Aryan Brotherhood
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The Aryan Brotherhood, "the Aryans", were the white prison gang whose protection defined John Kiriakou's first year at FCI Loretto.

The cell visit

Warned that anyone entering his cell uninvited was committing an act of aggression he would have to answer, Kiriakou had been in prison about two hours when two Aryans walked in, shaved heads, swastikas on their necks, one tattoo covering the entire front half of a throat. He jumped off his bunk, fists up. The questions were procedural: Are you the new guy? Are you a rat? No, there was nobody else in his case. Are you a chomo? He didn't know the word; it means child molester. No. "Well, you can sit with the Aryans in the cafeteria." So I guess I'm with the Aryans now, he thought. Showing your paperwork on day one, proving you're not in on a child sex charge, is, he explains, the universal admission ritual.

The Aryan table itself was a gradient: hardcore Nazis at one end, becoming "less and less Nazi" down its length, until the far end was just white guys who were neither child molesters nor rats. That end was Kiriakou's. The whiplash was not lost on him: a few years earlier he had been briefing the president and meeting kings and prime ministers, "and here I find myself sitting at the Aryan table for dinner."

"The Muslim killer"

A rumor started among the Aryans that Kiriakou had been an assassin for the CIA, "which was preposterous, but I never corrected it", and they took to calling him the Muslim killer. When the shot-caller finally asked him directly whether he had been a CIA hitman, Kiriakou delivered the answer he had prepared: "Hey, we all did stuff that we weren't proud of. It was wartime." That was all the Aryans needed.

The same week, Louis Farrakhan published an article calling Kiriakou a hero of the Muslim people, and two Nation of Islam members, in prison, he notes, a gang rather than a religion, walked into his cell holding the newspaper to pay respects. "The Aryans thought I was killing Muslims, the Muslims thought I was saving Muslims, and I just kept my mouth shut."

Alliances

Kiriakou credits CIA training, form strategic alliances, for the ease of his time: the Aryans were fine with him because he wasn't a rat; the Italians eventually adopted him because he hated the FBI as much as they did. He attended the Aryan Super Bowl party and the Aryan Christmas party, sitting at their table for the first year before moving in with the Italians. When a cafeteria staredown nearly turned into a fight, it was a young Aryan who ran over begging him not to throw down, a brawl would send them all to solitary, while Pete, the Bonanno family captain, tugged his sleeve.

The three questions

Retelling the episode in 2026 to explain a viral clip, Kiriakou fixed it to his first hour rather than his first day: "That was not just my first day in prison. That was my first hour in prison." Two men walked into his cell unannounced, shortly after a guard had warned him that people would; one had a swastika covering his entire neck and running up onto his face, the other had tattooed eyelids. He put his fists up.

The interview was three questions long: whether he was gay, whether he was a rat, "No, I didn't have anybody else in my case", and whether he was a "chomo", a word he had to have explained to him as child molester. Three negatives settled it: "Okay, you could sit with the Aryans in the cafeteria." His own reaction was bemusement rather than relief, "Oh, I guess I'm with the Aryans now."

He also corrects the clip that prompted the retelling: the story was told at a podcast recording, not in a bar as the edit implies, "That was all superimposed", and he takes no offence at it.

See also

- FCI Loretto
- Louis Farrakhan
- Bureau of Prisons
- Letter from Loretto
