Robert the arsonist is the prisoner John Kiriakou uses to illustrate the fourth of the recruitment motivations in his rules for prison survival: excitement.
Robert was Australian, and had been convicted of burning down a Department of Motor Vehicles office in Buffalo, New York, over a sales tax dispute. He and Kiriakou became friendly at FCI Loretto and later roommates. Kiriakou describes him as extremely gregarious, always joking, always wanting to be involved in everything.[1]
It also became clear to him quite quickly, he says, that Robert was a clinical sociopath who would have checked every single box on Robert Hare’s revised psychopathy checklist — among them pathological lying, which Kiriakou says Robert exhibited fully.[2]
Why that mattered
The assessment was operational rather than diagnostic. Kiriakou’s framework holds that a man like Robert would rarely be motivated by greed or ideology, and — given the personality — rarely by revenge either. What Robert was, above all, was an excitement junkie, “and that made it easy to manipulate him. I just had to make him feel, well, involved.”[3]
The caution Kiriakou attaches to the type applies to Robert too: impulsive thrill-seekers are the trickiest to control, and they are the ones who get caught.[1]
The judgement also connects to Kiriakou’s long-running argument about who ends up in the CIA: that the agency seeks people with sociopathic tendencies rather than sociopaths, because the latter are impossible to manage — a distinction he applies with the same vocabulary inside prison as outside it.[3]