Mark Lanzalotti
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Mark Lanzalotti was a prisoner at FCI Loretto whom John Kiriakou has called literally one of the finest human beings he has ever known in his life, a man he considers like a brother and in some ways is closer to than his own brother.

The case

In Kiriakou's account, Lanzalotti's stepfather, a Native American man Kiriakou calls John One Star, was involved in the methamphetamine trade and recruited Lanzalotti, then in his twenties, into a cook. Lanzalotti had never had a relationship with his own father, and the stepfather loomed large in his life. The group bought chemicals in Florida, made a deal abroad, rented a house in a bad part of suburban Philadelphia on the New Jersey side, and cooked in an Airstream trailer parked there.

Lanzalotti did this for roughly six months and then quit, telling the others it was not for him. Kiriakou notes that Lanzalotti had never taken drugs in his life, not even marijuana, and that he was the only person to leave the conspiracy voluntarily. More than a year later, after Lanzalotti had opened a successful detailing and body shop employing half a dozen people, the DEA and ATF raided the operation and eventually arrested him too.

The government offered five years and three months, the same deal it offered everyone else. One Star's attorney told Lanzalotti that he did not represent rats and that Lanzalotti could not implicate anybody. Lanzalotti refused the plea, not knowing that every other defendant had been offered the same terms and had taken them. He went to trial, everyone testified against him, and the case was presented as though he had been the mastermind. On a first-time, non-violent drug offence he was sentenced to triple life without parole and sent to the maximum-security penitentiary at Springfield, Missouri, where Kiriakou says his cellmate was Vincent "the Chin" Gigante.

Bone cancer was later removed from his wrist on prison grounds, leaving a nasty scar, and he was given radiation treatment inside. He appealed his sentence as cruel and unusual and won, reducing it to a 30-year maximum-security term, and was moved through Butner, North Carolina and another Pennsylvania facility before arriving at Loretto. Kiriakou met him 15 years into the 30 years.

Inside Loretto

Kiriakou describes Lanzalotti as unpretentious, completely honest, level-headed and very smart, a man who still telephones him to warn him that something he posted on social media needs editing, advice Kiriakou says he takes on the spot.

He was also, in Kiriakou's telling, one of the most gifted chefs in any prison, capable of miracles with a garbage bucket of water and a live electrical wire, and Kiriakou credits him with the 35 pounds he gained inside. Where most prisoners cooked whatever the kitchen workers stole, the Italians had a crooked officer on the payroll bringing in pork loin, white wine for marsala sauce, fresh pasta, tomatoes, mushrooms and garlic; Kiriakou compares the scene to Goodfellas. Lanzalotti loaded Tupperware containers with hot dinners and delivered them first to the half-dozen made men in the prison, a habit Kiriakou describes as a learning lesson for him. He was also, Kiriakou says, the foremost bookie in the entire prison, sending books of stamps home as a nest egg.

The friendship carried risk. One officer told Kiriakou he was not permitted to visit Lanzalotti's housing unit at all; Kiriakou would back off for a few days and then resume. Lanzalotti was also the first person to warn Kiriakou about Dave Phillips, telling him something did not sit right with the man.

The petition

Kiriakou took The New York Times down to Lanzalotti's cell each day and read an article about the Second Chance Act, which had just passed Congress and been signed into law. He told Lanzalotti the article was about him: people with no violence in their crime who had received draconian sentences that would be shorter if imposed today could petition the Justice Department for review and, if they qualified, be assigned an A-list firm for a resentencing hearing. Lanzalotti said he was not smart enough to handle something like that. Kiriakou wrote it for him.

Kiriakou left Loretto on 3 February 2015. In August of that year Lanzalotti's mother telephoned him in tears to say the appeal he had written had worked and Lanzalotti was being released 17 years into the 30-year sentence. Told he could not sit a real-estate licensing examination with a felony conviction, Lanzalotti followed Kiriakou's advice and petitioned the governor of New Jersey, who approved it. Kiriakou says Lanzalotti is now the top-ranked realtor on the Jersey Shore.

The friendship also brought Kiriakou the protection of the Italians. Once word spread that he was with them, he says, it was hands off, not only from other prisoners but from the guards, who did not want to take the risk.

See also

- FCI Loretto
- The Italians at Loretto
- John Kiriakou
- Dave Phillips
- Second Chance Act
