Clyde Hall
==========

Clyde Hall is the name John Kiriakou gave, with a viewer's help, for an imprisoned Ohio congressman whose remark about prison friendship he came to accept only after serving a sentence himself. He told the story on the DeProgram programme in July 2025.

Identifying him

Kiriakou introduced him without a name: "there was a crooked congressman from Ohio who went to prison a couple of years before I did. He was in my prison." When the host guessed Jim Traficant, Kiriakou corrected him, the man represented "the district immediately south of Jim Traficant", and then admitted the gap: "I forget his name now."

The name came from the audience. A viewer supplied it in the chat, and Kiriakou confirmed it on air with evident surprise: "Yes, it was Clyde Hall. How in the world did you pull that up? ... I have not thought of that name in a decade." The identification is therefore a viewer's, adopted by Kiriakou rather than produced by him.

The sentence he gives is "like two years or two and a half years," on "a corruption charge."

The remark

What Kiriakou remembered was what the man said after his release. Against the standard formula, "they say that you don't go to prison to make friends", the congressman said the opposite: "I came out of prison having made some of the best friends of my life."

Kiriakou heard this "before I was ever in trouble", and his judgement at the time was blunt: "thinking that he was nuts."

The reassessment

His own imprisonment reversed it. "But he's not nuts. And I understand it now."

Offered trauma bonding as the explanation, Kiriakou half-accepted and then rejected it on a specific ground: "in part it could be, but the people that you trauma bond with, you tend to walk away from." The friendships had outlasted the prison, which he takes as evidence they were something else, "these guys were genuinely good guys."

He makes no attempt to reconcile that with what the men had done, immediately noting that "some of them did some very bad things" and going on to tell the story of the body in the barrel.

See also

- The Body In The Barrel
- FCI Loretto
- The Italians at Loretto
- John Kiriakou
