Truck was the prison nickname of a convicted serial killer held at FCI Loretto during John Kiriakou’s sentence, and one of the men Kiriakou uses to illustrate how far he says he went during his time inside.[1]
The crimes
In Kiriakou’s account, Truck picked up prostitutes, had sex with them, and — not wanting to pay them — strangled them, then drove a couple of hundred miles with the bodies beside him before throwing them out at the roadside. The FBI knew a serial killer was operating during what Kiriakou calls the golden age of serial killers, roughly 1970 to 1990, but did not know where to look.[2]
He was caught when a 16-year-old he picked up at a truck stop and strangled survived. Because she was 16, Kiriakou notes, that technically made him a chomo — a designation about which he says Truck was very, very sensitive.[2][3]
The approach
Kiriakou describes Truck as an enormous man, at least six foot four and perhaps 350 pounds, with a handful of rotten blackened stumps for teeth and the worst breath Kiriakou had ever encountered.[3]
For reasons Kiriakou says were never clear to him, Truck constantly sought his approval. Their first exchange was almost belligerent — Truck demanding to know whether Kiriakou was the CIA man, and Kiriakou bracing for a fight. Truck then claimed to have done some work for the CIA in Vietnam, and afterwards to have run guns to the Angolan rebels in a shrimp boat.[4]
Kiriakou did not accept it. He told Truck a shrimp boat could not travel thirty miles, let alone the long way across the Atlantic to Angola, and to think of a better story — then walked away. One of the Italians warned him afterwards that Truck was one dangerous son of a bitch, and Kiriakou says he asked himself why he was challenging such a man.[4][5]
The rebuff had the opposite of the expected effect. Instead of angering Truck it made him more determined to win Kiriakou’s approval — something Kiriakou says he still does not understand.[5] Truck would save him a seat in the television room for Steelers games, which Kiriakou notes meant punching whoever’s seat it was, and would pass on tips such as the frequency of a new classic rock station. Kiriakou says he worked hard not to anger him.[6]
Truck was also frequently in solitary confinement for beating pedophile cellmates, usually over trivial provocations — one turned on a light while he was napping, another was snoring.[6][7]
The Raviv beating
Kiriakou used Truck deliberately. He had refused to let Larry Raviv, a murder-for-hire convict, move into his cell, which he says sent Raviv into a rage.[8][9]
On a day when Kiriakou had been called to the lieutenant’s office to sign a waiver for a television interview with Jake Tapper, Raviv — standing at the email computers, unaware Kiriakou was sitting two feet behind him watching football with Truck — told another prisoner that Kiriakou had gone down there to inform on them, and called him a rat.[10][11]
Kiriakou did not react. Truck asked whether he had heard it. Kiriakou leaned over and told Truck that an hour earlier he had heard Raviv call Truck a pedophile.[11][12]
Truck said nothing, got up, and beat Raviv unconscious. Kiriakou stayed in his seat and watched the game — and notes that when the alarm sounded he was the only man who had not scattered, with Raviv on the ground and Truck covered in blood.[12][13]
Called to the lieutenant’s office and told he had been seen on four cameras, Kiriakou applied his standing rule to admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations, suggesting the officers had staged the fight themselves. He was told to get out of the office.[14][15]
Truck was sent to solitary, formally charged with assault, and had five years added to his forty-year sentence. Raviv was airlifted to Pittsburgh with a skull fracture and returned six weeks later to apologise.[16]