites who sat at the front table. That's because Dave constantly accused everybody he disliked of being either a rat or a chomo, rats especially. The three white shot callers had gone to SIS to say that they couldn't guarantee Dave's safety on the yard if he came back. In fact, they wouldn't guarantee his safety. That was not.

none too subtle code for if you let him out, someone is going to beat the shit out of him and we're not going to stop them. I went back to our room and I told Frank. Then I gathered Dave's legal paperwork and mailed it to his attorneys. I sent his books to his grandmother and I gave his clothes to indigent prisoners. Several of Dave's books were actually my books. I had loaned them to Dave so I just simply returned them to my own locker. But when I picked up one of the books that I had lent Dave, a piece of paper fell out. Hmm. On the paper, in Dave's handwriting, was, quote, rat list, unquote. A list of people and an accounting of bad things that they had done

that the list itself indicated Dave had taken to the cops. Holy shit, my friend, Dave, was a rat. This was stone cold proof in his own handwriting, but what made it exponentially worse? The very first name on top of Dave's rat list was mine. And he had already ratted me out. I'm John Kirooku. Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick.

This is episode 15 in our series Doing Time Like a Spy. As always, we thank you for listening and liking and rating, reviewing, and commenting on the podcast wherever you happen to be listening to it. As I've mentioned here, the thing that scares most spies is whatever they don't know. I didn't know. I hadn't a fucking clue that the guy I thought had my back was in fact stabbing it repeatedly. Now Dave, Dave Phillips, and I had had an actual history together. In fact, I first met Dave in Pakistan in 2002. I was there working counterterrorism for the CIA looking for Al-Qaeda's leadership. Dave had been working for a defense contractor doing intelligence work. That's how Dave flew under my radar. We knew each other very briefly at best,

but there was evidence backing up a claim. Then I went my way and Dave went his way. I got into my trouble and Dave got into, well, he had told me a story, a very detailed, very elaborate story about how he ended up being charged with unauthorized access of a secure database in hindrance of national security. That's a felony. Though we may maintained his innocence, and believe me, I could relate. The federal government did what they usually do and piled lots of other charges on them, all designed to make him give up. And I could definitely relate to that, too.

Facing 54 years in prison, Dave, so he told us, took a nine-year plea deal instead. And then we bumped into each other again at Loretto because, you know, small world and became friends. I thought I had a fix on Dave and who he was. as a result I just stopped looking at him but that was a costly mistake every time I wrote one of my letters from Loretto blog posts I would make several copies one for the publishers of firedoglake.com

one for my attorney one for myself and one for Dave I made one for Dave because he said that he would keep a copy of each letter for me at an undisclosed location so that in the event that I was shaken down by the CEOs and my copies of the letters were confiscated I would still have Dave's hidden copies at my disposal. Dave was the safety. Because I wouldn't know where David stashed his copies,

I couldn't betray them. Now, I had assumed Dave hid the letters somewhere in our friend Arts Room. Had he been hiding them, that's probably where he would have done it. But that wasn't the case. In reality, Dave was passing them to the unit manager, a former SIS officer, who then passed them on to the SIS. Yes, Dave was an active conduit to the cops. Foolish me, I had violated my own rules to live by.

One of the most basic rules of being a spy. Trust nobody. Dave's list had many names on it, and each name got punished for being there. The cops tore apart my friend Mark Lanzalotti's room because his name was on the list. As I told you a few episodes back, Mark was a bookie.

as well as his chef. They took 1,200 books of stamps from Mark Sell and put him permanently out of the bookie business. Good thing, he was still a cook. Another entry on Dave's list ratted out our friend and former neighbor Luke. Luke robbed a series of banks in Western Virginia. That's what got him into trouble.

He had a stash of hardcore adult porn hidden in his locker, and that'll get you in trouble every time. On top of that, he was writing, a quote-unquote novel, just like a thousand other prisoners. Luke's problem, though, was that he'd staged a kill party scene right there on the notebooks pages. In the scene, Luke invited his judge, prosecutors, his co-defendant, and even his own attorneys to a Christmas party where he blew them all away and a hail of machine gun fire. Not only did the prison authorities haul Luke off to the shoe, they upgraded him to a medium-security prison.

Talk about rookie mistakes. Of course, there were dozens of other entries for Schaefer, the child molester, and for an arsonist named Al, with whom Dave feuded constantly. Everyone who offended Dave in any way was in there, including a staff member, with whom I had a conversation about pedophiles.

When Dave reported the conversation, he exaggerated what everyone said. When the SIS called me in to make a sworn statement, it was easy to tell the officer truthfully that her rat, whoever he was, was lying as rats do. But Dave was just getting started. How's this for both bizarre and brazen? When Dave landed at his next prison,

he wrote a letter to my wife, which he followed up with a phone call to her. He told her how he had stood up for me while he was in the shoe. He told her that SIS had visited him several times to ask him for any information they could use against me, even if he had to make it up. but that he had held firm. That was all bullshit, of course.

SIS could have thrown me into solitary for up to six months, quote, pending investigation, unquote, for literally no reason whatsoever. They didn't need Dave's help for that. But Dave was just getting started. When I first got to Loretto, one of my best friends got me a subscription to Vanity Fair, my favorite magazine.

The subscription had stopped around the time Dave went to the shoe. Four months later, My subscribing friend emailed me and said, Do you still want Vanity Fair? The magazine is being told that it's undeliverable and that the name on the subscription has changed from yours to somebody named Dave Phillips. Who, my friend asked, is Dave Phillips? Who, indeed?

I certainly thought I knew who he was. This string of events reminded me of a conversation I had had with an attorney friend about a year earlier. Dave was appealing his sentence and was looking for an attorney. he asked if my friend might be a good fit. So I told my lawyer friend about Dave. He said he'd look up the case and consider it. A few months passed. My lawyer friend then returned for another visit.

He told me that he had decided not to take Dave's case. I was genuinely surprised, and I asked why. My friend said that he had gone through the whole case, top to bottom, side to side, and concluded that our friend Dave was really nothing more than just a common criminal. He was a con man. And it was true. When I was finally able to Google Dave myself, what I found infuriated me, he wasn't just a con man.

He was more. His sentencing judge had called him a brazen con man. Now, our meetup in Pakistan was real. Dave had ever so briefly been a contractor for a company hired by the CIA. But aside from that, Dave never worked at the CIA. and everything else he said about the agency was pure, unadulterated bullshit. His actual criminal behavior was unrelated to spying and completely related to ripping off his friends and relatives.

He had gotten credit cards in the name of his elderly grandparents and his own daughter. He scammed a former girlfriend and old friends from high school. In short, Dave was a financial predator and a scumbag. I went back to the conversations we had had while walking together around the track at Loretto, where Dave would spin these stories about his operations and the awards that he had won for heroism. Looking back, there were always things that bothered me about those conversations. While Dave could generally talk to talk, pretty convincingly, he made a lot of silly mistakes with the jargon.

He'd mentioned training courses that he had supposedly attended, but he would get the locations wrong. I knew that because I had taken several of those same courses, and I knew for a fact where they were held. It wasn't where Dave said they were held. If I had not taken Dave and his supposed pass for granted, I might have bumped a little harder against his not knowing any of the CIA's key players, despite Dave having a 25-year career at the CIA.

How can you work at the CIA for 25 years and not know who the deputy director for operations is. It's not possible. But I had taken Dave's career for granted because I had bumped into him in context. I had become vulnerable to his invention. Dave went to the shoe on May 1st, 2014. My roommates and I kept the bed open for two weeks thinking initially that upon his release, Dave would probably come back. But then Frank, Beard and I heard finally that he was being shipped off to another prison. With that, we began our search for a new roommate. There was Doc Grievous, a Medicare fraud doctor from Long Island. He wanted a lower bunk, but that wasn't on the table, so pass. There was chin, a crooked and incontinent concrete mogul. The man with un-concrete bowels

needed to be closer to the toilet than our room was, so pass. There was Joey the kid, the cook, my first choice. But Joey was out of favor with the counselor, in charge of bed assignments, that wasn't going to happen either. So the bed sat empty for five weeks. In the meantime, my friend Mark Lanzalotti received an email from one of his attorneys that asked him to be on the lookout for another of his clients, a new prisoner named Cher Malani.

Now, I told part of Cher's story a few episodes back. That is, I told the headlines about how we dealt with them. But it's worth a deeper dive. Cher was a naturalized citizen from Afghanistan. He had emigrated to the U.S. in 1980 after the Soviet Union invaded his country. Share landed in Washington, D.C.,'s Virginia suburbs where cab driving made ends meet. Then September 11th happened. A defense contractor recruited Cher as a translator for American forces in Afghanistan.

During an operation in eastern Afghanistan, Scher's armored Humvee hit an improvised explosive device and flipped upside down. Enemy fire raped the vehicle, killing everyone who wasn't already dead, except Cher and one American soldier. They crawled through a broken window. When Cher stood to try and run, a Taliban fighter shot him in the shoulder and the stomach

within AK-47. The American soldier pulled him down, called in reinforcements, and tried to staunch the flow of blood pouring from Shepard. Cher. Eventually they were rescued. Share was near death as a medical team worked on him at a field hospital. From there, he was sent to a U.S. military hospital in Germany where they amputated his mangled arm just below the shoulder. He lay in a coma for six weeks. When he finally awoke, surrounded by family, his body was a complete and total wreck. His right arm was gone. And he had one of the gnarliest scars

anyone had ever seen, courtesy of the bullet that had, quote unquote, grazed his stomach. The scar shaped like a diamond and about the size of a football, stretched from his breastbone to his pubic bone, and was nearly a foot across at the center. The resulting mess had moved Cher's belly button from where it was supposed to be, at his belly, to his side. It could be mind-boggling what bullets and bonds. can do to human flesh.

As you can imagine, PTSD became a constant and unwelcome companion. So on top of his broken body, unable to do even basic tasks, there was rage at everyone and everything. Cher got a multi-million dollar legal settlement. He had therapy and drugs for the PTSD and the depression, but the rage, the rage is what one out. One day during an argument with his family, Sherr beat his wife and threw a vase through a brand new 72-inch TV. He was arrested and sentenced to six months of anger management classes. His psychiatrist suggested that he volunteer to return to Afghanistan and confront his demons

there. And that's what he did. Working as a translator, Sherr made several trips per year, spending most of his time in country at the U.S. Air Force Base at Bagram. Mark, wanting to do the right thing by his lawyer, hoped that I could track share down, bond over our common experiences, and make him feel comfortable. Mark, wanting to do right by his lawyer, hoped I could track share down, bond over our common experiences, and make him feel comfortable when he arrived.

Perhaps I could take him over to the chapel and, for example, introduce him to the other month, Muslims there. Five weeks after Dave's departure, sorry, hi, the hiccups, five weeks after Dave's departure, a CO delivered a five-foot, four-inch, bearded, one-armed Afghan man to my room and said, here's your new celly. We gave Cher a pair of shower shoes, a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, and shampoo, and I took him to the chapel to introduce him around and to get him a Koran. Also, I introduced Cher to Wahid, another Afghan inmate. and a former pharmacist.

So far, so good. Back in our room, I explained to share that we had a good room, in part, because we respected each other's privacy and because we were all honest with each other. Look, I said, I don't know anything about your crime, but everyone is going to ask you.

Everybody. You have to be honest if you hope to get along here. So he might as well just start right now. I looked him dead in the eye, and I said, what did you do? He smiled as if about to tell a joke, and then he just threw up his hand. Silly craziness, as if that was an answer. Like, what did that even mean?

I told him, that is a really bad answer for prison. What did you do? So now he was searching for the right word. Maybe this one would answer the question. Computer, he says finally. when you've lived at a place like Loretto long enough, a person in prison because of something they did involving a computer means only one thing.

Pictures on the computer, I asked. Pictures of children? A reluctant pause. A resigned sigh. And then a meek. Yeah. That was disappointing. I said, you're going to have to be honest about this.

I told him that there were lots of people who would not talk to him or associate with him. and he would have to eat at the chomo table. Just then, Beard, one of our other roommates, walked in. A career criminal and drug dealer, Beard was unbelievably easy to get along with. In a lot of ways, he was really the perfect roommate. A drug dealer, as I said, from Lansing, Michigan,

Beard actually liked prison. His routine, every single day, involved some combination of eating, sleeping, lifting weights, and watching TV. strange as it might seem from Beard's perspective, life was good. Having Beard as a roomy had unexpected benefits for me. He frequently offered surprisingly sage advice on a variety of subjects. His sagacity was the product of all those years spent in prison.

And Beard was almost never in the room. He preferred hanging out at his reserved seat in the TV room. But he was back in the room now. And though he usually trusted Frank and me to handle the room, roommates. Something about this new roommate stuck in his craw, like he sensed something. He cut right to the end of the chase. What's your crime? I made a stupid mistake, said Cher, giving the wrong answer again. Beard knew exactly what the answer really meant. We have rules in our room. Child of molesters can't have visitors. Got it? Share nodded. He got it. Beard looked at me. His eyes saying wearily,

not another child molester. But that's what Cher was, and worse. He confessed to me in private one day, just how much worse. Yes, there was a computer and a photo, but it turned out that Cher had been having what he called an affair, again, his word, with his 14-year-old niece. He got her to send him a nude photo of herself. That was the photo on Cher's computer.

one day Cher's teenage daughter saw the picture, this naked picture of her cousin on her dad's computer, and she called the police. They in turn called the FBI who then arrested Cher. He took a plea and was sentenced to six years in federal prison. He seemed relieved as if telling me this story had unburdened him. And then he said, I forgive them as if closing the book. Forgive who? I forgive my niece and my daughter. That just triggered my indignation. Pedophiles always do this. As furious as it made me, I remembered my promise to try and ease Cher's way at Loretto. I told him that is not a healthy attitude for a whole bunch of reasons. My advice is that maybe you shouldn't talk about your crime at all. Cher's eyes lit up. Now he was triggered. He shouted at me,

if people don't like it, I will fuck them up the ass. Yeah, that was going to win friends and influence fellow inmates. I took Cher to the chapel. I showed him where all the books on Islam were kept, and I introduced him to the chaplain and some of the other Muslims. One of the very few Shia Muslims in prison, Cher asked if he could buy any religious items that he might need. Sure, said the chaplain.

There was a catalog and any inmate, including Cher could order whatever they needed. Cher explained that what he would need was a ritual bull in which to wash his penis and testicles before he prayed. Seriously. The chaplain looked at me. Remember, I'm the guy with the degree in Middle Eastern studies

with the concentration in Islamic theology. But that request was as new to me as it was to the chaplain. So Cher and I headed back to our room as we walked, Cher said quite seriously, I think he hates Muslims. Yeah, sure, sure. That's what the problem here is. Like Beard,

Cher enjoyed being in prison. He felt completely comfortable in prison. In fact, he saw prison as some kind of exclusive men's club. He slept most of the day, played soccer in the evenings, and then prayed all night long. He swore, a lot at people he didn't know. That, I told him, was guaranteed to get him a hearty ass kicking,

especially since he was 54 years old, 140 pounds, short, stout, and had one arm. Cher was not a guy who was going to defend himself easily. To top off the whole pile of bad roommate dynamics, he was a filthy slob too, absolutely filthy. He would return from playing soccer, Dranched in sweat, he would take off his dirty, wet, smelly clothes and then drape them on our lockers. That included his wet, smelly, funky underwear, his socks, his shirt, his shorts, and his filthy towel. Then on top of that, Cher had a festering, so large you couldn't miss it, herpesore on his

upper lip, and then put his now tainted washcloth. which had touched the herpes sore on our roommate Eric's bed. I thought Eric was going to lose his mind. Cher then hung up a string to dry the clothes. He would hang the clothes on the string to dry them. It stretched from one end of his bunk to the other. This was against regulations and would never pass weekly inspection. But Cher was on the lower bunk and Eric was on the top bunk.

So the string was actually on Eric's bed rather than shares. Share put the herpes washcloth inches from Eric's face right next to his pillow. You can certainly see the blowout coming. When Eric opened his eyes after a nap and saw the herpes washcloth next to his face, he jumped out of bed, pulled the string, snacked it in half, and shouted at Cher to not ever do such a disgusting thing ever again. Was Cher contrite? Did he take the big picture of you?

Absolutely not. Instead, he shouted at everyone. I will fuck you in the ass. I will fuck your mother in the ass. And it just got crazier from there. Eric walked out. For the next 40 minutes, Cher ranted, randomly about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky,

and he was obsessed with Nancy Reagan being pregnant before she was married to Ronald Reagan. I shouldn't even be in prison to begin with. He shouted because, as he said, his niece's parents had forgiven him. And according to Islamic law, according to his version of it anyway, that meant that he hadn't done anything wrong. Clearly, Cher's presence in the room was not going to fly long term. We were going to have to do something about it. 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 That night, Cher picked a fight with Eric after lights out. I was still up reading and Frank was sitting on the edge of his bed.

Beard was in the TV room and Steve was asleep. Eric felt something moving beneath him and he looked over the side of the bed and saw that Cher had re-hung his drying string and stuck the herpes washcloth right next to Eric's head again. Sher looked at Eric defiantly saying nothing. Eric also saying nothing pulled down the drying string again. The washcloth landed on the floor. After some quick fuck yous back and forth, Cher ran out of the room.

I looked at Frank. Frank looked at me and we both thought, uh-oh. Well, the uh-oh arrived in the form of eight Muslims who rushed our room a few minutes later. Get out of bed, kid. One of them shouted at Eric. I jumped up to my feet. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. This cannot get out of hand, I said.

One of the Muslims said, the kid stabbed the brother with a pencil, meaning share. Frank and Eric both pointed out how ridiculous that was. As the discussion raged on, one of the senior Muslims motioned for me to step out into the hall.

And he asked me, what happened here? So I told him about the herpes washcloth. He, of course, hadn't heard anything about that. He just wanted to know, did Eric stab Cher? Absolutely not, I shot back. He was in bed, half asleep. The senior Muslim took it all in. Finally, he nodded thoughtfully, and we headed back into the room. Share, the Muslim said, where exactly did he stab you? Share hesitated. Well, he tried to stab me. Where's the pencil? That was going to be a problem, since there had never been a pencil in the first place. Well, Cher insisted, he wanted to stab me. The Muslims, now realizing

Cher had lied to them and had pulled them into this conflict, apologized to Eric and walked out. I looked at Cher. So now you're a rat in addition to being a pedophile. Good luck with that. The next day we had a room meeting and decided that Cher had to go. I wrote the request to staff, which Sher then signed, asking the... he'd be moved to another room. He gave it to the counselor who rejected it immediately. Tough luck, he said when we opened our mouths to protest. So now we were stuck with the guy. And being stuck with Cher began to get harder and harder to put up with. Prison directly and indirectly surrounds the rule breakers within its walls with lots of rules that they absolutely

must follow. Some are the prison's rules, of course, but many are unwritten rules laid down by prison culture. And Cher flouted those rules the way other people breathe. He prayed constantly upwards of 20 times a day. Fair enough, if that's what you're into, despite the fact that Muslims pray five times a day. And if you're Shia Muslim, you can combine the morning prayers and the evening prayers and actually make it three times a day. But this man was devoted to his religious faith. with that said it's prison there are rules about these things you're supposed to pray in the designated prayer area down the hall but share insisted on praying in the room and i'll remind you our room was 160 square feet for six people lots of that floor space was taken up by our bunk beds and lockers and that left not much other space for six of us to move around in so having share on his prison rug in the very middle of the room simply wasn't going to work. So having Cher on his prayer rug in the very center of the room didn't work.

For a little while, he prayed on his bed until finally taking his devotion to where it belonged, the designated prayer area. I mentioned in an earlier podcast how important cleanliness is in prison. No one wants to deal with other people's messes, but Cher never, ever cleaned the room. He never took out the garbage. Even in prison, someone's got to take out the trash. And he walked around shirtless so that we could all see his grisly stump and his, you had to see it to believe how grisly it was stomach wound. Nudity, even partial nudity, is anathema in prison.

It breaks one of the fundamental rules by which we all live peaceably. For that reason, we told Cher constantly to cover. of. His reaction was simply to shout, fuck you. Everybody should see what the American Army made happened to me. I shouted at him, nobody gives a shit about what happened to you. And I told him that if he didn't cover up, someone was going to give him a beat down. Share also ignored the prison's rules. The rules regarding prison uniforms, for example, is clear. All inmates must be in full uniform from 6 a.m. until after lunch. If you sleep during the day, you must sleep in uniform and you must sleep on top of the covers

so that the cops can see your uniform. Anyone sleeping under the covers would have their pillow confiscated, plus they would suffer some sort of administrative sanction like three months suspension of commissary, telephone, email, or even visiting privileges. But Cher didn't give a shit. Because he was up praying all night, he would sleep all day in shorts, and a t-shirt, meaning not in uniform, and he was always under the covers. One day the warden came through on one of his periodic walkabouts.

He saw Sharon bed, woke him up, and told him, get up, get your uniform on. You can't sleep under the covers. Cher looked up at the warden like he was an alien. And who the hell are you? With eyebrows arching and surprise, he said, I'm the warden. What does that mean? I said, it means he's the boss of the whole prison. I looked at the warden, and I circled my ear with my finger.

He's crazy, was what I meant. Get up and get dressed, the warden said as he exited, done with us. Cher's response, what was that all about? Cher was the only Shia Muslim among a large group of Sunni Muslims in our housing unit. Most of the Muslims in prison were converts who knew little to nothing about the Sunni Shia split, they cared even less about it, and they didn't want lessons from a one-armed Afghan child molester on why they should instead be praying to some obscure 18th century Iranian Ayatollah. Next thing, shares lecturing the other Muslims on how their prayers are wrong, his word,

how they repeated Arabic sayings without knowing the meanings, and how none of them were authentic Muslims. For good measure, he added that he didn't like praying with African Americans because, quote, they're stupid, they smell bad, and they don't know the prayers, unquote. As you might imagine, this caused quite a rift. Share was thrown out of the group and told that he couldn't pray with the Sunnis anymore. His reaction, later, he would shove his prayer rug, quote, up their mother's cunts, unquote. So pious. Our room's share problem became the whole unit's share problem. He would literally stand in front of the large floor fan outside the bathroom. After playing soccer for two hours, he would pull down his pants so he could air out his balls. Seriously, that was his

explanation, and it violated just about every single kind of prison protocol. imaginable. If you provoke a group of prisoners, at least a few of them will react, having been provoked. A few days after airing out his balls in front of the fan, somebody came into our room and gave Cher's locker a vigorous shake. Well, as you know from a previous podcast, that was Joey. When Cher returned later and opened his locker, nearly everything inside fell out onto the floor. This happens a lot in prison. It's one of the easier. ways to fuck with people. If you piss someone off, rather than fight you, which could then land everybody in solitary, they'll just give your locker a good shake instead. Frank, Eric and I thought

it was pretty hilarious that one of Cher's many enemies was taking the game right to him. Cher pointed the finger at Wahid, the Afghan Sunni who had befriended him upon his arrival, who had introduced him to the other Muslims, and had given him clothes and a watch to get him started. Sher accused Waheed right to his face. You shook my locker, he raged at him. If you do it again, I'll kill you. Well, he'd said, I didn't do shit to you. With that, Cher was persona non grata with the Muslims.

He couldn't pray with them. He couldn't even talk to them. As far as they were concerned, Cher was a total apostate. By then word had gotten out that on top of the steaming pile of shit, Cher was a pedophile. not just a clicker, someone who looked at pornographic pictures of children, but a toucher, the lowest of the low. One of the leaders of the Hispanic Pisces gang, a fellow soccer player, asked Cher directly if he had committed a sex crime,

because it really does matter to the prison community. Cher said, it's very complicated. The gangbanger cut him off and he was not allowed to ever play soccer again. said Cher. When the gangbanger was no longer with an ear shot, Cher couldn't help, adding, I don't care about their soccer. I fuck them all. I fuck their mothers. I will shove my fist up their asses. Okay, Cher, you be you. The cold, hard truth was that Cher had serious mental problems. His mental problems were becoming our mental

problems. To sit on our hands and do nothing seemed, well, it seemed insane. but taking action might put me at odds with prison culture. I went to my buddy Mark's room. I needed a second opinion, and Mark was always great about giving me level-headed advice. I asked him this, if I tell the chief psychologist that shares nuts, that he's depressed and potentially violent,

does that make me a rat? Yes, said Mark, stay away from it. That was not the answer that I wanted to hear. But Mark said, you're always talking about your CIA rules. Why don't you just do what you need to do to protect yourself? Yes, that was the way out of trouble. Go back to being a spy rather than a prisoner playing by spy rules.

If stability, remember, if stability is not to your benefit, chaos is your friend. Got a problem? Solve it with a dirty trick. All right then. My mission was this. get shared to check himself into the shoe where he would be out of our hair and where he would get much closer psychological observation.

I wasn't going to win any nice guy awards doing this and I admit that the whole thing makes me look bad but the mission was the mission and we could not live with this monster any longer. The first thing I did was to crush up an entire sleeve of saltine crackers and spread them all over Cher's bed under the sheet when he was outside walking the track. When he returned to the room and saw the crumbs on his bed, he shouted,

Fucking pieces of shit! I eased next to him. Very empathetic. Cher, I said. Obviously, you have enemies. This harassment is going to continue. Maybe you should just check yourself into the shoe. It's quiet down there, and nobody's going to bother you. Frank jumped into the chorus.

Listen to him, Cher, he said. This is only going to get worse. just go to the shoe. Shire shouted at me, I fuck their shoe. I am not a fan of blasphemers. By which he meant, of course, the Sunni Muslims. I am Shere Maulani, follower of Ali,

follower of Hussein. I will give my life to kill the enemies of Islam. And then he beat his breast with his fist for a few minutes. So that plan didn't work. The next day I mentioned to Joey. Remember, Joey was one of the Italians who lived across the hall. that we were facing a challenge in our room. I told Joey how badly we wanted this guy in the shoe,

but that it was too risky for us to do things to him ourselves. It would be much better if things just sort of happened while everybody in the room was outside exercising. We knew from a friendly CO that the nearby security camera did not work. So Joey said he would take care of it. All the rest of us went outside except for Joey. When we all returned to the room, there was Joey's handiwork. He had broken into Sherr's locker.

He had stolen ten bags of mackerel. He had taken a pair of scissors and he cut the pockets out of Cher's pants and disappeared his prayer beads. Joey told us later that he fleshed the prayer beads down the toilet. Moments after we entered the room, Sher arrived with the CO. Look what they did to me, he shouted. I demand that you check the security tape. Buddy, the CEO responded. The cameras aren't for you.

They're for us. If you have a problem with somebody, you deal with it. Cher tried to argue, but the CO already bored, just moved on with his day. With Cher's rage growing like a lava plume, I told him again to check into the shoe. Frank piled on, just go to the shoe. But Cher was having none of it. I will feed them their own balls. The next day, Cher hired another Muslim pedophile, a Roma.

we used to use the now disfavored term gypsy from Cleveland to keep an eye on our room. He paid the Roma by having his wife transfer money into the kid's account to buy a radio and an MP3 player, strictly against the rules and punishable, of course, by confinement in the shoe. If Cher was going to zig, I was going to zag in response. I went up to the Roma and I demanded to know why he was hanging around our room. I'm just looking for share, he said. Like that was good enough. So, time to shut this down. I said, pedophiles can't have visitors in our room.

I told him pointedly, get lost before I do something. I'm going to regret later. The Roma understood, and he left immediately. Joey wanted to move quickly, but I called him off. I said, Joey, we've heated up the area, using a phrase from my CIA surveillance training. I said, let's let a week pass. before we move on him again.

Besides, I can try to convince him in the meantime to go to the shoe. Yet again, though, the shoe conversation was a non-starter. Share wasn't going anywhere. And a week passed. And Joey asked me what I wanted him to do. Joey, I said, I don't care what you do. But I want you to have some fun with it, whatever it is. Two hours later, we got back to the room after walking the track.

A familiar scene confronted us. Share in front of his bed complaining loudly to the same CO as before. But this time, the offending thing in Cher's bed wasn't crumbs. This time, the thing driving Cher Nuts was a drawing made by Joey using a sharpy permanent marker of an erect cock and balls, permanently marking Cher's bed sheet. I said, Cher, this is out of hand. Whoever your enemy is, make peace with him. Beard was not in on the conspiracy and he exploded its share. Do you know what this means?

Beard shouted at him. It means somebody is coming into our room when we're not here. Our room is getting disrespected because you have enemies. Em this shit or go to the shoe. The CEO offered the same amount of encouragement as before, which was none. He walked away, just smiling. Words spread around the unit like wildfire that somebody had humiliated. share. He in turn blamed

everybody, the Hispanics because they'd thrown him off the soccer team. He blamed the blacks he'd insulted. He blamed the Muslims. He confided in Frank, of all people, that the only thing worse would have been if the perpetrator had called him

an asshole. He said, there is nothing worse than the human asshole. He was giving us deeper insight into his psyche. He added this. He said, Asholes are the most disgusting things imaginable. Well, as any good spy can tell you,

some people just don't know when to shut up. A few uneventful days passed, Cher was a nervous wreck, in part because he still didn't know who exactly his enemies were. He had threatened to stay in the room 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to, quote, catch and kill, unquote, his tormentor.

That lasted for one day. Things then got quiet again for the better part of a week. That should have made Cher even more nervous. We all went to dinner one night, and then we went outside to walk the track. At 6.30, Frank, Joey, and I ran into our friend Doc Grievous. He said, there's a present waiting for you in your room. Well, that got us moving. We headed back to the room.

Curious as hell what Doc could have meant. We arrived just about when Cher arrived. Scher's prayer rug was opened and turned upside down and another large erect cock decorated it. But this one had writing above it. It said, asshole you are. And then it was signed Yoda. Cher physically shook.

He was so angry. He tore off the underside of the rug and threw it away. He wanted to go to the CO. again. Don't, I told him. It'll just make you more of a rat. Fuck you, he shouted back at me. I showed it, I, I then shouted back at him. You're a rat. You're a child molester. You're always talking about who you want to fuck up the ass. Fuck you, I said. Get out of here and go to the shoe. Of course, Cher did run right back to the CO again, who told him again that there was nothing he could do. Share was even further in sense now, but he went about his business,

muttering to himself and praying for the rest of the night. He didn't sleep at all. In the morning, he refused to speak to any of us. He went to breakfast and then up to the library for his pre-GED class. I forgot to mention that Cher read at a third grade level. Frank and I sat in the room together, just the two of us. I said, Frank, I think I can push him over the edge today. that's when I rubbed the sliced pork pepperoni that I had gotten from the commissary under shares pillow. It was a terrible, culturally insensitive thing to do. But spies, don't forget, have sociopathic tendencies. In pursuit of a higher goal, we willingly navigate the gray that hangs between the black and the white.

And there was very much a higher goal at play. if I was going to have to bring the spy and me forward while sending the prisoner on his way, so be it. It's not like I was going to kill the guy. I just put some pork under his pillow. Cher ran to the cops to complain, but they were well past giving a shit, which made him even angrier.

A crowd then began to form around him as he shouted how this person and that person had done all of these different things to him. Now, he wasn't wrong, of course. doing these things to him. But now that he was on the brink, we owed it to ourselves to finish the job. Rather, I owed it. I was probably the one person who could do it. As the crowd continued growing, I stepped forward and I shouted, you're the one doing this to yourself for attention. We're tired of all your bullshit. We're tired of you. Just get out. Share had Zee.

zeroed in on the lead. I'm doing it to myself. I said, aha, so the truth comes out. You're doing it to yourself. Share and his mind just reeled. And he screamed, I will fuck you all. I will kill you all. I'm not afraid of your prison. I am not afraid of death. I am not afraid of your government. You created al-Qaeda. I fuck al-Qaeda. I fuck the Taliban. As he continued to rant like a crazy person, now completely unhinged, I ran to the unit manager's office. It was his last day on the job before transferring to Washington. He was just about ready to leave the office. I said, Cher's gone nuts, ruining his exit.

I think he needs psych attention. A second later over the PA system, I heard, Sher Malani, report to the unit manager's office. Well, share refused to go to the office. So the unit manager now aching to just leave his job behind for good, sent a couple of COs who cuffed Cher's one arm to his waist and hauled him away. Frank and I watched him go. Thank God that worked, said Frank.

If it hadn't, I was going to poop in his boots. A few weeks later, a guy in the next room came back from the shoe. I asked him if he had encountered Cher down there. He had, and he said Cher was having a rough tongue. He was kicking the cell door all the time and shouting, I fuck you, I fuck your mother. That just pissed off the cops who would then kick in the door when Cher was asleep. They would wake him up and say,

We thought you liked to kick the door, you piece of shit. Look, prison is a hard place to be angry. And yet it's the easiest. I had thought when I got there that I'd be leaving the spying world behind. It turned out that I was diving even more deeply into it. During the latter part of my state, Loretto, I was asked to teach a class on how to build a small business for inmates preparing to go home soon. As the class began, we went around the room and I asked everyone to talk about what they wanted to do when they got home.

One guy said, I'm a welder, so I'll probably go back into welding. The guy next to him had a heating and air conditioning company. he too was going to go back to what he knew. There was an auto mechanic who wanted to open his own repair shop and there was a guy who wanted to be a rap mogul. Not a rapper. He wanted to be a mogul. He didn't know how to rap, but he wanted to be like P. Diddy.

So I asked him, how does one become a rap mogul like P. Diddy? He said, first you write a hit rap song, then you play it in the strip clubs in Atlanta, then it gets onto the radio because the strippers use it. as their official song, then you make millions of dollars from it. So that was a man with a plan. I asked the other prisoner who was there what he wanted to do. He said, I want to create a business called the Adventure Club.

I'll take boys between the ages of like nine and 13 out into the woods for weekends. We can go hiking and camping. They can link their Facebook pages to mine and we can stay in touch that way. I said, do you mind if I ask you what your crime was? He said, well, child molestation. Later in the day, I went to see the counselor who had asked me to teach the class. I told him about the peto who wanted to open a business where he would take young boys into the woods for the weekend. I said, I think we should report him.

The counselor looked at me, nobody's going to take boys into the woods. They're all going to end up selling drugs or going into food service. Now get the fuck out of my office. The class was not renewed for a second session. We, however, will be back for more. Until then, thank you for listening and for liking, rating, reviewing, and commenting on the podcast. 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.