The forty-seven suffix is a detail of federal prisoner numbering that John Kiriakou describes as a formal marker of gang affiliation, offered on the DeProgram programme in July 2025 while answering a viewer’s question about which prisoners stood at the top of the hierarchy.[1]
The marker
Kiriakou states the rule flatly. “If you’re in an organised gang — MS-13, Bloods, Crips, Mexican Mafia, Borrachos, Norteños, all these guys — your prisoner number ends with the number -47. 47 means organised gang.”[1]
He does not explain who assigns the designation or on what evidence, and does not claim it is secret. It functions in his account as a piece of open administrative record-keeping that happens to encode something the Bureau of Prisons does not otherwise announce.
Why he brings it up
The suffix was not the point in itself. Kiriakou introduced it to make an argument about the Italians, and specifically to head off the objection that they were somehow a different category of prisoner: “Well, the Italians were also 47s.”[1][2]
On the official record, in other words, the Italian prisoners were classified exactly as the Bloods and MS-13 were. The distinction Kiriakou draws is one of size and standing rather than status: “of all the gangs, the Italians were by far the smallest and by far the most highly respected.”[2]
The hierarchy it sits inside
The remark belongs to a longer account of prison rank that Kiriakou gave in the same passage. Asked whether the ordering worked as viewers imagined — with child sex offenders at the bottom — he confirmed it and completed the scale: “The chomos are at the very, very bottom. The rats are barely above the chomos. The Italians were at the very top. Very, very top.”[3]
Pressed on what separated an Italian prisoner from anyone Italian, he answered that membership was not ethnic but organisational — “you have to be connected in some way” — and that the network’s reach preceded arrival: “the Italian network is very strong, and so they’ll know weeks in advance that you’re coming to the prison.”[3]