Kiriakou devotes a substantial part of his account of FCI Loretto to the correctional officers who ran it. His general charge is that abusive conduct was against Bureau regulations, that nobody enforced those regulations, and that whenever anyone tried, the officers covered for each other — with the observation that laws become useless when the people tasked with enforcing them choose instead to ignore them.[1]
Yardley and Graham
Two officers, whom Kiriakou names as Yardley and Graham, tried to trick him into fighting an Iraqi Kurdish prisoner — conduct he describes as both unethical and entirely illegal.[2]
Graham was the elder and, in Kiriakou’s telling, the more hapless. He claimed to know everything happening at Loretto and to have sources throughout the prison, a claim undercut by the inflatable rat he kept on his desk — a display of contempt that made it hard to believe any prisoner would risk his safety to inform for him. Kiriakou’s assessment is that Graham knew nothing, including that his wife, also an officer at Loretto, was having a sustained affair with a Puerto Rican prisoner until she was caught and fired.[3][4]
The matter came to a head in the strip-search room, where all prisoners are searched after visits. Returning from a family visit and finding Graham conducting the searches, Kiriakou made a pointed remark about the assignment as he undressed. Graham said, “You exhaust me,” sighed, and proposed a truce, which Kiriakou accepted.[4][5]
The lieutenant
The lieutenant who confronted Kiriakou over a remark made on a monitored telephone call had, according to Kiriakou, worked in and been forced out of several other prisons and had sexually harassed a wide variety of women both inside and outside the prison. Kiriakou reports personally hearing him berate an inmate in obscene terms for standing in a hallway between moves.[1] The confrontation itself is described in prison phone monitoring.
Hera
An officer Kiriakou calls Hera figures in an incident at a set of doors, in which Kiriakou’s friend Dave suggested it would be easier for everyone if both doors were unlocked. Hera took this as a challenge, demanded to know who Dave thought he was, and called him “insolent” — another officer code word, in this case meaning that the prisoner is going to solitary. Kiriakou stayed as a witness; he credits his presence with keeping Hera honest, and Hera relented.[6][7]
‘Sarge’
The officer Kiriakou calls Sarge — who had earlier called him an obscenity and trashed his room — he describes as the meanest and angriest officer at Loretto. He wrote about her abusive language toward the prisoners in her charge in one of his first letters from Loretto, and in doing so, without intending to, blew the whistle on her: the conduct he described amounted to a regulatory violation carrying a two-week unpaid suspension.[5][8]
He was called to the Special Investigative Service office and asked to swear out a complaint, which he did. Several days later the warden transferred Sarge out of his unit and reassigned her to driving a car around the outside of the compound while the yard was open. She remained in that exile for six months. On her return as the afternoon shift officer in his housing unit, she summoned him to the officers’ office and told him never to speak to her again; he told her to stay away from him.[8][9]
The exceptions
Kiriakou’s account is not uniform. He describes the unit manager as one of the very few people there he did not hate — a decent, reasonable man who warned him that the warden and assistant warden were gunning for him and that he might want to take measures to protect himself.[10] He also notes that as he left his unit expecting to be sent to solitary, one of the few good officers wished him luck.[11] Notably, he says he cannot remember any of their names, and suspects it is a psychological defence mechanism.[10]