FCI Loretto
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The Federal Correctional Institution at Loretto (FCI Loretto) is a U.S. federal prison in Loretto, Pennsylvania, in the mountains of west-central Pennsylvania, where, per Kiriakou, the only local job besides farming is working as a prison guard. It is classified by the Bureau of Prisons as low-medium security, "a low security prison, but it's called a low medium, and then there's a high medium. So this was low medium." There are double fences topped with concertina wire, motion detectors, and roving patrols, but no guard towers and no armed corrections officers. John Kiriakou served twenty-three months of his thirty-month Intelligence Identities Protection Act sentence there, between 2013 and 2015.

Arrival

Sentenced to camp, delivered to prison

At sentencing, Kiriakou's attorneys requested placement in a minimum-security work camp, a facility with no bars, unlocked doors, and a work arrangement with a nearby college. The prosecutor offered no objection; the judge agreed.

Kiriakou's brother told him on the day of his arrest that it would turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to him; Kiriakou says he felt suicidal that day.

On the morning of February 28, 2013, in the American federal system, the defendant drives to the facility and knocks on the door, Jesselyn Radack, Tom Drake, Jim Spain, Kiriakou's cousin Mark Kiriakou, and Mark's son-in-law Matt McCarthy drove Kiriakou to the camp, along with a documentary film crew. He knocked on the camp door. The officer told him: "You have to go across the street to the actual prison. They'll process you and bring you back."

At the actual prison, after processing, strip-searched, mug-shotted, and issued a used uniform with no pillow, the guard began walking him toward the back of the facility. Kiriakou said: "Wait, I'm supposed to be at the camp across the street." The guard replied: "Not according to my paperwork." Kiriakou told himself: "Take it easy. They'll put you in solitary if you say anything," and said nothing. His new first name became "inmate"; he was also assigned prisoner number 79637083. A guard walked him to his cell and offered the only advice he'd get: "If anybody comes into your cell uninvited, that's an act of aggression. Welcome home."

It took four to five days to get access to a phone to call his attorneys, who told him that the Bureau of Prisons, not the sentencing judge, has the ultimate word over prison assignment, and that a motion to move him would take roughly two years to be heard: "Buddy, I'm sorry. You're going to have to tough it out." He was placed in a cell built for four that, due to overcrowding, held six. Kiriakou served the full twenty-three months in the actual prison, never the camp.

The discrepancy, Kiriakou subsequently learned, was the result of direct administrative pressure from John Brennan: "Brennan was so angry at the shortness of my sentence that he told them, 'Make it as difficult as possible.'" A subsequent Freedom of Information Act request confirmed the CIA had been livid about the plea deal and, in Kiriakou's words, "wanted me to die in there." He received no halfway-house time at the end of his sentence, which he likewise attributes to the CIA ensuring he served as much time as possible.

First cellmates

Kiriakou's cellmates on arrival included two Mexicans serving 24- and 20-year drug sentences, another Mexican serving 15 years for drugs, and a Puerto Rican serving 7.5 years for drug conspiracy. The one exception was "Frank," the former auditor of Cuyahoga County, Ohio, serving a long sentence for corruption. All, Kiriakou says, were decent men whose company he enjoyed. On his first day, alone in the cell during work call, Kiriakou fell asleep from shock and depression; he woke to find his cellmates there and introduced himself. Later that same first day, not understanding the "red light" signaling a 120-second recall to cell for standing count, he was physically pulled back into the cell by the shirt with five seconds to spare, his cellmates didn't want the guards' attention drawn to their own cell, where they were cooking and dealing in stolen meat.

The Italian-mafia placement

Within twenty minutes of being placed in his cell, two inmates, "one with a swastika tattoo across his neck and onto his face, the other with FUCK YOU tattooed on his eyelids", entered uninvited and asked Kiriakou whether he was "a fag," "a rat," or "a chomo" (child molester). On answering no to each, he was invited to sit with the Aryans at meals.

The assignment was overturned the following day by an inmate in the cell across the hall, the boss of the Bonanno crime family, known to Kiriakou as Pete, who, on observing Kiriakou's seating placement, told him: "From today, you're with the Italians." Kiriakou learned that a fellow inmate, Mark Lanzalotti, on reading in the New York Times that Kiriakou would be placed at FCI Loretto, had gone to every Italian inmate in the institution to brief them: "There's a CIA guy coming here. He's not an FBI agent. The FBI are cops and rats. The CIA protected us from the Muslims." The Italian placement made Kiriakou's tenure at the prison largely non-violent.

Alliance structure on arrival

Kiriakou described arriving at FCI Loretto with pre-arranged social protection from three distinct groups, plus a fourth he had to manage himself.

The Aryan Brotherhood had received a rumor, origin unknown, that Kiriakou was a CIA assassin who had spent the post-9/11 period traveling the world killing Muslims. Kiriakou did not correct this: "They thought that was fantastic."

On the day Kiriakou arrived, two Nation of Islam-affiliated Black Muslim prisoners approached him holding a newspaper and told him Louis Farrakhan had called him "a hero of the Muslim people" in the NOI newspaper and that he'd have no problems with them; he never had.

That left the Mexican prisoners, whom Kiriakou won over on his own. In his six-man cell, four cellmates were affiliated with the Sureños, the Norteños, the Mexican Mafia, and the Jalisco cartel. One Sureño asked if Kiriakou was educated and, on hearing yes, asked him to write his appeal. Kiriakou did so for free; it was denied, but the man put the word out among the Mexicans that Kiriakou was honest and had helped him.

Daily life

Population and cells

Kiriakou's unit held more than 1,400 people on any given day, with lines for showers and toilets and not enough seats in the TV room. Loretto held 1,369 prisoners overall when he arrived, about 50% Black, 30% Hispanic, and 20% white, with the great majority of the white population, unusually for a low-security facility, being pedophiles, giving Loretto a reputation as a haven for them; at Loretto they could use the TV room largely unbothered, unlike other low-security prisons where they had to watch from the hallway, though many were banned from their own cells except to sleep by their roommates. By the time of his later "Letters from Loretto," Kiriakou put the figure at nearly 30% of a then-1,325-strong population being pedophiles or child rapists, part of an adjusted baseline for "normal" that also included bunking near a self-described former methamphetamine kingpin of Kentucky and sitting near a convicted police murderer in the cafeteria. Kiriakou says the building was not designed for the population it held: rooms built for two were packed with four, and rooms built for four were packed with eight, "if you were lucky," six. His own cell was roughly 8 feet by 15 feet, shared by six people. He has separately put the overcrowding at 39%, with bunk beds lining the halls, game room, and TV room in addition to the cells themselves.

The pedophile population

Kiriakou says he had never encountered a pedophile in his life before the day he went to prison, and came to see the condition as utterly unrepentant and incurable; he also found, to his fascination, that 100% of the pedophiles he met had themselves been molested as children. Before prison, while an adjunct professor at a Virginia university, he wrote to a former colleague, the dean of the medical school, a psychiatrist, for advice on dealing with imprisoned child sex offenders; she told him there was no cure for pedophilia, and that convicted pedophiles like to talk about their crimes because they get sexual gratification from reliving them.

Kiriakou worked in and ran the Loretto chapel library, a sought-after, low-hassle job he liked, staffed by people he found terrific; the chapel, like the prison library, functioned as an informal refuge for pedophiles, who could sit and read there undisturbed under one unwritten rule, no discussing one's case, since pedophiles were otherwise beaten in the yard, in their cells, or in the day room. He recalls one pedophile who broke that rule, complaining outside the chapel office that he was suing his own mother, brother, and wife after being caught having sex with his 15-year-old daughter, "but she wanted to... she enjoyed it", and who, reminded of the rule, replied only, "but Jesus loved the little children." In an earlier retelling, Kiriakou attaches that same line to a different man, a 6'7" former firefighter nicknamed "Chomo the Giant", who was thrown out of the chapel and told not to return after responding to a warning to stop discussing his case with, "Jesus loved the little children." He describes an elderly pedophile in his housing unit caught by NBC's To Catch a Predator expecting to meet a 13-year-old for sex, whose car trunk was found to contain handcuffs, a hammer, a bag of lime, and a body bag.

On his first day in prison, wiping down tables, Kiriakou was approached by a man serving 27 years who, asked what he had done, described being caught looking at crime-scene photographs of dead children obtained from a friend who worked at a morgue, a story Kiriakou says he found horrifying and cut off immediately. In a 2026 retelling he names the man as Mark Brown, "I'm happy to say his name, because what's he going to do? Is he going to sue me?", and gives the exchange in full. Brown's first formulation was "I got caught looking at crime scene photos," which on challenge he expanded to "having sex with children is a crime. I got caught looking at the photos." Kiriakou's answer was "You're not the victim here." Brown then volunteered that what "really did me in was the subfolder", pictures of dead children, from the morgue contact. Kiriakou cut him off: "Don't ever speak to me again. Do you understand?" He says Brown never did. Asked in that same session what the worst thing he saw in prison was, this is the answer he gives.

How he found out, and why they are all at low security

Kiriakou dates his awareness of the scale to one inmate. An 82-year-old man in his housing unit, hunched and incontinent, was being beaten regularly by an 18-year-old cellmate in on a drug charge, because the old man's body was too broken down to clean up after himself. The man asked Kiriakou, "I was like a one-man United Nations in there", to ask the Black shot caller to make the beatings stop.

Kiriakou went to the law library first to look up the conviction. At 80, the man had arranged to buy a nine-year-old girl from a drug-addicted mother in Atlanta and driven from Chicago to collect her, intending to rape her. There was no child and no mother, it was an FBI sting, and he was arrested at the hotel where the purchase was to happen. He received 17 years, meaning release at about 94 with good behaviour. "That alerted me to the sheer number of pedophiles in prison."

The research that followed produced his figure: "fully one third, it was actually 35%, of the prisoners in my prison were pedophiles," a proportion he says holds "consistent all across the Bureau of Prisons at the low security level." He notes a pedophile-specific prison outside Youngstown, Ohio.

The concentration is structural rather than accidental. They cannot be sent to minimum-security work camps "because they'll run away and molest other kids," and cannot be sent to medium or maximum security "because people will kill them there." Low security is what remains. His summary of the experience: "being completely surrounded by pedophiles was sickening in and of itself."

Kiriakou argues the arrangement is backwards: federal law bars registered sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of a school, yet prison housing placed him within feet of pedophiles daily, "if pedophiles are not permitted within 1,000 feet of a school, why are they permitted within five feet of my children?" He proposes a partitioned section of the visiting room to separate pedophiles' family visits from other inmates', and notes that pedophiles are in any case barred from the low-security camps where his judge and prosecutor had recommended he serve his own time. He states there is no counseling, treatment, or medication offered to pedophiles in federal prison, and that once their sentences and any subsequent probation are served they are simply free to re-enter society; he advocates civil confinement, used, he says, in Virginia and other states, holding a pedophile in a secure location on prison grounds after sentence completion, without normal prison restrictions, to prevent reoffending.

He illustrates the reoffense risk with "Cook," a roughly 70-year-old chapel coworker from Kentucky who received a mandatory five-year sentence for a first child-pornography offense, reoffended, and was resentenced to 20 years. Weeks after finally completing that sentence and leaving Loretto, Cook reoffended again and returned with a new 60-year sentence; told he would "die in here," Kiriakou replied: "society is better off without you in it." In an earlier telling, Kiriakou describes "Cook" instead as a man in his early-to-mid sixties from the mountains of North Carolina who did five years for crossing a state line to molest a child, was released and reoffended for a 10-year term, and, met again by Kiriakou in the hallway just before his own release, admitted he had done it again and drawn a 30-year sentence; Kiriakou told him, "society is better off with you in here for the rest of your life."

Schedule and counts

The daily schedule was rigid: breakfast at 6 a.m., work call at 7:30, recall at 10:20, lunch at 11, afternoon work call at 12:20, afternoon recall at 3 p.m., dinner at 5, evening work call at 6, final lockdown at 9, lights out at 11. Movement between points was restricted to designated ten-minute windows, with a fifty-minute wait required between them. Standing counts came at 4:15 p.m. and 9:30 p.m., with non-standing counts at midnight, 3 a.m., and 5 a.m.; guards shone flashlights in sleeping inmates' faces at each one, which Kiriakou says served no purpose beyond disrupting sleep, and which he characterizes as resembling a torture technique. Prisoners had to make their beds by the 6 a.m. lights-on and were permitted to sleep only on top of the made bed, never under the covers, on penalty of solitary confinement, so most made the bed, then slept on top of it under a coat.

Kiriakou devised his own survival rules in prison, modeled on his CIA field training. Rule one: "recruit spies to steal secrets or to steal anything else that I needed."

Food

Kiriakou says prisoners are fed "animal grade" rather than human-grade food, a subject he later wrote about in Consortium News and Covert Action Magazine. Prisoners called the Friday fish "sewer trout"; the boxes it came in were marked "Alaskan cod product of China... not for human consumption, feed use only." A prison-wide memo once informed inmates the warden was sorry that they had accidentally been fed dog food mislabeled as ground beef on taco night. After refusing to eat, Kiriakou told the warden, "I have eaten ass that tasted better than this," daring him to send him to solitary over it. He separately cites Dr. Peter Moskos's In Defense of Flogging and his own reporting to argue that roughly half of U.S. prisons are privately run (citing GEO Corporation), with operators profiting by keeping beds filled while cutting food and medical costs.

Despite the food, Kiriakou gained thirty-five pounds at Loretto: the Italian inmates had a corrupt guard on their payroll who smuggled in pork loin, wine for Marsala sauce, and fresh vegetables, and dinner, usually pasta with three cheeses, shredded chicken, tomatoes, mushrooms, basil, garlic, and a wine sauce, served nightly at 8 p.m., felt, in his words, "like you were in a Scorsese movie." He compared the atmosphere to Goodfellas, adding, "It was real life." His wife noticed the weight gain and asked, "What's happening to you?" He never learned how Mark Lanzalotti, his cellmate's Italian associate, got all the ingredients into the prison.

Work, wages, and the prison economy

Kiriakou worked as a janitor in the prison chapel, earning sixteen cents an hour. When he offered to teach a class, citing his PhD coursework in international affairs, he was told: "If we wanted you to teach a class, we'd ask you to teach a class. Now pick up the broom." In a separate account of prison labor, Kiriakou says Loretto's inmates manufactured fiber-optic cable for the military at 40 cents an hour, undercutting private manufacturers who paid $20,25 an hour and risked being driven out of business, and that he personally earned 16 cents a month as a "senior" worker in that role.

A parallel economy ran on hustle and improvisation. One inmate made a living reselling other prisoners' used shoes, Kiriakou bought two pairs from him himself, while another dozen or so ran books as bookies, the most successful of them Mark Lanzalotti. Some prisoners ran informal "convenience stores" out of their lockers, selling soda, candy, and chips at a standard 30% markup; others repaired radios, did unlicensed chiropractic work, or sold stolen laundry-room underwear and socks. Books of stamps functioned as the prison's true currency: they sold at face value for $8.20 but traded flat at $7 within the prison economy, prized for their portability. One inmate sold sexual services priced in stamp books, a hand job for one book, oral sex for two, anal sex for five. Kiriakou says he relied instead on his prison wage and the support of family and friends.

Prisoners also improvised a cooking method called a "stinger": a wall-plug faceplate wired to two live wires, submerged in a bucket of water to boil it rapidly, with food sealed in plastic bags lowered in to cook. Guards typically ignored it. In one incident, a guard screamed at a prisoner for cooking with a stinger; the prisoner pulled it from the water, still live, still attached to the wall socket, and tossed it to the guard, who caught it reflexively and was electrocuted. He died in the hospital three days later.

Cleanliness and hygiene

Cleanliness was paramount: a prisoner who smelled bad risked being stripped and physically thrown into a shower by cellmates, so even severely mentally ill or homeless inmates learned to shower daily.

Racial segregation and factions

Kiriakou described the prison's social organization as resembling "1950s America," with rigid racial segregation across common areas including the cafeteria and TV rooms. The prison's eight televisions were split racially, four controlled by Hispanic prisoners, four by Black prisoners, leaving white prisoners no dedicated channel choice. In the cafeteria, one table was reserved for the Aryan Brotherhood; one was shared by Italian organized-crime figures and Native Americans; other white tables were set aside for sex offenders and informants; Black prisoners occupied roughly half the room, and Hispanic prisoners sat separately at the back.

Each faction had a "shot caller", a trusted advocate who mediated disputes with other factions' shot callers, which Kiriakou says kept most conflicts from turning violent. Most self-identified Aryan prisoners, in his description, were poorly educated men imprisoned mainly for manufacturing meth or dealing large quantities of marijuana, covered in swastika and SS tattoos. Every Hispanic prisoner was required to join the Paisas prison gang or face a beating and transfer, with members expected to work out daily in case of a race riot; within that population, Dominicans, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans largely kept to themselves, with Puerto Ricans and Mexicans looking down on each other and everyone looking down on the Dominicans. Kiriakou found the Italian faction, by contrast, honest, honorable, and generous. Most of New York's Five Families were represented at Loretto, Gambino, Bonanno, Lucchese, Colombo, and Genovese, along with Philadelphia's Bruno-Scarfo family and northern New Jersey's DeCavalcante family; roughly half a dozen "made men" were held there, including the boss of the Gambino family, "Little Nicky" Corozzo, serving 12 years on 12 murder counts, per Kiriakou, the boss and underboss of Boston's Patriarca family, and the underboss of the DeCavalcante family. Warned by a friend to keep his distance, Kiriakou avoided Corozzo until summoned to his cell one day; Corozzo asked Kiriakou to ghostwrite his life story as a book, and Kiriakou advised against it, noting that books in the genre are usually written by informants justifying their decision to cooperate. Corozzo took the advice well, and from that day on made Kiriakou and his crew close friends, inviting him to every Italian party and dinner, watching the Super Bowl together, and exercising together in the yard.

In two years at Loretto, Kiriakou witnessed only three physical altercations: two over control of a television, and one in which an Aryan prisoner who called a white inmate a rat was beaten by him. He attributed the low violence rate to the fact that most prisoners had worked their way down from higher-security facilities and did not want to jeopardize that placement.

Mail

On his first day, only hours into his sentence, a stranger from Ringgold, Georgia sent him a postcard of a rose with a kind note. Not knowing her, Kiriakou resolved on the spot to answer every piece of mail he received. Over the next twenty-three months he wrote 7,000 letters to 675 different people, many of whom remained friends after his release.

Prison officials were separately found to be slitting the sides of Kiriakou's outgoing letters and resealing them with tape, standard policy is to inspect incoming mail for contraband, not to read outgoing mail. Kiriakou went to the lieutenant's office and demonstrated the correct extraction technique, rolling the letter with tongs to pull it out without cutting the envelope, telling them, "Just so you know, you morons." The tampering stopped.

After he complained about mistreatment, prison officials opened a formal investigation that, he says, turned out to target him rather than his original complaint: his incoming and outgoing email was put on a four-day delay, his physical mail was slit open and read, and none of the witnesses he named were ever interviewed. Kiriakou says he wasn't surprised: "this is exactly what happens to all whistleblowers."

Incoming reading matter was screened on the same logic. Asked at a 2016 public meeting about the CIA's KUBARK counterintelligence interrogation manual, Kiriakou answered that someone had tried to send him a copy while he was inside and "the warden rejected it as being disruptive", a declassified government publication about the agency's own interrogation history, refused at the mailroom of the prison holding the officer who exposed its modern successor.

The inmates he knew

Robert, the Australian arsonist

Robert, an Australian inmate convicted of burning down a Department of Motor Vehicles office in Buffalo, New York in a dispute over sales tax, was the first person to befriend Kiriakou, on his very first day. Kiriakou came to regard him as a textbook sociopath by Dr. Robert Hare's Psychopathy Checklist,Revised, one who masked it with friendliness. After his first six months, Kiriakou transferred cells, a move requiring a prison counselor's sign-off, to room with Robert and Frank.

Robert introduced Kiriakou to a cellmate who claimed to be a CIA officer named Dave Phillips. Kiriakou doubted him immediately: real officers, on first meeting, ask each other what directorate (DO, DI, DS&T, DA) and division they served in, and Dave Phillips fumbled both the deputy director's identity and a training-center name. Mark Lanzalotti was the first to warn Kiriakou, "something just doesn't sit right with this guy." Dave Phillips later made two shanks, one from a disposable razor blade, one from an uncoiled spring, and planted them on a pedophile cellmate they were disputing with; Kiriakou refused to take part. Guards found the shanks and arrested both the pedophile (transferred to New Jersey) and Dave Phillips (transferred to Ohio); Kiriakou was questioned and denied involvement.

"Watch Out" and "Cat in the Hat"

A hostile cellmate nicknamed "Watch Out", a scrawny, unaffiliated Black prisoner from Virginia Beach, was deliberately mis-called "Look Up" by Kiriakou to provoke him.

A fellow inmate known as "Cat in the Hat," named for an oddly elongated head, sought to move into Kiriakou's cell; his stated crime was murder for hire (a life-insurance policy on a business partner, paid off via a hired hitman to settle a gambling debt). Kiriakou confirmed the story at the law library but also found that Cat in the Hat had ratted out the hitman to reduce his own sentence, and refused him the cell. Days later, unaware Kiriakou was nearby, Cat in the Hat called him a rat to another inmate, "Truck," a long-haul trucker serving forty years for strangling prostitutes, after Kiriakou had actually been called away only to sign a CNN waiver for a Jake Tapper interview. Truck told Kiriakou what he'd overheard; using what he described as CIA misdirection, Kiriakou told Truck, "Half an hour ago, I heard him call you a pedophile." Truck beat Cat in the Hat so severely a medical helicopter had to land in the yard to fly him to a Pittsburgh hospital; Truck received five additional years and a transfer to medium security. Six weeks later Cat in the Hat returned to Loretto, apologized without making eye contact, and Kiriakou warned him: "As God is my witness, if I ever hear my name cross your lips ever again, you're dead and you'll never see it coming."

"Wallace"

Kiriakou orchestrated a cruel prank on a fellow prisoner nicknamed "Wallace": he had another inmate steal a laundry bag, then planted it with a toy merry-go-round on Wallace's bed to make him believe, falsely, that his appeal had succeeded and he was going home. Wallace gave away his possessions and held a going-away dinner before being caught in an attempted escape and sent to solitary, then transferred to a New Jersey prison. Kiriakou later reflected: "That was cold even by our standards." The same period brought him a moment of perspective: overhearing a Black fellow prisoner tell a companion he had slept in the same bunk for ten years and expected to for ten more, Kiriakou concluded he had "no right to complain about my lousy, measly 23 months."

Ken Schaefer

"Ken Schaefer" was a convicted child rapist who, after abusing a boy for six years, fled on bail to Israel, which does not extradite Jewish citizens. The FBI lured him back with a fake ad for a nonexistent "children's ballet extravaganza" in Cyprus; when Schaefer arrived, Interpol arrested him and he was extradited to the United States. He was convicted under the Mann Act and of "male on male sex with a child," and sentenced to 20 years. Kiriakou confronted him directly, telling him he was barred from rooming with him and had to eat at "the pedophile table" with other convicted pedophiles. Angered, Schaefer offered other prisoners money to assault Kiriakou, including $500 to a Mexican cartel-affiliated inmate, falsely claiming Kiriakou hated Jews and was anti-Semitic as the motive. Prison staff eventually broke up the resulting conflict by placing three prisoners, "Art," "Dave," and Schaefer, in solitary for about six weeks before transferring each to a different prison (Illinois, Ohio, and New Jersey respectively); a guard told Kiriakou he was spared transfer only because he hadn't been seen on camera near where a retaliatory beating occurred.

Beard

Cellmate "Beard", Marlon Beard, was a career criminal who had spent decades in prison before becoming, after release, a successful personal trainer and entrepreneur. He once got into an actual fistfight with another prisoner over whether Jay-Z or Kanye West had more money. After Kiriakou's "Letters from Loretto" went viral via Arianna Huffington, guards repeatedly shook down his cell, throwing photos of his children on the floor; Beard told him the shakedowns were meant to provoke a beating, either from Beard or from someone Beard would recruit, "they want to piss off the big black guy so that the big black guy either gives you a beating or finds somebody else to give you a beating."

Frank, the corrupt auditor

Frank, the former Cuyahoga County auditor and one of Kiriakou's first cellmates, had run a kickback scheme he described as modeled "right out of Al Capone, Chicago," using slush funds to hire relatives of contributors, remodel his house, and buy a Mercedes. A serious heart condition and a 25-year sentence led Frank to testify against Jimmy DeMora, who went to trial, was convicted on every count, and received a harsh sentence. As a known informant, Frank was confined to the "rat/pedophile table" in the cafeteria and barred from the TV room, but won people over with his humor. Bonanno family figure Pete "the Rabbit" Calabrese confronted Kiriakou over the friendship, calling Frank a rat who "brings dishonor to the Italians."

Mark Lanzalotti

Kiriakou says that despite his many prison alliances, he made exactly one true friend during his incarceration. Mark Lanzalotti became that friend, Kiriakou's best friend in prison, and remains, per Kiriakou, one of his best friends in life. Kiriakou met him at Loretto when Lanzalotti was fifteen years into a thirty-year sentence. Lanzalotti's stepfather, a Native American man named John One Star, had recruited him as a young man into a methamphetamine-cooking operation; Lanzalotti quit after six months, the only member of the conspiracy to voluntarily leave, and never used drugs himself. He was arrested by the DEA and ATF more than a year after leaving, despite having since built a successful detailing and body-shop business; he refused a plea deal of five years three months, went to trial on a first-time nonviolent drug offense, and was sentenced to triple life without parole. In a separate telling, Kiriakou says Lanzalotti was the only one of eight co-defendants in the drug conspiracy who refused to cooperate with the DEA, the other seven accepted deals and received roughly five and a half years each, while Lanzalotti alone drew triple life without parole. He was sent to the maximum-security penitentiary at Springfield, Missouri, where his cellmate was Vincent "the Chin" Gigante, boss of the Genovese crime family. Lanzalotti later developed bone cancer, had bone removed from his wrist and received radiation treatment inside prison, then successfully appealed his sentence as cruel and unusual, reducing it to thirty years.

At Loretto, Lanzalotti was the prison's foremost bookie, sending his stamp-book proceeds home as a nest egg, and cooked restaurant-quality Italian food for the prison's made men using a garbage bucket, water, and a live electrical wire. Kiriakou showed him a New York Times article about the Second Chance Act (passed by Congress and signed by President Obama) and told him he could petition for resentencing; Kiriakou wrote the petition himself. Kiriakou was released from prison on February 3, 2015, after 23 months. In August 2015, he learned the petition had worked: Lanzalotti was freed seventeen years into his thirty-year sentence. Lanzalotti went on to receive an unsolicited pardon from Virginia's governor and, at Kiriakou's suggestion, obtained New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's approval to sit his real estate licensing exam despite the felony conviction; he became the top-ranked real estate agent on the Jersey Shore.

Kiriakou credits the friendship with extending him protection from both prisoners and guards, who feared the Italians' reach beyond the prison walls.

(Kiriakou's defense attorney Mark McDougall, who advised him to take his plea deal, is a different person entirely from fellow inmate Mark Lanzalotti.)

Legal aid to other inmates

Kiriakou did legal work for several fellow prisoners. A Mexican drug-cartel member in his cell, captured by his own account bleeding out in a gunfight with the DEA at a cocaine warehouse, asked Kiriakou to write his appeal; Kiriakou did so pro bono, but the appellate court, while acknowledging the legal technicalities raised, ruled them insufficient and the appeal failed.

Abuses, corruption, and medical neglect

Guard culture

Kiriakou encountered hostility almost exclusively from guards, never from fellow prisoners. On his first day, a guard whispered "traitor" at him walking to dinner; Kiriakou turned, smiled, and needled back. A guard nicknamed "Blue" taped over his own name plate so released prisoners couldn't track him down and hurt him, and was the only guard at Loretto who wore a stab vest, certain someone would eventually try to stab him. Guard shifts rotated by quarter, and when Blue learned he might be assigned to Kiriakou's unit he asked to avoid it, telling a friend of Kiriakou's: "That's all I need, work eight hours at this job and then go outside and CNN standing next to my car. No thanks."

Kiriakou repeatedly cited sociologist Peter Moskos's book In Defense of Flogging, which describes the Bureau of Prisons as "little more than an employment agency for otherwise unemployable, undereducated rural white men", people who washed out of the military or police academies, took modest federal wages for the benefits, and, in Kiriakou's assessment, were often bullied as children and used the position to bully prisoners who couldn't retaliate.

Kiriakou says the only qualifications required to become a federal prison guard are working toward a GED, no high-school diploma required, and no felony convictions; he says the Bureau of Prisons assigns mail distribution to prisoners rather than guards for a specific reason: "Because the guards can't read." He illustrates the hiring bar with an anecdote: when prisoners from the minimum-security camp across the street walked off toward the highway, a pizza delivery driver dropping off an order noticed and alerted the prison, helping guards catch the escapees; the prison hired him as a guard almost immediately, his only qualification being "that he had two eyes and they both worked and he could read." Guard pay compounds the problem: while shackled and being transported to an outside orthopedist for a broken pinky finger, Kiriakou overheard a guard complain he'd been passed over for a promotion from GS-3 to GS-4, a position paying roughly $20,000,22,000 a year at the time.

Guard corruption

Kiriakou told the Federal Bureau of Prisons director directly that guard theft from commissary shipments is routine, citing as an example an entire pallet of Pop-Tarts worth roughly $5,000, a guard backs a personal Ford F-150 pickup up to the loading area, loads the pallet, and resells it on Facebook Marketplace or eBay.

Dental care

Medical and dental care were minimal. After cracking a crown, Kiriakou was seen by the prison dentist, who fitted a temporary crown and admitted that regardless of why an inmate came in, "my only job here is no matter what reason people come to the dentist for, I just pulled a tooth. That's it." Medical care otherwise amounted to being handed Tylenol.

Medical neglect: the broken finger

That orthopedic transport followed a documented medical-neglect episode. When Kiriakou first reported to the evening pill line with a swollen, doubled-in-size finger, he was told to see the physician assistant in the morning; the PA examined it and pronounced it merely "jammed," put it in a splint, denied Kiriakou's request for an X-ray, and sent him away with ibuprofen and instructions to return in a week. An X-ray was not ordered until ten days later; it confirmed the finger was in fact broken, a tendon had snapped off at the knuckle, pulling a chunk of bone off with it.

Eighteen days after the injury, Kiriakou was strip-searched, issued institutional clothing, and fully shackled, handcuffs, waist chain, leg irons, and a locked steel box over the handcuffs to prevent picking, for the outside orthopedic consultation, a security posture he attributes to his misclassification as a threat rather than the camp placement his sentence called for. Before the trip he refused to sign the Bureau's transport-rules document requiring him to address all staff as "sir," objecting that he was old enough to be the escorting officer's father and that "respect is earned"; he offered to call the officer "CEO" instead, and was initially told he would not be taken to the doctor over the dispute. After his account of the misdiagnosis was published by Jesselyn Radack and Firedoglake, Kiriakou confronted the physician assistant directly: "You knew my finger was broken and you didn't do anything."

The terminally ill inmate

Kiriakou describes a warden pressuring a terminally ill inmate to sign a waiver promising not to sue the institution, in exchange for release to die at home. The inmate refused. He died alone in a steel prison bunk.

Camera dead zones and the Epstein comparison

Kiriakou described the prison chapel as a frequent location for inmates to have sex, specifically because the security cameras there never worked, and everyone knew it, one of several camera-dead zones throughout the facility, including the stairwell to the mail room and the hallway to the laundry. Guards, in his account, were frequently asleep. Every functioning camera in a federal prison resets and records over the previous day's footage each night at midnight. He uses this institutional pattern to argue that Jeffrey Epstein's death in custody being attributed to camera failure and sleeping guards is unremarkable, simply how the Bureau of Prisons operates.

Two intelligence-service entrapment attempts

Kiriakou identifies two episodes at Loretto in which guards, on his account, acting on direction from outside the prison, attempted to provoke an incident that would have lengthened his sentence. Before he reported, one of his attorneys had already warned him the FBI was upset his sentence was only 23 months and might try to place an informant near him, advice to trust no one that he says proved apt.

The Iraqi-Kurd setup. Days after his arrival, Robert walked him around the facility and introduced him to an Iraqi Kurdish imam who spoke no English and was jailed on a terrorism charge for translating a Stinger-missile bill of sale. Kiriakou greeted him in Arabic, mentioned his CIA background, shook hands, and walked away. Two days later he was summoned to the lieutenant's office and shown the man's photo: officers of the prison's Special Investigative Service told him the man was the uncle of the Times Square bomber, and claimed that after their meeting, the imam had called a contact in Pakistan and been told to kill Kiriakou. Kiriakou noticed the story didn't hold up, the actual Times Square bomber was Pakistani, and this man was an Arabic-speaking Iraqi Kurd who spoke none of Pakistan's languages, and confirmed his suspicion by approaching the man directly in the yard: he had been told, in mirror image, that Kiriakou had called a Washington number and been ordered to kill him. The two compared notes and laughed at how "ham-handed" the setup was. Kiriakou identified the conduct, conspiracy to promote violence in a federal facility, as a Class D felony, and wrote about it publicly, which brought the incident to national attention (see His prison blog, below).

The Taliban-spokesman handshake. Roughly six weeks into his sentence, an Afghan-American pharmacist serving time on an opioid offense told Kiriakou that a man identified as the Taliban's spokesman, recently transferred from New Jersey, wanted to meet him. Kiriakou declined. Days later, the man approached him on the outdoor track with his hand extended; Kiriakou put both hands up and refused contact, then spotted a guard standing in the woods outside the perimeter fence, photographing the encounter with a telephoto lens. The man said they had a lot in common; Kiriakou replied the only thing they had in common was that he'd tried to kill people like him. The man was transferred out of the prison within four to five days. Kiriakou later needled the guard: "Nice try, amateur."

FOIA request from inside

About six weeks after arriving, Kiriakou filed a Freedom of Information Act request on himself, despite having promised in his plea deal never to do so. The Bureau of Prisons responded roughly six weeks later with a 250-page file, about 230 pages of which were routine administrative material, visitor logs, medical records. But some twenty pages were stamped "FOIA exempt, do not release to inmate" and appear to have reached him by mistake, or out of sympathy from someone inside the Bureau.

Among those pages was a warden's memo, circulated to staff four days to a week before Kiriakou's arrival, instructing them in block letters: CAUTION: INMATE HAS ACCESS TO THE MEDIA, and describing him as "trained to be ruthless" and "skilled in escape." Kiriakou says there is no such CIA training in "escape techniques," calling the claim a misreading of spy movies, and concluding the real reason he'd been placed in a harsher facility than the judge ordered was the media-access memo. He told the warden directly: "If I had gone to the camp, I would have kept my head down, done my twenty-three months, and gone home quietly. But you had to make a big production out of it."

The warden's calculation

When threatened with solitary confinement over his public writing, Kiriakou told the warden:

> Warden, with all due respect, I've gone nose-to-nose with al-Qaeda, with Hezbollah, with the Iranians, and you want me to be afraid of you? Give me some credit. I've lived in Yemen, in Pakistan. I'm not afraid of your Loretto, Pennsylvania solitary. Besides, go ahead and send me to solitary. CNN's going to be waiting for you next to your car in the parking lot.

He was never sent to solitary at any point in his sentence. A guard later overheard the warden explain his restraint to another guard: "Oh, so I could have CNN standing next to my car in the parking lot tomorrow? No, thank you." As long as Kiriakou did not name guards individually, the administration tolerated his reporting.

Overcriminalization, more broadly

Kiriakou uses two cases outside his own to illustrate what he calls reflexive federal overcriminalization. A NOAA employee in Honolulu running weekend whale-watching tours was charged with a felony for interfering with the feeding of a wild animal under the Endangered Species Act, after a tourist, not she, whistled at feeding orcas; she fought the case for six years before pleading to a reduced charge, losing her boat, job, pension, and savings in the process. In a second case, a former colleague from Kiriakou's time as an adjunct professor at Liberty University had his wife arrested, a felony, after police, responding to a neighbor's burglary, found her prescription pills stored in a labeled weekly pill organizer rather than their original bottles. The couple fought the case for a year, pleading down to a misdemeanor with a fine and a year of probation.

Diesel therapy

Kiriakou describes diesel therapy, the Bureau of Prisons practice of continually transferring a targeted prisoner between facilities by bus and plane, without access to a phone, computer, or even pen and paper, so that no one, including family or attorneys, can determine the person's location. He cites Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah as an example of how little leverage even a sitting federal lawmaker has with the Bureau: a constituent's son in federal custody suddenly stopped responding to calls and letters, and when Lee called the prison directly and identified himself, the staffer who answered told him, "You have a lot of nerve calling here," and hung up. Kiriakou says his own Letter from Loretto blog series resulted in explicit threats of solitary confinement and diesel therapy, and that the resulting standoff with the administration kept him in prison roughly six months longer than he otherwise would have been.

His prison blog

An attorney had set up a 600-person mailing list to circulate updates on Kiriakou's condition. About six weeks in, he wrote his first piece, calling it "Letter from Loretto," consciously modeled on Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail." The book that grew from the same writing habit, Doing Time Like a Spy, began as a joke, notes on the more absurd things that happened to him, never originally intended as a book.

"Letter from Loretto," which recounted the Iraqi-Kurd entrapment attempt described above, went viral after Arianna Huffington picked it up on the Huffington Post. The attention brought journalist Jake Tapper, then with ABC News, later CNN, to Loretto to interview Kiriakou in person, requiring him to sign a waiver at the lieutenant's office; it also drew The Economist, The Atlantic, CNN, Playboy, Time, and NPR (twice). When Tapper asked what his biggest daily challenge was, Kiriakou pointed at the warden, who was sitting beside him during the interview.

Kiriakou leveraged the resulting media access to keep writing consistently about prison conditions, medical care, and guard-encouraged violence, so long as he avoided naming individual guards.

Release and aftermath

Kiriakou was released from FCI Loretto on February 3, 2015, after serving 23 months. He received no halfway-house time (see above), moving instead directly to a halfway house where 110 men were competing for a single listed job, dishwasher at Fuddruckers, under a 30-day deadline to find work or be sent back to prison. As a convicted felon he was turned down for work by Uber, DoorDash, local grocery stores, and as a diner dishwasher, and was fired at the end of his first day as a baggage-handler at Reagan National Airport once his conviction was discovered.

The Obama Justice Department seized his federal pension; Kiriakou says he subsequently went through an eight-year custody battle, went bankrupt, and still owes more than a million dollars to attorneys he cannot repay. Around the same time, his congressman publicly called on the president to pardon him, and the author of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the law Kiriakou was convicted under, wrote the president a letter stating Kiriakou should never have been convicted under it. Welcome-home calls came from Yoko Ono and Oliver Stone, and Roger Waters paid his mortgage.

Senator John McCain's office separately arranged to have his pension restored: within days of Kiriakou's release, McCain's legislative director called offering to help, and McCain's staff, together with Kiriakou's attorney, drafted a one-sentence private-relief bill, slipped into the roughly 3,000-page National Defense Authorization Act, stating that "every American convicted of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act between October 1st and October 31st, 2012 shall hereby have his federal pension reinstated", wording that, by design, applied to Kiriakou alone. McCain intended to secure his own appointment to the conference committee reconciling the House and Senate versions of the bill to push it through, but was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, and died before he could complete it. Kiriakou attributes McCain's sympathy specifically to the torture issue, noting McCain's own roughly seven years of torture as a POW in North Vietnam left him unable to fully raise his arms.

In mid-2026, the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons called Kiriakou to invite him onto an informal advisory council on reforming the agency. Kiriakou agreed, but told the director bluntly that the Bureau would not succeed: "You guys are corrupt from the very top to the very bottom and everybody in between." His first recommendation, offered as a self-described lifelong union member, was to break the prison guards' union, which he says exists to "support corruption."

How he ended up inside the fence

Kiriakou was not sentenced to the prison. His attorneys asked the judge for a minimum-security work camp, the prosecution did not object, and she granted it. He drove himself to the camp to surrender, the system, he notes, works by knocking on the door and saying you are there to turn yourself in, and was told to go across the street to the main prison to be processed and brought back. Instead he was walked round to the back of the prison. Told that he was supposed to be at the camp, the officer laughed and said: "not according to my paperwork. You're not."

It took four or five days to reach his lawyers, who told him a motion would take two years to be heard, by which time the sentence would have run. He stayed.

He draws a direct causal line from that misassignment to everything he subsequently published. Had the designation held, he says, the record would have been silence: "if they had sent me to the camp I would have minded my own business, I would have kept my mouth shut, kept my head down, I would have done my twenty-three months, I would have gone home." What followed instead was a decision: "because they screwed me and stuck me in the prison, I was determined to tell my story, and so that's exactly what I did."

He describes the same shock in operational terms. He told himself on arrival to keep a low profile, say nothing and get the lay of the land, and reckons it took about a week to move out of shock and into what he calls operational mode, "anytime somebody goes to prison you're in shock ... you can't believe that you're there." The enemy he names is not the violence but the monotony: "it's groundhog day every single day ... there's nothing to do, and people actually go crazy." He cites a study putting the share of American prisoners suffering some form of mental illness at eighty-five per cent, and says confinement makes it worse.

The guards and the cameras

Asked whether federal custody could plausibly have produced the death of Jeffrey Epstein, Kiriakou offered Loretto as his evidence of how such institutions actually run, while noting he was at Loretto and not the Metropolitan Detention Center, and that MDC holds far more dangerous people than a rural low-security prison.

His account of the staff is blunt: the guards are lazy, asleep in the booth or on the telephone with their girlfriends or looking at pornography on the computer. They are supposed to walk the unit every fifteen minutes, and every eight minutes where a prisoner is on suicide watch. "I never saw those guys. They walk into the booth for their eight hour shift and they walk out eight hours later for the very first time."

The cameras are the second half of the account, "the cameras never work", and Kiriakou notes that in Epstein's case this may have been counted on rather than merely exploited. His illustration is his own job: as janitor in the chapel he had to clear the men who were having sex out of the room before every religious service could be set up, and the reason they were there at all was that the cameras did not work.

Sex offenders and the visiting room

A recurring subject in the letters from Loretto is the prison's handling of prisoners convicted of sex offences against children. Kiriakou's charge is that there was no treatment of any kind for them, no therapy and no medication, and that they consequently found a community of like-minded defenders inside, moving in groups, sitting together in the cafeteria, taking prisoner-led classes together and congregating in the library and the chapel, all protesting their innocence.

His sharpest example is administrative. The warden circulated a memo inviting all inmates to join the Bureau in celebrating United Nations Universal Children's Day, announcing a celebration over the weekend of 30 November to 1 December 2013 with materials available for each family with visiting children aged three to ten. Kiriakou's objection was that in a facility housing untreated sex offenders, the memo gave those prisoners advance warning of a children's event so that they could schedule their own visits accordingly, placing them in the presence of young children across two days.

He had a personal stake in the argument. In a third letter from Loretto he described a guard having to move his entire family during a visit because another prisoner was leering at his nine-year-old son, and posed the question directly: if sex offenders must stay more than 1,000 feet from a school on the outside, why are they permitted within five feet of his children in the visiting room?

Being watched

Kiriakou distinguishes between his actual friends inside and the wider circle of prisoners he was merely friendly with, a core group of friends plus perhaps another two dozen acquaintances. That distinction mattered, because one of those acquaintances was used as the intermediary in what he describes as an attempt to manufacture a second case against him; see the Taliban spokesman setup.

The warden's own objection to the letters, in Kiriakou's account, was that they embarrassed him by showing he was running what amounted to an organised crime operation out of the prison. The CIA's objection was different: the entire point of prosecuting him had been to silence him, and instead the prosecution had made him famous and given him a voice.

Arrival date

Kiriakou gives his arrival at the prison as 28 February 2013.

The Afghan prisoner

One of the more difficult episodes Kiriakou recounts concerns an Afghan prisoner, a man who had lost an arm to an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan, who was serving a sentence for a child sex offence, and whom Kiriakou describes as a very devout Shia Muslim and as certifiably insane, a judgement he says any psychiatrist in America would have shared.

The man's behaviour in the unit, which had no windows, and in which large fans ran constantly against the heat, included indecent exposure in front of the fans, conduct Kiriakou warned him would get him stabbed.

Kiriakou is explicit that what followed was deliberate and joint: knowing the man was mentally ill, he and another prisoner plotted to push him over the edge in order to have him transferred to another prison and be rid of him. The other prisoner emptied the man's locker of all its contents while Kiriakou was deliberately elsewhere on the yard, so that suspicion would fall on the man who had been seen doing similar things before. Kiriakou's own contribution was to draw on the man's prayer rug, his most prized possession, in marker pen, twice, after which the man tore off and discarded the defaced portion.

The man suffered a mental breakdown. Kiriakou ran to the unit manager's office to report it; officers and a member of the medical staff arrived, handcuffed him while he was screaming and swearing, and took him to solitary confinement, after which he was transferred to another prison, the intended outcome.

Kiriakou also names his bunkmate at the time as Frank Russo, the former auditor general of Cuyahoga County, Ohio, who he says was arrested while running for governor of Ohio and would have won, describing him as a natural politician.

See also

- Diesel Therapy
- John Kiriakou
- John Brennan
- Plato Cacheris
- Mark McDougall
- Louis Farrakhan
- Jeffrey Epstein
