John Kiriakou's Dead Drop - S2E5 The Abyss

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

THE BLURB: Frederich Nietsche warned us about staring into the abyss and becoming the monster we most feared. He could have been talking about being in prison. Or being a spy. In this episode, John tells how he increasingly relied on the rules of spying to navitage prison life. But, in becoming a monster in order to survive, the question becomes: when John's sentence ends, will he be able to separate himself from the monster - or will the monster he had to become follow him into the outside worldl?SHOW NOTESIf you're enjoying Dead Drop, please check out our other podcasts at Costard & Touchstone! Your next podcast binge is just a click away! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast, it's a Costerton Touchstone production. Frederick Nietzsche wrote, Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. He could easily have been writing about life inside prison. He could have been talking about life as a spy, too. Prisoners and spies both need to adapt to survive. But adaptation comes with very real risk.

What if, per Nietzsche, the thing you're adapting into is a monster? It's not as if there's much of a choice in prison. There's no room for anything soft. Just like in spying, soft equals lost focus. Lost focus equals terrible things happening. To survive in prison, I would have to go as dark as required. The question would be, once I got to whatever that darkest adaptation was, would I still be able to find my way back?

Would that guy even still exist? That's why having rules was good. They defined where all the lines were. Having rules meant I could measure myself to measure how and how much being in prison was changing me. I would not be the first person changed by prison and not for the better. John Dillinger was arguably the most famous criminal,

the most famous outlaw of the 20th century, born and raised outside of Indianapolis, Indiana. His father was very worried about him. His father knew that Dillinger was bullying other children. He knew that Dillinger was involved in petty crime, and he moved him to a rural village just to get him out of that element. Well, it was in that rural village. Then he met somebody in his early 20s who convinced the younger John Dillinger that a life of crime was okay. It was something to be sought. This year, young man and Dillinger robbed a local general store. Dillinger went in with a gun and with a sock full of bolts. He hit the proprietor with that sock full of bolts and he waved the gun around but he

never used it. Dillinger's father then went to the owner of the store and begged the man's forgiveness. To his credit, he forgave John Dillinger for robbing him. Dillinger, of course, was arrested when on trial, was found guilty. But the store owner said he was a young man, he was only 17, and he deserved leniency. Instead, the judge gave him 10 to 20 years at hard labor. When Dillinger finally got out of prison, 11 or 12 years later, he was a hardened criminal, and he was ready to start robbing banks. Dillinger was 17 years old, just a kid, when prison began shaping him.

I was a grown man with an entire career under my belt. I believed I could see the red line coming and I could respect it. As with any spy mission, though, once events begin happening, they can take on a life with their own. Could I dance with the devil and come out okay on the other side? Well, I guess I was going to find out. I'm John Kariaku. Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick. This is part five of our series Doing Time Like a Spy.

As always, we thank you sincerely for listening to the podcast. There are so many great stories out there and great podcasts telling those stories that we really are touched that you've made our podcast. Well, a bit of a hit. As I record this, we're actually number four on Apple's history chart, and the podcasts ahead of us are all brilliant, every one of them. That is utterly incomprehensible to me. That we're here is quite literally thanks to you.

What's helped especially is your enthusiasm for Dead Drop and all your likes, ratings, reviews, and comments, good, bad, or indifferent. It all helps. So please keep it up. Well, that is, we will if you will. As we've talked about here, if you are a rules-hating person, you're going to hate prison. But rules could be what save you, too. The spy rules I began applying to prison life absolutely were saving me on a daily basis,

saving my sanity at the very least. Rule number five was eliminate potential problems using dirty tricks. That doesn't sound very nice. But prison's not very nice. In the real world, this is probably not a rule that you want to implement every day. You sort of use it for special occasions. When you really, really need something or when someone means you harm and you need to neutralize them.

I remember the first time I was told about a dirty trick that was used in the field, rather than having used it myself, and I thought it was brilliant. There was a terrorist group that had caused dire harm to the United States. This was back in the 1970s. We could not get to the members of this terrorist group because they were in, physically, in a rogue country that protected them. And this was before the days of guided missile, and smart drones and pinpoint accuracy on targeting.

We came up with this plan. We would wait until one member of this terrorist group traveled to a country that we had access to. And sure enough, everybody travels. Sure enough, he did travel to Western Europe, and we approached him. We did it this way. Very gently, the case officer said,

oh, Muhammad, I'm so glad I ran into you. I'm from the CIA in Washington. We were talking to your colleague, Abdullah, the other member of your terrorist group, we've been working with Abdullah for years. He told us that you would be a good guy to talk to, and he told us that you were coming here. So we thought we would just kind of bend to you and have a conversation. Let us take you to dinner.

Of course, he runs screaming from the room. What he does also is he goes back home and he murders Abdullah. And then we wait until Rashid comes out and we say, We were talking to Muhammad the last time he was here in Vienna, London, wherever. He told us about Abdullah. Abdullah was a true believer, but he works with us, and he thought it would be good if you would work with us. So then Rashid goes back and kills Muhammad. We got to the point where literally all of them had murdered one another, and the only one that was left was the founder of the group.

He came under suspicion by the leader of the country that he was. in. Why are all his people dying? They're all killing each other. Something's up. He probably means me harm and the leader of the country killed the final guy. And that group no longer exists. CIA didn't have to kill anybody. CIA didn't even have access to anybody. We got them to kill each other. With that in mind, I encountered a problem in prison that in real life probably would not have bothered me. In prison, it bothered me greatly. There was a prisoner whom I will call Wallace. Wallace was the biggest cry baby I ever met in my life. He would cry if his team would win at basketball. He would cry because he was so happy he had a visitor, like actually cry. He would cry

when nobody showed up to visit him. He would cry if a pretty song was on the radio. He was constantly crying. That was probably depression, but who cares? Everybody's depressed in prison. One of the reasons why he came to anybody's attention at all was that he had dated an A-list Hollywood star. This is a multiple Academy Award winner. Wallace was in People Magazine and Variety Magazine

and the Hollywood Reporter and TMZ and all these other Hollywood publications and websites. The problem was that he was just a con man. Every day from the minute he opened his eyes in the morning until the minute he closed them in the evening, he was talking. Ba-pa-pa-ba-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-ba-ba about all of his powerful, famous, beautiful Hollywood friends and all the great famous Hollywood parties that he went to and how he owned multiple villas in the Mediterranean

and a yacht that was docked in Monte Carlo and we were all welcome to go on his yacht and we were all invited to go to his villas in Nice and in Ventimiglia, Italy, and just on and on and on. We knew none of that was true. He had dated this Hollywood star, yes, he had been in these magazines. We had all seen it. He had those receipts, but he was also a degenerate gambler, and he was bankrupt. He probably didn't own the multiple villas in the Mediterranean.

He didn't own the yacht that was docked in Monte Carlo. maybe he once had, maybe he had fantasized about it, but he was just a con man, a Ponzi schemer, and he finally got caught. So he went to prison on multiple fraud charges. In prison, he was placing bets with every bookie in the place. He lost most of those bets. Very quickly it got to the point where he had to borrow money from one loan shark to pay the other loan shark, and he got in deeper and deeper and deeper. And every once in a while, somebody would beat the hell out of him.

And he would start crying, and he would beg the rest of us for money just to cover him. Money in the form of bags of mackerel. Hey, can you spare 10 max? I really need 10 max. I'm going to get my ass kick. If I don't cough up 10 max, give me 20 max. If you have tunas, I'll take half of it in tuna. Tuna was more expensive.

In the commissary, they sold bags of chicken, bags of mackerel, and bags of tuna. When I say bags, I mean like a foil pouch. We called them bags of mac. They weren't really bags. They were foil pouches. The bag of chicken was in like spring water. The mac and the tuna was in oil. But mackerel is a very low quality fish.

It stinks to high oven. The only people who actually ate the mackerel were the guys who were really, really poor. Most of them were homeless on the outside. They committed a crime just so that they could spend the winter indoors, even if it was in prison. For whatever reason, a lot of the Mexicans, ate the mackerel. You could smell it from several cells down. It smelled so bad of low-quality fish. The only other ones that ate it were the kosher Jews because it was part of the kosher diet.

Everybody else just used it simply as currency. Wallace got to the point where he just couldn't pay all the loan sharks and the bookies. And we kept telling him, Wallace, check yourself into solitary. It's the only way you're going to protect yourself. You're going to get your ass kicked. you can't possibly pay back all this money. None of us believed him that he had any money. He didn't have any money. His dad was also in prison because his dad was a con man. His mom would come to visit him once every six months

and she would stay at this fleabag motel down the road from the prison. It's like, dude, if you have that much money, why is your mom not staying at the Weston in town or the Hilton or the Marriott? And you have her in this dump with bedbugs down the street from the prison that doesn't make any sense. And then he would cry because she was coming. Then he would cry when she would leave. Finally, I had had enough of his lies about wealth.

I had had enough of him crying over everything. I had enough of him begging for money every single day when I knew he was just going to bet on the next basketball game. So I said to one of the Italians, I'm going to fuck this guy up. Wallace had never done anything to me physically. It was just because I was sick and tired of hearing his, voice. In real life, I would never, ever do such a thing. Never. But you're confined in this small space

together and he just won't shut up. I said to the Italians, I'm going to fuck this guy up. One of the senior Italians said to me, are you out of your mind? You're going to go straight to solitary and you're not going to come out. And I said, I would never be so crude as to fuck him up with my own hands. They looked at me, perplexed. What are you talking about? I did several things. First, one of my cellmates was being released. He was going home. The day before you go home, first thing in the morning, your counselor, unit manager, whoever it happens to be, gives you one sheet of paper called a merry go round. Mary go round is very simply, your name and prisoner number at the top, and then a list of all the,

offices in the prison. And you have to go to each office and get signatures. You don't really have to get signatures. It's just to keep you busy on your last full day so you don't spend that day settling scores. In fact, on my last day, I just signed all of the offices myself. I just made up different signatures. Only morons don't realize that it's just make work. I said, Jose, can I borrow your merry-go-round? Just for an hour. I'll give you a Mac. He said, sure so I give him a Mac and he gives me his merry-go-round. I go up to the library, I make a photocopy. On the photocopy, I white out his name and his prisoner number and I make a clean photocopy. And then I go to a typewriter and I type in Wallace's name and his prisoner number.

And then I asked one of the guys in the laundry if he would steal me a laundry bag and I gave him a couple of Macs. So he steals me a laundry bag. I wait until 5 o'clock on Friday afternoon. and I put the laundry bag and the merry-go-round on Wallace's bed. So I'm sitting there with one of the Italians. 5.30, Wallace comes in. He was whistling. Hey, guys. Hey, Wallace, how you doing?

He walks over to his bed and he gasps. What? And he holds up the merry-go-round and the laundry bag, and he says, I'm going home. What? What do you mean? I'm going home. I won my appeal.

Oh, my God, Wallace. Nobody ever wins their appeals. I won. I knew I was innocent. I won my appeal. I'm going home. I have to call my lawyer. He runs to the phone bank. Well, even fancy New York lawyers go home by 530 or 6 on a Friday night. He goes to the unit manager's office. He left at three. The counselor left before that. It comes back. His mind is racing. And the Italian says, Wallace, we got to have a dinner for you. Sunday night. Let's get everybody together. we're going to celebrate your victory. He's like, oh my God, I can't believe it.

He starts crying. Then he starts going up and down the halls, telling everybody he won his appeal. He's going home. On Saturday, he gave away all of his possessions. Everything. Just gave it away to indigent prisoners. On Sunday, we had a huge going away dinner for him. Pasta, chicken breast, and the whole nine yards.

The Italians really did it. Monday morning, we began walking with him to R&D, receiving and discharge, intake and out processing. Now, I got the rest of the story from the cop in R&D. He was one of the two or three friendly cops toward me in the entire prison. He said that Wallace went in and handed him the merry-go-round. The cop said, who are you? I'm Wallace. What are you doing here?

I'm going home. The cop looks at the merry-go-round. he tells him, turn around, you're under arrest. For what? Attempted escape and cuffs him. He bursts into tears. They take him to solitary. He's in solitary for six weeks.

And then they transfer him to another prison, one in New Jersey. I said to the Italians, I thought he would never shut his fucking mouth. One of the Italians, a made man from New York, he said to me, that was cold even by our standards. I said to him, sometimes it's best to use dirty tricks, especially when it's to save your own sanity. Rule number six is the human body can endure much more than the brain says it can. Now, at the CIA, that rule was actually that the human body can endure much more punishment

than the brain says it can. I adapted it to prison life. At the CIA, what this meant was, once, twice, maybe more than twice, over the course of your career, you're going to get into a fistfight, and you're going to get hurt. Most of us worry unnecessarily about fistfights.

Getting punched in the face hurts, but it only hurts for a minute, and then it doesn't hurt anymore. The worry about being punched in the face is far more difficult than the actual punch. I've been punched in the face. This was when I was at the agency. And to tell you the truth, with the chemical dump that your body initiates when a fight starts,

you don't even feel it. I noticed later in the evening that my cheek was a little bit sore. No big deal. I took a Tylenol. That was the day that the guy called my wife a whore and I beat him into a coma. He got one punch in and he got me in the cheek. No big deal. I didn't even feel it.

broke my hand on his face. That hurt more. I still don't have full use at my hand. But in prison, I adapted this rule. The human body can endure much more than the brain says it can. And I included in that not just the punch in the face. But depression, everybody is depressed in prison. I remember walking out to the yard with Dave. And there was an African-American prisoner walking a few feet in front of me. I heard him say to the guy that he was walking with, I have been sleeping in the same bunk every night for the last 10 years. And I'm going to stay in that same bunk every night for the next 10 years. And I remember thinking, my God, there but for the grace of God go I.

I have no right to complain about my lousy, measly 23 months. I have no idea what this guy did. It was probably a drug charge. We have draconian sentences in this country. for drug charges, but 20 years in the same steel bunk with a mattress that is as thin as a bath towel. But we take it. We get depressed and we take it. What you do to fight it is you try to eat right, you exercise every day and you try to distract yourself. For me, that began as reading books. I'm a voracious reader anyway. In that short 23 months,

months, I read well over a hundred books. And for me also, it was writing. I made a promise that very first day in prison that I would respond to everybody who wrote to me. I wrote 7,000 letters to 675 different people. And then I got it into my head that maybe I'll write a book. It started off as a joke. It became doing time like a spy, how the CIA taught me to survive and thrive in prison, and it won two literary awards. I wrote that book. in long hand on legal pads, one word at a time. 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 Costard 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. One of the many, many scams, side hustles that prisoners have is on Sunday morning at 8 a.m.,

If you want to see a movie at any point over the next week, you have to run to the library. And align forms. And you can book a two-hour window in which you can watch a movie. Nobody wants to get up on a Sunday morning and run to the library. So you just bribe the guy who keeps the list for the movies. They have these individual little viewing booths. You can take a movie out of the library. you're allowed two hours with a DVD player and you can sit there.

It's like an individual study desk in a university library. There are some movies they don't want you to see. They care far less about movies than they care about music. I'll tell you a funny story. You can buy an MP3 player in the commissary for, I think it's $30. It's just a cheap Walmart MP3 player generic. not even worth $30. And then you can download music on the prison intranet for 99 cents.

So here's me. I'm downloading Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and Arlo Guthrie and then the Doobie brothers and the Eagles and the Beatles and stuff like that. I remember having to wait for two days because I downloaded a song from the new Christie minstrels and they had to like search through their data banks for it. For most of these guys, it was like a badge of honor to be the first or among the first to download the latest rap from Lil, whatever, who I never heard of. Invariably, days later, they would say that the song you downloaded was deemed unfit for the prison community. Because it says like fuck the police or fuck the man or blow up the police station or, you know, fuck the FBI.

and so they withdraw it and they refund your 99 cents. It was like a joke. The new songs would hit on Monday and they would be withdrawn on Thursday. Somebody finally listened to the lyrics. A white guy at the Bureau of Prisons finally forced himself through the latest rap and said, oh no, no, no, this is inappropriate. It was kind of the same thing with movies. Now, with the movies, the ones that were available were the ones that were donated.

Right? Nobody was out there shopping for movies at Target to send to the prison. Whatever happened to be donated was what you got. There was one box set of movies that I watched over and over and over again, and it was a collection of film noir from the 40s and 50s. They didn't have anybody of any import in them. No stars. I think Fred McMurray was in one. It was real escapism for me.

To be in 1948 Los Angeles and to watch, watch this go down. The guy is framed for murder and he runs to Mexico and gets caught right at the border. It was great. This is a long way of saying there was one week where the guy that I would pay to Max to reserve my movie time, he was out sick. And so I had to go stand in line. Dave woke me up. Come on, we got to run up to the library and book our times. So I go up there and there's a large, muscular black guy right in front of us. He got there a second before we did. And he says, to Dave, would you watch my space? Dave said, sure. Well, the guy then just goes to the cafeteria and has breakfast. Well, I would love to have had breakfast. But it's either breakfast or stand in line for the movies.

He comes back after breakfast, smelling of breakfast gets back in line. Dave's like, where the fuck were you? He said, I went to breakfast. Dave flipped his lid. And I kept saying, very softly, Back off, Dave. Back off Dave. It's not worth fighting. He's not going to even ask for the same movies you're going to ask for. He's probably never heard of the same movies you're going to ask for. But Dave wanted to go to the mat over this. And I kept telling him, back off, back off. And finally the guy sets a stance. And as soon as he set his stance and balled up his fists, I was like, well, Dave's not listening to me. And then Dave took one right to the face. hard enough that it knocked him down.

I put out my hand, I pulled him up, and the guy's like, fuck you, fuck you, motherfucker. I told Dave, just stop. You're going to end up in solitary. Finally, one of the cops comes out of the library. What the fuck's going on out here? Nothing. Somebody told the joke. Everybody got loud for a second.

And the cop just goes back in the library. Dave bitched about it for the entire day. And I said, Dave, does your face hurt? Not really. then shut the fuck up. Stop worrying about it. It's over. Did the guy take your movies?

No, he didn't take your movies. So just stop. Remember, the human body can endure much more than the brain says it can. Instead of moving on to Rule 7, I want to revisit Rule 5 with a few tweaks and upgrades. This turned out to be one of the most serious challenges I faced in prison. A new prisoner arrived

on the bus one Thursday. He was about my age, maybe a year or two younger, small, thin, mostly bald. He had heard that I was in a good room. He had heard that I had an empty bed and he wanted to move in. Now, this was clearly an educated guy. I said, well, what's your name? Ken Schaefer. Tell me about yourself, Ken. I got a degree at the University of Pennsylvania, which is an Ivy League school, of course. and I got a law degree at Harvard. What the fuck are you doing here? Well, I ended up heading up my law firm's Moscow office. There were some M&A mergers and acquisitions irregularities.

One thing led to the other. I had to leave Russia. The Russians insisted that I'd be prosecuted. The Americans ended up prosecuting me, and I got some time. I said that sucks. Especially an attorney who was educated at Penn and Harvard. I said, well, let me talk to the guys in my room and I'll get back to you. Well, everybody knows you can't trust a single word that anybody says in the prison, even if he went to Penn and Harvard.

I went straight to the law library, and I looked him up. It was true that he had graduated from Penn and Harvard Law. It was true that he headed his law firm's Moscow office. It was true that he was an attorney working in mergers and acquisitions. What he didn't tell me was that he was a gay pedophile who was sentenced to 20 years for the serial rape of a boy from the ages of 12 to 15. The details in this case were sickening. Ken had a real love of the ballet. He knew more about the ballet than anybody else I've ever known in my life.

And he would go to the Bolshoi ballet all. the time. The Bolshoi ballet has these feeder schools where they train children starting about the age of 10 until they become 15, 16 years old and they become actual ballerinas and ballet dancers in the proper Bolshoi. Everybody in Moscow in the ballet community knew that Ken had money. One of the feeder schools head of school, a woman, went to him and said, there's a boy from Kazakhstan. He's a a prodigy, a once-in-a-lifetime kind of special ballet prodigy, but his parents are dirt poor, and they can't afford his tuition to go to the ballet school. They invited Ken to watch the kid dance, like a tryout. Well, one of the things that they do in Russia, and it's a cultural thing,

nothing is meant by it. When children try out for ballet, they do so in their underwear. And the idea is that you want to be able to see their muscle tone to see if they can handle some of the more sophisticated jumps and pleiés and what have you. So the kid was 12 years old and Ken says, it's magic, it's incredible, he's a genius, I'll pay all of his expenses, but he has to live with me. He can sleep on my couch. and there's a lady across the hall from me. She can get him ready for school and cook his meals while I'm working, but he has to live with me. His parents were like, that doesn't really sound normal.

We want to meet the guy. So they came up from Kazakhstan and met Ken. The father later said he was a little creeped out, but this was the chance of a lifetime for their son. And so they agreed. The kid could live with him and sleep on the couch. But the father told his son, if this man does anything to you, you have to tell us immediately.

So the parents went back to Kazakhstan. The kid moved in. The very night that he moved in, Ken raped him. The kid was bleeding from the rectum and crying. And Ken told him that if he told anybody, he was going to kill his parents. parents. Because he was still bleeding, he told him to tell the school nurse if she asked that he had hemorrhoids. According to the court papers, Ken raped him as many as five nights a week and

began referring to him as his boyfriend, then his lover, then his husband. The kid's 12. He skipped the whole grooming part. He just went straight in for the kill. Well, this lasted. until the kid was 15, Ken gets transferred back to Philadelphia. Now he comes from a mainline family, right? Millions and millions of dollars, and they've donated major artworks to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and they're on the social register and real blue bloods.

Ken enrolls the kid in a local ballet school, and the kid immediately takes a shine to the daughter of the school's owner. Ken's mother goes to the ballet school and rips the owner a new one, shouting at her that she's standing in between Ken and the kid. And the school owner is like, are you out of your mind? He's a child. She calls the cops. And the cops talk to the boy and he said, no, nothing's happening. Nothing's happening. Nothing's happening. He was petrified. He remains in Philadelphia for three more years. turns 18, has a girlfriend, but is still having sex with Ken. Finally, he has a nervous breakdown

and he attempts suicide. He confesses to his girlfriend that Ken has been raping him since he was 12 for the last six years. She says you should sue him. They have a lot of money and you should sue him and you can start a new life in the United States. The kid finds a lawyer who's willing to take the case on contingency, they file a lawsuit in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The court clerk sees this and says, why is this a civil suit? This is a criminal case. He's been raping this little boy for six years. The court clerk calls the FBI, they grab Ken. Ken's parents have the, whatever it is, $250,000 for bail. Ken happens to be Jewish. As soon as he gets to gets out of jail straight to Israel because Israel doesn't extradite Jews and it doesn't matter

what they're accused of doing. Ken is living fat and happy in Israel. The parents are sending money so he lacks for nothing and the FBI has to try to figure out a way to get him because the Israelis are not going to turn him over. They came up with an ingenious plan. They took out an ad in all the Israeli newspapers, English language newspapers, saying that there was going to be a once-in-a-lifetime ballet extravaganza of all children in Cyprus. One night only, it's never going to happen again.

The greatest child ballerinas and ballet dancers in the world are all gathering in Lima Sol on this one night. Ken is so fucking arrogant that he's. he buys a ticket, figuring, I'll just slip into Cyprus for a few hours and then fly right back out. There's no ballet extravaganza. It's all made up. And Interpol is waiting for him at the airport. And they grabbed him and they extradited him from Cyprus. He's extradited back to the United States. He's denied bail. The kid hires an attorney from eastern Pennsylvania. The attorney came to the prison to interview me. That's a different story. But he hires this attorney.

A-list attorney. The attorney happens to be an amateur astrophotographer. He has a camera that he attaches to a very high-power telescope and he takes photos of nebulae and planets and whatever galaxies. There happens to be a Jewish school across the street from his home in the Philly suburbs. There's a group of kids from the school who are on a day trip somewhere and the bus comes home late. It comes back to the school late. The attorney's in his front yard looking at the stars. The kids see him. They all run over there. Hey, can we look in your telescope, mister? Of course you can. He shows them whatever it is he's looking at. Jupiter with all of its moons. It's all very exciting. And the head of school says, please let us repay your kindness for showing the kids,

you know, these planets. They're all so excited. They all want to be astronomers now. We're going on a trip to Israel. We would love it if you would join us on the trip to Israel. Now, the lawyer also happens to be Jewish. And he says, oh my gosh, you know what? I've never been to Israel. They said all expenses paid. We'd love to take you. You can act as a chaperone. He goes to Israel. Next thing you know, he gets an invitation to meet with the Minister of Education. So he goes to the Ministry of Education in Jerusalem. This is a bizarre story, you know. He goes to the Ministry of Education, and the minister says, the head of the school told me about the kindness that you showed the students, and you showed them the planets in your telescope, and they're all excited,

could the state of Israel ask one favor of you, make this case against Ken Schaefer go away? And he said, you lured me all the way to Israel? What kind of power does this man's family have? He said, I will die before I let this case go away. He's a monster. And you should have recognized that he was a monster. He cut his trip short and went back to Philadelphia. And he said, it energized him to just nail Ken to the wall. Ken was charged with two counts of violating the Man Act,

which is transporting a person across state lines for the purpose of illicit sex. and he was charged with one count of whatever they're calling petter-assi these days, male-on-male sex with a child. One of the man-act cases was thrown out, but in the end he was convicted of the other two, and he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. So I confronted him, and I said, you fucking monster. M&A irregularities?

Seriously, you're smart enough to know that every fucking detail of your case is available to anybody who goes to the law librarian types in your name. You're not getting anywhere near my room. No, you're not rooming with me. You need a room with the other pedophiles, and you need to eat at the pedophile table. He took that as a direct challenge.

Ken thought he was smarter than I was. He was book smarter than I am, certainly. But this wasn't books, and he certainly didn't have the training that I had. He started his war against me by spreading rumors. But he underestimated how much I was liked by everybody in the prison. He must have known my story. But this was the thing about Ken.

He was so arrogant. He thought that he was so smart that nobody could do anything to him. I realized I was going to have a problem with him when two black guys came up to me. And I vaguely knew who these guys were. I couldn't remember their names. I would always say, hey, buddy, how you doing? Hey, big guy, how you doing? Whenever I can't remember somebody's name.

I vaguely remembered helping these guys out somehow. Like I wrote an appeal or I wrote a letter or I did something to help these guys when I first arrived there. And they were still very grateful. I didn't even remember them, but they were still grateful. So they came up to me and said, hey, John, there's this new guy. Schaefer? Yeah, he's a bad guy.

Yeah, he offered us money to fuck you up. To fuck me up? Yeah. But you've been good to us. and we wanted to tell you what was going on. He's out there like soliciting for somebody to fuck you up. I said, I appreciate the heads up. Thank you.

The same thing happened with the Hispanics. One of the guys from the Buracos came up to me, Mexican cartel guy. I had written his appeal. And he said, hey, this chomo came up to me, offered me $500. I said, $500. He said, he wanted me to lay you out. And I said, did he say why? He said, no, he said, you hate Jews.

and that you're anti-Semitic. I said, I hate Jews. What? Dude, I just wanted to give you heads up, that there's a guy gunned him for you. So I mentioned to Dave, I said, you know, much as I hate to do it, I'm going to have to be proactive about this.

I'm going to have to get him before he gets me. I decided to use the light touch at first. Why go straight to the nuclear option? I thought if I could put the fear of God in this guy and I scare him enough that he backs off, That's a victory for me. There was no scaring him off. The black shot collar for the entire prison was this guy named Ali.

And I said to him one day, half jokingly, not realizing he was the most powerful black guy in the entire prison. I said, you know, you say your name wrong. He goes, the fuck? Like that. I said, your name is, it's actually Ali, not Ali. The accent's on the first syllable. He said, the fuck you talking about. I said, I hear you introduce yourself as Ali, but that's not correct.

And I noticed that when you pray, here's how arrogant I am, that I'm just freely offering unsolicited advice to gangsters. I said, I noticed that when you pray, you just keep repeating Allahu Akbar over and over and over again. That's not the prayer. The prayer is, bismillah, Rahman Rahim. Al-Hmdhaw, al-Hmdala, Malik you're Medin. And the guy he was standing next to said to me, step back, Enward.

And I said, sorry, you're right. You're right. It's none of my business. And then Ali says, no, wait a minute. I want to hear what you have to say. Are you Muslim? No, but I studied Islam, and I studied Islam under one of the most important Islamic scholars on the planet, Sayyad Hussein Nasir. He says, let's sit down in the TV room.

So we sat down and we talked and we immediately became friends. I wrote his resume for him as he was being released. I wrote the text for his website. Everybody wants to make a website when they're getting out of his. of prison. They all want to be personal trainers or they want to be prison consultants. So I did that for him. As he was leaving, he gave me a big hug and he told me I never thought I would be friends with a white boy. I really never thought I'd be friends with a CIA white boy. You see, that's why I've never respected racial divisions. I said, I don't see you as black. I see you just as a guy.

I heard you on the phone talking to your kids. I've heard the love in your voice as you talk to your kids. You're a good man. You're a good father. There's no reason why you and I shouldn't be friends. So he came up to me. You know this Chomo Schaefer, he hired me to protect him because he thinks you're going to do something to him. I said, what's he paying you, Ali? 500 a month. His parents are wiring it to my wife. You know what? God bless. Take the money. Give it to your wife and your kids. it gives them a little boost. God knows his parents have it. He said, I just wanted you to know this guy's out for you. Dave, for whatever reason, took all of this very personally, as if it was happening to him. And Dave says, we need to get him before he gets us. What's this us? He's not after you,

and I'm figuring this out. I'll work it out. Dave says, I'm going to plant a shank in his stuff. Now, Ken was up in South Two unit, which was known as a bastion for pedophiles. But he happened to be roommates with Art, my friend Art Rachel. Dave is like, Art, you got to do surveillance for us. Does he leave his locker unlocked? And he said, never. He's very concerned about his safety and his own security. That locker is never unlocked. When he does unlock it to pull something out, he'll immediately close it and lock it again. You're not going to be able to get into the locker to plan a shank. So I said to Dave, I don't want any part of this. I'm going home and at the time I thought it was 10 months. I don't want any part of this. I'm not spending

my remaining time here in solitary. I'm not allowing them to transfer me to a medium security prison. I know I can handle this guy without planting shanks. Then Ken started dropping anonymous notes to the COs. They were wholly unconvincing. He would write the notes in what he thought were ibonics. He would write on the note, yo, motherfuckas, Kiriaku, which he would always spell correctly, the CIA guy, he's doing this shit that ain't right. And then he would put it in the lieutenant's office. Come on, man, what are you doing? Dave made two shanks. He broke open a disposable razor and made a slashing shank. And then he got the spring from an unused bed. unused mattress and he worked hard to uncoil it and to make it a stabbing shank. He waited until

Ken went out to the yard, which was unusual. Most pedophiles were too scared to go out into the yard, but he went out there and exercised. While he was out in the yard, Dave went up to the room and planted the shanks underneath the lockers. Lockers on little feet and he taped them underneath the locker. Well, the cops aren't stupid. They weren't hired yesterday. Okay, they could have been his. They were probably planted because literally anybody can walk up there. So let's look at the security cameras and see who went up there recently, who doesn't live in South 2 unit? There's Dave.

And they know that Dave is friends with Art and John. They grab Art, they grab Dave, they grab Ken, they put all three of them in solitary. They're in there for about six weeks, which was sort of the standard. Art was sent to a prison in Illinois somewhere. Dave was sent to a prison in Ohio, and Ken was sent to a prison in New Jersey. It broke up the group. And then, of course, they call me to the lieutenant's office.

They get right in my face. One of them shouts, The only reason you weren't on that bus to another prison is because we didn't see you on the cameras going up to South 2. South 2? It's all pedophiles up there. I don't go up to South 2. What are you out of your minds?

And then that was it. They knew they couldn't touch me. But in the end, it got rid of Ken. And that made the rest of my time at Loretto that much easier. In the next episode, the pen is mightier than the sword. Mightier than a bunch of corrupt prison officials anyway. Thanks, as always, for listening. And I really mean it.

Every time you listen, you like, you review, you share, you comment, it helps us. It helps us with the algorithm. and it makes us more and more popular and accessible to a broader audience. So thank you very much. Until next time, I'm John Curiaco. Dead Drop is written by John Curiaku and Alan Katz. Costard and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast, and John Kiriaku, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers.

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