The shank planting incident was an episode at FCI Loretto that John Kiriakou recounts as an example of a risk he judged plain stupid, and which ended the presence in his circle of the man who claimed to be a former CIA officer.[1]
Kiriakou is careful to place himself on a spectrum rather than at one end of it. He describes himself as a risk taker, always a risk taker, a major risk taker — and then draws the line at things that are simply stupid.[1]
The plan
Dave Phillips made two weapons: a slashing weapon from a razor blade dug out of a disposable razor, and a stabbing weapon from an uncoiled spring. The intended target was a pedophile with whom the group was in a dispute.[2]
Phillips asked Kiriakou whether he wanted to come along and plant them. Kiriakou’s answer was that he did not want to be within a hundred feet of shanks, because he was going home in a year.[2]
The outcome
The weapons were planted. Phillips then anonymously informed on the pedophile as being in possession of them. Guards raided the cell and found the shanks, which Kiriakou notes were not particularly well hidden, and arrested the pedophile — and then arrested Phillips too, because they knew the group had been feuding with the man.[3]
The pedophile was sent to a prison in New Jersey and Phillips to a prison in Ohio.[3]
The interview
Kiriakou was then called to the lieutenant’s office, where officers told him that the only reason he had not been put in solitary confinement and shipped to another prison was that they had not seen him on the security cameras going to the housing unit where the pedophile lived.[4]
Kiriakou’s reply was that he did not go to that unit because it was full of pedophiles. Told he was being a funny guy, he said he did not know what they were talking about — that they called him down all the time and talked as though he understood, and he did not. He states plainly in the retelling that he knew exactly what they were talking about, and cites his own operating rule: admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations.[4]
He closes the account with the outcome that mattered to him — Phillips was gone, the pedophile was gone, and he was not.[4] The same pattern recurs later in his sentence in the case of Ken Schaefer, where a fight broke up a group and left Kiriakou the only man in it still at Loretto.[5]