Ali from Newark was the Black shot caller at FCI Loretto during John Kiriakou’s imprisonment, and the subject of one of the few unambiguously warm episodes in Kiriakou’s prison account. He described the man on the DeProgram programme in July 2025, in answer to a viewer asking whether his prison had been racially segregated in the way the California system is reported to be.[1]
The rule he broke
Kiriakou agreed that the segregation was total — “absolutely, everything” — and that at higher security levels contact across racial lines was actively punished: “you cannot have any contact with other races because you’re then branded a race traitor.” Even playing cards was out.[1]
He says he refused the arrangement from the start, and that the refusal was deliberate rather than accidental: “I made a conscious decision when I first arrived — and I say that in my book — I made a conscious decision to ignore those racial divisions.”[1]
Ali
The man he names is “the black shot caller, a guy named Ali from Newark,” who “was at the tail end of a 25-year drug charge.”[1]
What Kiriakou did for him was practical and unglamorous. “I helped him. I wrote his résumé for him,” he says.[1][2]
The repayment came at the end of Kiriakou’s sentence: Ali “came over to hug me and to tell me how much he respected me.”[1] Asked how any of it had been possible given the rules, Kiriakou’s answer was a single sentence: “Because I refused to respect those racial divisions.”[2]
Where the objections came from
The pushback did not arrive from the quarter the host expected. Asked whether white prisoners had given him trouble for it, Kiriakou said no: “I got shit from the Hispanics.”[2]
His reaction to that was incomprehension rather than injury. He describes the internal divisions among Hispanic prisoners as finer and more numerous than the ones the prison enforced — “the Mexicans hate the Puerto Ricans and the Puerto Ricans hate the Dominicans and the Dominicans hate the Costa Ricans” — and calls the whole structure ridiculous: “you guys all look exactly the same to me and you all hate each other. I just never understood it.”[3]