John Kiriakou's Dead Drop - S2E7 Letters From Loretto

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

THE BLURB: John arrived at Loretto Federal Prison having promised to write about his experiences for various independent news media outlets. He had no idea just how powerful that connection - John's prison experiences and the news media - would prove. In this episode, John tells the story of how his prison blog - "Letters From Loretto" - became a national sensation and an ever-more-damning indictment of the corruption inside our prisons and prison system. SHOW NOTESFor more great podcasts, visit us at Costard & Touchstone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast, it's a Costerton Touchstone production. I've told you about letters from Loretto in previous episodes. That was the blog I started at Loretto and smuggled out, so to speak, to my lawyers for publication via the legal pouch. I had decided prior to arriving at Loretto to write about my experiences there. And why wouldn't I? I was a writer. Getting sent to prison rather than to the work camp I'd anticipated definitely added some urgency to my mission. I don't know how corrupt it was across the street at the work camp.

but I doubt it held a candle to the corruption and the general madness I was now facing for the next 30 months, reducible to 23. As I said in my first letter from Loretto dated May 20th, 2013, quote, my reputation preceded me and a rumor got started that I was a CIA hitman, unquote. While my story motivated a few people to challenge me, especially the COs, most people, I believe, got caught up in the CIA guy mantra. What did it even mean to most of the people at Lerner? whether inmates or staff.

Really, think about it. What do most people know about the CIA, about spying in general, aside from what they've seen in a James Bond movie? What did anyone at Loretto know about the life I had led up until the moment I became part of its twisted, depressive community? I had shared an elevator with the President of the United States

who had just been chewed out by his wife. I had helped America fight back against those who attacked it on 9-11, and I blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program. What had any of the U.S. of these humps done. I'll end up to a fair amount of righteous indignation here. In that first post, I told the stories I've told so far in this season of the podcast about my arrival

and the process of settling into this strange new environment. In the last episode, I told you how I relayed my handwritten posts to my attorneys and a little bit about the dissemination process from there. In this episode, I'm going to dial in a little deeper. That's into my letters from Loretto. They gained me considerable leverage within the prison. I could get my posts out and the prison authorities couldn't stop me.

But letters from Loretto had impacts far beyond Loretto's concertina wire. I'm John Kirooku, and this is Dead Drop, doing time like a spy, Part 7, letters from Loretto. As always, we thank you for listening and especially for liking, commenting on, reviewing, rating, or sharing the podcast. It really does make a difference. Being a prisoner means having little to no voice in what happens to you. Little to no voice in what happens to your health while you're in custody. I had only been at Loretta for a week when I had my first exposure to health services. That's what the medical unit had the nerve to call itself.

They had nothing to do with either health or services. Prison officials are compelled by law to provide prisoners with adequate medical care. The word adequate, though, is tricky. The prison authorities don't believe prisoners are ever sick or injured. They're malingering. and there's actually a $2 fine for that. But when a prisoner goes to sick call repeatedly to report the very same problem,

prison authorities are obligated to respond. The courts have found that, quote, a serious medical need, unquote, is present whenever the failure to treat a prisoner's condition, quote, could result in further significant injury or the unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain if not treated, unquote. The courts have sided with prisoners agreeing that pain can constitute a,

serious medical need, even if the failure to treat it does not make the condition worse. When a prisoner is willing to pay the $2 copay, designed to keep the malingerers out of the medical unit's sick call line, it means they're not malingering. June 21st, 2013. Hello again from the Federal Correctional Institution at Loretto, Pennsylvania. First, I wanted to thank everybody for the interest in my first letter. We had more than one million hits. Second, thank you for the more than 200 letters I've received since the last letter

was published. I'm answering each of them, but sending them out is a slow process because I have to use mailing labels, and we're only allowed to print five a day. Third, thank you very much for your very generous contributions to my family. I've told several of you that I could only make it through this nightmare because of friends and supporters like you, and I mean it. Health care is a major topic of debate in the national press, especially now that the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare is law. Health care is also a major topic of conversation and debate here at Loretto, although we prisoners don't have much authority to change the status quo. Loretto is considered to be a level two medical facility. That is, it's supposed to be equipped with a medical unit that can handle

prisoners with chronic problems like diabetes, emphysema, and other issues. In fact, the medical unit is well equipped and has its own x-ray facilities, a dental clinic, and a lab. There's an osteopath in charge and several physician's assistants or PAs from the U.S. Public Health Service on staff. But that's not to say that all is well in Loretto's medical unit. Just before I arrived here, prisoner Cameron Douglas, the son of actor Michael Douglas, had a mishap while playing handball. He injured his leg and went to the medical unit where he was told that he had a sprained knee and was given ibuprofen. After suffering with intense pain for two weeks, complaining all the while, he finally could not get out of bed and the warden ordered that he be taken to a local hospital.

An x-ray showed that Douglas had a broken femur, a condition that if left untreated could lead to death. The hospital also found a large blood clot in the leg as well as a broken finger. Douglas underwent surgery to repair the broken bones and to relieve the dangerous clot. The Douglas family has filed a lawsuit against the Bureau of Prisons, which is still pending. I've had my own personal experience with the medical unit. Two weeks after my arrival, I dislocated my left pinky finger while exercising. I popped it back into place, but having broken bones in the past, I knew the finger was also broken, so I went over to medical. Sick call appointments are only accepted between 6 a.m. and 6.15 a.m., but I went directly to the evening pill line attendant and told him that I had an emergency.

He wrapped the finger and told me to see the PA in the morning. I returned to medical in the morning with my entire left hand swollen, my finger doubled in size, and I told my PA that I was certain it was broken. No, the PA said, it's just jammed. He put it in a splint despite my request for an x-ray, which he denied. He told me to come back in a week, and then he gave me some ibuprofen. Even with the ibuprofen, the swelling and pain did not improve. Again, I asked for an x-ray.

Finally, 10 days after the injury, the PA agreed to it. The x-ray found that a tendon had snapped off at the center knuckle, pulling a chunk of bone off with it, broken. just like I had said. The PA rewrapped it in another splint and said he would make arrangements to send me to an orthopedic specialist nearby. In the meantime, he said, keep it wrapped.

Eight days later and 18 days after the injury, I heard that dreaded announcement, Kiriaku, report to the lieutenant's office. I walked to the office and was told that I was going for an outside medical consultation. First, I was escorted to the medical unit where I was strip searched and given brown pants, a brown t-shirt,

a pair of underwear, a pair of socks, and a pair of slippers. The CO took my clothes and watched them in a plastic bag that he locked in the unit. I was then handcuffed and shackled around my ankles. A chain was placed around my waist, which connected to my handcuffs and my leg irons. Then a black steel box about the size of a computer hard drive was locked over the handcuffs so the lock could not be picked. Remember, I'm a dangerous criminal. If I had been in a camp, where I was supposed to be, an inmate drive,

would have simply dropped me off at the doctor's office and then picked me up afterward. But a nameless, faceless bureaucrat in the Bureau of Prisons decided that I was a threat to public safety. Now completely shackled, the CEO handed me a form and told me to sign it. It was a list of rules for the trip to the doctor, including that I promised not to escape and that if I do try to escape, I understand that I would be shot. One rule in particular caught my eye. It said that for the duration of the trip, I was to call everybody sir. I said I wouldn't sign it.

I wouldn't try to escape, but respect is earned. I'm old enough to be the CO's father, yet he calls me Kiriaku. I said that I would call him CO, but I wasn't going to call him sir. Well, he said, he simply wouldn't take me to the doctor. Fine, I said. We stared at each other for a moment. Then the COs said, okay, forget it. So I took shackled baby steps to a waiting van with two COs in it,

and they drove me to the nearby doctor's office. At the office, the doctor looked at my x-rays and examined my finger. It's broken, he said. It's already started to heal. There's no point in re-breaking it and setting it because the resulting arthritis will be even more painful. He said to try to bend it, squeeze a small ball, and just come back in two weeks. Two weeks later, after complaining that I had not been able to see my PA since my visit to the doctor, the PA called me into his office. He said to just do what the doctor had told me to do, but that the prison would not pay for the follow-up ordered by the specialist. It was an unnecessary expense, the PA said. I've essentially

lost the use of my finger. It's swollen, painful, misshapen, and discolored. My father-in-law, who happens to be a prominent physician, examined my finger last month during a visit. His verdict? Quote, you're screwed. They should have treated this the day it happened. You'll never recover full use of the finger and now arthritis will set in. Unquote. Thanks a lot. I'm lucky it wasn't my leg that was broken, like Cameron Douglas. Until next time, John. Grewd. I knew it. Because I had seen other people be screwed. There was a guy lifting weights who got his pinky finger caught in between weights on the weight pile. It literally cut the top quarter of his finger off, completely off, almost at the joint. He was bleeding profusely and they told him tough luck. He sat and just cried

on a bench, lost a finger, serious injury, and nobody gave a shit. Well, I had seen that just a week or two before. So as soon as I broke my finger and I knew it was broken a second after doing it, I knew I was going to be screwed. I was particularly offended when they put the black box on me. The black box is over the handcuffs and the black box is connected to the chain around my waist, which in turn is connected to the chain around my ankles. And that's how I went to the doctor's office. As soon as I sat down in the waiting room, a little girl that was in the waiting room started to cry. People shielding their children from me, staring at me, pointing at me. And then the doctor says, sorry, buddy, you're screwed. 18 days after the injury, you can't fix that. Not without considerable

pain. And they weren't going to pay for it anyway. So tough luck. It took the letter from Loretto just a day or two to get out. So it was still pretty fresh when all this had just happened as I got the letter to Jesslyn Radek and Fire Dog Lake. They used to print these things. immediately. As soon as they would arrive, they would print them. And then immediately the guards would start passing them around. The only response that it got at Loretto was a tongue lashing from the PA. I said to him, you seem like a nice enough guy. You really do. But you're a fucking asshole too. You knew my finger was broken and you didn't do anything. It's your job to treat me and you didn't do anything. We got to the point where after a subsequent incident in which

which he over-medicated me and caused me to faint, he stopped speaking to me. And so I would put in for a visit to the PA and it would just be denied. And I thought, well, I only have 23 months. I can survive 23 months without health care. I had one chronic condition that got markedly worse while I was in prison and that was diabetes, type 2 diabetes. When I went in, I said, listen, I'm on Varsiga and Janiamet and this and that and they were like tough luck. Those are name brand drugs, we don't do name brand drugs. You can have metformin. I said, well, I was already on the maximum dosage of metformin a year ago and it wasn't enough and I had to go on these other drugs. Tough luck. Okay, well, where can I get a meter to check my blood? I'm supposed to check my blood four times a day.

Nope. You can check it once a week on Thursday mornings from 6 to 6.15. Like, that's how diabetes works. They just told me tough luck for you. The other thing that happened, I had, a nose-to-nose confrontation with one of the most vicious, angry, backward lieutenants, I would guess in the entire prison system. He started the fight by saying, can we talk man to man? Now that's code for, I'm going to swear at you, and I don't want you to report me for it, which meant I could swear at him, and he couldn't send me to solitary for it. I got so angry in this confrontation.

It took me over an hour to finally calm down. Well, when I finally got out of prison, I went to get my eyes checked because I hadn't had them checked in two years. The optometrist said, you seem to have bleeding in your eyeball. You need to see an ophthalmologist. I was like, oh, okay, I went to an ophthalmologist, and they gave me an IV of this bright orange liquid. I had to sit there for an hour.

They did this scope of my eyeballs. And he said, oh yeah, you've had some bleeding in your eyeball. I said, what in the world would cause something like that? I have diabetes. Is it diabetic retinopathy? And he said, no, this is a result of a severe and immediate spike in blood pressure. Your blood pressure spiked so high, so suddenly that it caused blood vessels in your eyeball to burst. And they were back like near my brain.

And he said, any idea what might cause that? I said, oh yeah, I remember exactly what caused it. It was the fight with that lieutenant. 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. July 10th, 2013, letter from Loretto. Hello again from the Federal Correctional Institution at Loretto, Pennsylvania. I'm now nearing five months incarceration against a 30-month sentence for blowing the whistle on the CIA's illegal torture program. With good time, I have around 16 months to go. When you first come to prison, you almost immediately develop a new sense of normal.

What's normal on the outside, a rude clerk at a 7-Eleven, a telemarketer calling your home at dinner time, is no longer my world. My new normal is that the guy I may sit across from in the cafeteria is here for murdering a policeman. Normal is that the guy in the next bunk is the former methamphetamine king of Kentucky and will likely die here. Normal is that nearly 30% of the now 1,325 prisoners at Loretto are pedophiles and child rapists. I mentioned in a previous letter that I now work in the chapel. This is a highly sought after and peaceful job. I like the chapel and the staff is terrific. The chapel, like the library, is seen as something of a safe haven though for pedophiles.

They aren't hassled there, and they can sit and read for long periods. There's one informal rule in the chapel, however. No talking about your case. One evening, a particularly loud pedophile was complaining outside the chapel's office that he was in the process of suing his mother, brother, and wife, who had completely disowned him after he was caught having sex with his 15-year-old daughter. Quote, but she wanted to, he protested. She enjoyed it, unquote.

He actually said those things. I walked over to him and I reminded him that he was not allowed to talk about his case in the chapel. His response left me speechless. He said, but Jesus loved the little children. I just went back to my seat. One elderly pedophile in my housing unit was caught on the old NBC television show to catch a predator. He thought he was going to have sex with a 13-year-old. Instead, the cops grabbed him.

In the trunk of his car, they found handcuffs, a hammer, a bag of lime, and a body bag. You can imagine his intentions. I won't bore you with stories of how photos of my cellmate's five-year-old grandchild were stolen from his locker, or how some pedophiles subscribe to teen magazines so they can cut out pictures of Selena Gomez and hang them in their lockers. The purpose of these horrible accounts is not to disgust. Instead, it's to point out several problems, only one of which is unique to Loretto. First, if pedophiles are not permitted within 1,000 feet of a school, Why are they permitted within five feet of my children?

Why isn't there a section of the visiting room where pedophiles can have their visits, but that is separated by a partition? It couldn't possibly be expensive, and it would serve to protect our children. Of course, if I had been sent to a camp, as was recommended by both the judge and the prosecutor in my case, it would be a different story. Pedophiles are not permitted in camps. Remember, though, that a Bureau of Prisons bureaucrat deemed me to be a threat to the public safety.

Second, despite what you may have read over the years, there is no such thing as treatment or rehabilitation in prison. It just doesn't exist. There's no counseling or medication for pedophiles. Once their sentences have been served, they're free to leave and to live in society again. Sure, they'll have years and years of probation, but that won't do anything to curb their urges.

It's a proven fact that many of them will re-offend. Finally, since I got here, I've come to realize how little the federal government does to protect our children from predators. Perhaps it's time to consider the issue of civil confinement. That's where the government moves a pedophile to a secure location on the prison grounds after he has completed his sentence. He's not necessarily subject to counts or to 10-minute moves like everybody else in prison, but he is not free to re-enter society and to re-offend. This system works in Virginia and in other states, and it helps greatly to protect our children. Thank you for the hundreds of letters of support and encouragement since my last letter.

They've really kept my spirits up. All the best, John. On that letter, I got some pushback from the general public. A lot of people castigated me for endorsing civil confinement. They said, no, when you've done your time, you've paid your debt to society and you're free. Well, let me tell you about a guy that I worked with in the chapel. His name was Cook. Cook was a pedophile.

He was near 70 years old from Kentucky, thick Kentucky drawl. He had been caught with child porn and got the mandatory five-year sentence for a first-time offender. And then he did it again. And he got 20 years. Well, he was at the tail end of his 20 years when I met him in the chapel. And about four months before I left Loretto, he finished his sentence and he left. The week that I was leaving Loretto, I'm walking to work in the chapel and I see Cook. And I said, Cook, what are you doing here?

And he says to me, well, I've got a problem. I said, cook, shame on you. How many years did they give you this time? And he said, 60, I'm going to die in here. I said, society is better off without you in it. And then I went to work. These letters of Loretto became so popular that the guards began treating me differently. And not necessarily in a good way.

The popularity of letters from Loretto frighten them. They wanted nothing to do with me, which was great. They had never experienced anything like this. It baffled the warden, too. He tried threatening me. He tried cajoling me. And there was nothing to stop me. I said, Warden, you're the one who blew this in the beginning.

If I had been sent to the camp like I was supposed to, I would have kept my mouth shut. I would have kept my head down. I would have done my thing and I would have gone home. But no, you had to fuck with me. I didn't give up my constitutional rights to freedom of press when I came to this prison. I said, you did this, not me. There were guards who just stayed away. And then there were other guards who tried hard to provoke me.

But they were so crude when going about it. I would just laugh at them and say, clown. And then they would go on their way finally. One day, a friendly guard came up to me and said, The warden is really angry about these letters from Loretto. He ordered two other guards to come by your place tonight and take your desk off the wall. It wasn't really a desk.

It was a fold-down piece of wood drilled into the wall. It had two pieces of rope that sort of held it, like a sandwich board almost. So I said, okay, thanks a lot. I paid one of the other prisoners who worked in the shop, a Mac, and I said, do me a favor. Come by my place with a drill and strip the screws on my desk. He said, sure. He came and really, really stripped those screws.

They were just bald and couldn't do anything with them. Sure enough, a couple of hours later, two COs come, and they've got a drill. And they're working on it and working on it and working on it. And finally one of them says, fuck it. We can't do it. And they left. So I was feeling a little bit emboldened. I took a legal pad and I wrote,

This Desk Kills Fascism. It was a play on what Woody Guthrie had written on his guitar, This Machine Kills Fascism. Pete Seeger similarly wrote on his banjo, This Machine Surounds Fascism and forces it to surrender. So I taped it on the desk. This desk kills fascism. A couple of hours pass and it's count time.

The two COs' cut. come in. One of them sees this. He tears it off the desk, crumples it up, and throws it at me, which is exactly what I wanted him to do. So I flattened it out and I mailed it to myself at home. I had saved it in a file thinking, I'm going to do something with it. A couple of years later, I did something that I've always, always wanted to do. I took an art class, an adult art class at the torpedo factory, which is an artist colony in Old Town, Alexandria, Virginia. I took a class on screen printing. It took me six weeks to paint an exact copy of the crumpled up sheet of paper. I made 100 screen prints out of it. I sold them on my website when I got home and I was able

to make a little bit of money to get myself reestablished in society again. July 24th, 2013, letter from Loretto. Hello again from the Federal Correctional Institution at Loretto, Pennsylvania. I've learned over the past months that one's prison sentence is not the totality of his punishment. I took a plea in January 2013 to one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. In addition to having to spend 30 months in prison, I'll have to meet a probation officer monthly for three years after my release. I also lost my pension after 19 years of proud federal service. My legal bills totaled more than a million dollars, and I sold most of my personal possessions to pay at least some of that million dollars. but my punishment didn't end there.

Last week, my wife received a sharply worded letter from our insurance company, USAA, the United States Assurance Association. I have had my insurance with USAA, both auto and homeowners, since 1993. They were a terrific provider during that time. The letter we received cut right to the point. USAA doesn't insure felons. They were canceling our insurance effective immediately. I told my wife not to panic, call them in the morning, put them.

the insurance in her name. She did that only to be told that USAAA didn't insure, quote, felonious families, unquote. Thank goodness she was able to find another more reputable company with which to do business. When I mentioned this travesty to my friend Dave, about whom I've written, he told me to soon expect the other shoe to drop. When he was arrested, even before he was convicted, his bank, Wells Fargo, closed all of his accounts and sent him a check, along with the letter saying that they do not allow felons to bank with them. He had to find a small local bank that was willing to allow him the luxury of a checking account. Similarly, immediately after my arrest, both Cardinal Bank and United Bank refused to allow my John Kyriaku Legal Defense Trust to open an

account. A vice president at United Bank said, quote, we simply don't want to do business with you, unquote. In addition, I learned recently that I could no longer travel freely to countries like Canada, the UK and France. These and many other countries share law enforcement databases with the U.S. They do not allow felons in their countries without a special visa. So when I want or need to travel abroad in the future, I will have to go to these countries' embassies, file a visa request form, and submit to an interview about my crime. Update. Many of you have asked for an update on the event that I reported in my first letter. In that letter, I wrote about two special investigative service officers who tried to bait me into taking some sort of action against a Muslim prisoner.

After the letter was published, I was assured by both the warden and by a sea lieutenant that an investigation would be conducted. It turned out that the investigation was of me. My email was put on a four-day delay, both incoming and outgoing. My incoming and outgoing snail mail was stripped open and read, and none of my witnesses were interviewed. I wasn't surprised by any of this. This is exactly what happens to all whistleblowers. Thanks for reading John. Thanks again for listening to Dead Drop, doing time like a spy. As always, we thank you for listening and we especially thank you for liking, commenting on, reviewing, rating, or sharing the podcast. It really does make a difference

and it means a lot to us. Until next time, I'm John Kiriaku. Dead Drop is written by John Kiroaku and Alan Katz. Costard and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast, and John Kariaku, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers. This podcast, it's a Kastard and Touchstone production.