Marlon Beard
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Marlon Beard, known in prison simply as Beard, was one of John Kiriakou's cellmates at FCI Loretto and the man Kiriakou says he still holds in deep respect.

Beard had spent decades in prison. Kiriakou recounts a conversation in which the cell was discussing what each man would do on release, and Beard said he would sell drugs, because that was all he knew how to do, he would simply have to be more careful not to get caught. He described himself as a career criminal who could not change. Kiriakou notes that he did change: Beard became a successful personal trainer and entrepreneur.

He was the only African American in the group. Kiriakou describes him working out constantly and, when he was not working out, watching television and arguing, including one actual fistfight over whether Jay-Z or Kanye West had more money, which Kiriakou and the others pointed out could send him to solitary confinement.

The shakedowns

When Kiriakou's Letters from Loretto took on a life of their own and reached the mainstream, he credits Arianna Huffington at the Huffington Post, he became the subject of shakedown after shakedown. Officers would come into the room, clear everybody out and trash the cell: throwing photographs of his children on the floor and walking over them, emptying every man's locker onto the ground.

Kiriakou apologised to his cellmates, telling them the searches were his fault because he was so high profile. Beard's answer, in Kiriakou's account, reframed the whole thing: the guards were doing it on purpose, to anger the big Black man in the cell so that he would either beat Kiriakou himself or arrange for somebody else to do it. Beard told him to keep doing what he was doing, because he was the only reason people on the outside knew what life inside was like.

Kiriakou says it was because of Beard that he doubled down and wrote even more than he had been writing. He adds that Beard protected him, and probably did not even mean to, he just did.

Roommates and friends

Kiriakou uses Beard to mark a general rule about Loretto: roommates can be friends, but that is the exception rather than the rule. Of the men assigned to his first cell, he says none were people he would have chosen to associate with, then or since, Beard is the figure who complicates that judgement.

See also

- FCI Loretto
- Letter from Loretto
- John Kiriakou
- Correctional officers at FCI Loretto
- Solitary confinement
