The stinger was the improvised heating device prisoners at FCI Loretto used to cook. John Kiriakou describes it in detail because it is the answer to a question he says he never asked at the time: how the food he was eating was being produced.[1]
Construction
The device was a piece of metal — Kiriakou specifies something like the faceplate from a wall plug — attached to two live wires. The faceplate went into a bucket of water and the wires went directly into a wall outlet. The current boiled the water quickly.[2]
Food to be cooked went into a plastic bag, which then went into the boiling water. Pasta could be cooked directly in the water, with no bag needed.[2]
Kiriakou’s assessment of the method is blunt: as cooking methods go, it is incredibly dangerous. He adds that cooking this way happened every single day, and that 99 times out of 100 correctional officers would simply ignore it.[2]
What it produced
The stinger is what lay behind the meals Kiriakou describes among the Italians — pasta with three cheeses, shredded chicken, fresh tomatoes, mushrooms, basil, a great deal of garlic and a delicate white wine sauce, with dinner always served at eight.[3]
He attributes the cooking to his closest friend inside, Mark Lanzalotti, saying Lanzalotti made fine dining, restaurant-quality Italian food with a garbage bucket full of water and a live electrical wire, and calling it mind-blowing how clever people can be when they really want something.[1] Elsewhere he says what Lanzalotti could do with that equipment was miraculous, and credits him with the 35 pounds Kiriakou gained in prison.[4]
The death of an officer
Kiriakou recounts one occasion on which an officer did not ignore the practice. The officer made a scene and screamed at a prisoner for cooking, demanding to know how many times he had to say there was to be no cooking.[2]
The prisoner pulled the stinger out of the water by the wire — still attached to the wall socket — and tossed it to the officer, who caught it without thinking. He was electrocuted, and Kiriakou says he died in hospital three days later.[5]