S2E15 The Home Stretch

IN THIS EPISODE When John first entered the gates of Loretto Federal Prison, his goal was to use all his training as a spy to survive prison. But, just as with spying, prison can be very unpredictable. In fact, John found that he'd been fooled by one of his roommates - who'd been betraying him from the jump. As he enters the home stretch of his sentence, John doubles down on his mission to use everything he learned as a spy to survive prison to the bitter end. SHOW NOTES If you enjoy this podcast, please check out our whole exciting range of podcasts at Costard & Touchstone Productions costardandtouchstone.com. Your next podcast obsession is just a click away! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 2:01John Kiriakou?

  This podcast, it's a Coster and Touchstone production. One of the core elements in life in prison is this. Roommates come and roommates go. That's both a good thing and a bad thing, of course, depending on the roommate, or cellmate, since it's prison. But we've thought of them more or less as our rooms. On the plus side, even if you got stuck with an idiot or a child molester, the chances are very good that before too long, either he'll move on to another room for whatever reason, or he'll get released, or end up in solitary. Having a good room with good people, who you mostly like and can get along with, makes a huge difference. People's annoying habits get magnified inside cramped spaces.

• 2:46John Kiriakou?

  That's why good rooms deserve the extra work they demand to keep them as good as possible.

• 2:53John Kiriakou?

  A few episodes back, I told you the story about Schaefer, the chomo with a taste for ballet. Dave had planted a shank in Schaefer's cell. That had gotten rid of Schaefer, but at the cost of Dave getting sent to the SHU, to solitary. When shit like that happens, a prisoner's friend circle should act, and I mean act quickly, as we did for Dave. Even before Dave was out of the unit, Frank and I were beelining for Dave's locker to clean it out and get it squared away before the cops got to it. If your friends don't do anything with your stuff, the cops will just set aside the uniforms for reuse and then throw everything else away. Food, books, legal paperwork, whatever you have in there.

• 3:36John Kiriakou?

  Sometimes, there can be a surprising amount of stuff for people locked up in prison. Frank and I got two empty laundry bags and filled them with Dave's belongings, which we then stowed under our own bunks. Except, Dave wouldn't be rejoining the room. The SIS told me not long after they took Dave, that was going to be the case. It was a little strange. Dave hadn't received a charge or even a disciplinary report related to Schaefer, but then Dave was extremely unpopular among the Arians and other whites who sat at the front table. That's because Dave constantly accused everybody he disliked of being either a rat or a chomo. Rats especially. The three white shot callers had gone to SIS

• 4:20John Kiriakou?

  to say that they couldn't guarantee Dave's safety on the yard if he came back. In fact, they wouldn't guarantee his safety. That was none too subtle code for, "If you let him out, someone is going to beat the shit out of him, and we're not going to stop them." I went back to our room and I told Frank. Then I gathered Dave's legal paperwork and mailed it to his attorneys. I sent his books to his grandmother, and I gave his clothes to indigent prisoners. Several of Dave's books were actually my books. I had loaned them to Dave, so I just simply returned them to my own locker. But when I picked up one of the books that I had lent Dave, a piece of paper fell out. Hmm.

• 5:00John Kiriakou?

  On the paper, in Dave's handwriting, was, quote, "rat list," unquote. A list of people and an accounting of bad things that they had done that the list itself indicated Dave had taken to the cops. Holy shit, my friend Dave was a rat. This was stone-cold proof in his own handwriting. But what made it exponentially worse? The very first name on top of Dave's rat list was mine, and he had already ratted me out.

• 5:40John Kiriakou?

  I'm John Kiriakou. Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick? This is episode 15 in our series, Doing Time Like a Spy. As always, we thank you for listening and liking and rating, reviewing, and commenting on the podcast wherever you happen to be listening to it.

• 5:58John Kiriakou?

  As I've mentioned here, the thing that scares most spies is whatever they don't know. I didn't know. I hadn't a fucking clue that the guy I thought had my back was in fact stabbing it repeatedly. Now Dave, Dave Phillips, and I had had an actual history together. In fact, I first met Dave in Pakistan in 2002. I was there working counterterrorism for the CIA, looking for Al Qaeda's leadership. Dave had been working for a defense contractor, doing intelligence work. That's how Dave flew under my radar. We knew each other very briefly at best, but there was evidence backing up a claim. Then I went my way, and Dave went his way.

• 6:42John Kiriakou?

  I got into my trouble, and Dave got into... Well, he had told me a story, a very detailed, very elaborate story about how he ended up being charged with unauthorized access of a secure database and hindrance of national security. That's a felony. Though he maintained his innocence, and believe me, I could relate. The federal government did what they usually do and piled lots of other charges on him, all designed to make him give up. And I could definitely relate to that, too. Facing 54 years in prison, Dave, so he told us, took a nine-year plea deal instead. And then we bumped into each other again at Loretto, because, you know, small world, and became friends.

• 7:27John Kiriakou?

  I thought I had a fix on Dave and who he was. As a result, I just stopped looking at him. But that was a costly mistake. Every time I wrote one of my letters from Loretto blog posts, I would make several copies. One for the publishers of FireDogLake.com, one for my attorney, one for myself, and one for Dave. I made one for Dave because he said that he would keep a copy of each letter for me at an undisclosed location, so that in the event that I was shaken down by the COs and my copies of the letters were confiscated, I would still have Dave's hidden copies at my disposal. Dave was the safety. Because I wouldn't know where Dave had stashed his copies, I couldn't betray them.

• 8:09John Kiriakou?

  Now, I had assumed Dave hid the letters somewhere in our friend Art's room. Had he been hiding them, that's probably where he would have done it. But that wasn't the case. In reality, Dave was passing them to the unit manager, a former SIS officer, who then passed them on to the SIS. Dave was an active conduit to the cops. Foolish me. I had violated my own rules to live by. One of the most basic rules of being a spy: trust nobody. Dave's list had many names on it, and each name got punished for being there. The cops tore apart my friend Mark Lanzalotti's room because his name was on the list.

• 8:54John Kiriakou?

  As I told you a few episodes back, Mark was a bookie, as well as a chef. They took 1,200 books of stamps from Mark's cell and put him permanently out of the bookie business. Good thing he was still a cook. Another entry on Dave's list ratted out our friend and former neighbor Luke. Luke robbed a series of banks in western Virginia. That's what got him into trouble. He had a stash of hardcore adult porn hidden in his locker. And that'll get you in trouble every time. On top of that, he was writing a quote-unquote "novel", just like a thousand other prisoners. Luke's problem, though, was that he'd staged a kill party scene right there in the notebook's pages.

• 9:38John Kiriakou?

  In the scene, Luke invited his judge, prosecutors, his co-defendant, and even his own attorneys to a Christmas party where he blew them all away in a hail of machine gun fire. Not only did the prison authorities haul Luke off to the SHU, they upgraded him to a medium-security prison. Talk about rookie mistakes. Of course, there were dozens of other entries for Schaefer, the child molester, and for an arsonist named Al with whom Dave feuded constantly. Everyone who offended Dave in any way was in there, including a staff member with whom I had a conversation about pedophiles. When Dave reported the conversation, he exaggerated what everyone said.

• 10:22John Kiriakou?

  When the SIS called me in to make a sworn statement, it was easy to tell the officer truthfully that her rat, whoever he was, was lying, as rats do. But Dave was just getting started. How's this for both bizarre and brazen? When Dave landed at his next prison, he wrote a letter to my wife, which he followed up with a phone call to her. He told her how he had stood up for me while he was in the SHU. He told her that SIS had visited him several times to ask him for any information they could use against me, even if he had to make it up, but that he had held firm. That was all bullshit, of course. SIS could have thrown me into solitary for up to six months, quote, "pending investigation," unquote, for literally no reason whatsoever.

• 11:09John Kiriakou?

  They didn't need Dave's help for that. But Dave was just getting started. When I first got to Loretto, one of my best friends got me a subscription to Vanity Fair, my favorite magazine. The subscription had stopped around the time Dave went to the shoe. Four months later, my subscribing friend emailed me and said, "Do you still want Vanity Fair? The magazine is being told that it's undeliverable and that the name on the subscription is changed from yours to somebody named Dave Phillips." "Who?" my friend asked, "is Dave Phillips?" Who indeed? I certainly thought I knew who he was. This string of events reminded me of a conversation I had had with an attorney friend about a year earlier.

• 11:53John Kiriakou?

  Dave was appealing his sentence and was looking for an attorney. He asked if my friend might be a good fit. So I told my lawyer friend about Dave. He said he'd look up the case and consider it. A few months passed. My lawyer friend then returned for another visit. He told me that he had decided not to take Dave's case. I was genuinely surprised, and I asked why. My friend said that he had gone through the whole case, top to bottom, side to side, and concluded that our friend Dave was really nothing more than just a common criminal. He was a con man. And it was true! When I was finally able to Google Dave myself, what I found infuriated me. He wasn't just a con man. He was more.

• 12:36John Kiriakou?

  His sentencing judge had called him "a brazen con man." Now, our meetup in Pakistan was real. Dave had ever so briefly been a contractor for a company hired by the CIA. But aside from that, Dave never worked at the CIA. And everything else he said about the agency was pure, unadulterated bullshit. His actual criminal behavior was unrelated to spying and completely related to ripping off his friends and relatives. He had gotten credit cards in the name of his elderly grandparents and his own daughter. He scammed a former girlfriend and old friends from high school. In short, Dave was a financial predator and a scumbag.

• 13:22John Kiriakou?

  I went back to the conversations we had had while walking together around the track at Loretto, where Dave would spin these stories about his operations and the awards that he had won for heroism. Looking back, there were always things that bothered me about those conversations. While Dave could generally talk the talk, pretty convincingly, he made a lot of silly mistakes with the jargon. He'd mention training courses that he had supposedly attended, but he would get the locations wrong. I knew that because I had taken several of those same courses, and I knew for a fact where they were held. It wasn't where Dave said they were held. If I had not taken Dave and his supposed past for granted, I might have bumped a little

• 14:04John Kiriakou?

  harder against his not knowing any of the CIA's key players, despite Dave having a 25-year career at the CIA. How can you work at the CIA for 25 years and not know who the Deputy Director for Operations is? It's not possible. But I had taken Dave's career for granted because I had bumped into him in context. I had become vulnerable to his invention. Dave went to the shoe on May 1st, 2014. My roommates and I kept the bed open for two weeks, thinking initially that, upon his release, Dave would probably come back. But then Frank, Beard, and I heard finally that he was being shipped off to another prison. With that, we began our search for a new roommate.

• 14:50John Kiriakou?

  There was Doc Grievous, a Medicare fraud doctor from Long Island. He wanted a lower bunk, but that wasn't on the table, so pass. There was Chin, a crooked and incontinent concrete mogul. The man with unconcrete bowels needed to be closer to the toilet than our room was, so pass. There was Joey the Kid, the cook, my first choice. But Joey was out of favor with the counselor in charge of bed assignments. That wasn't gonna happen either. So the bed sat empty for five weeks. In the meantime, my friend Mark Lanzalotti received an email from one of his attorneys that asked him to be on the lookout for another of his clients, a new prisoner named Sher Maulani.

• 15:33John Kiriakou?

  Now, I told part of Sher's story a few episodes back. That is, I told the headlines about how we dealt with him. But it's worth a deeper dive. Sher was a naturalized citizen from Afghanistan. He had immigrated to the US in 1980 after the Soviet Union invaded his country. Sher landed in Washington DC's Virginia suburbs, where cab driving made ends meet. Then, September 11th happened. A defense contractor recruited Sher as a translator for American forces in Afghanistan. During an operation in eastern Afghanistan, Sher's armored Humvee hit an improvised explosive device and flipped upside down.

• 16:13John Kiriakou?

  Enemy fire raked the vehicle, killing everyone who wasn't already dead, except Sher and one American soldier. They crawled through a broken window. When Sher stood to try and run, a Taliban fighter shot him in the shoulder and the stomach with an AK-47. The American soldier pulled him down, called in reinforcements, and tried to staunch the flow of blood pouring from Sher. Eventually, they were rescued. Sher was near death as a medical team worked on him at a field hospital. From there, he was sent to a US military hospital in Germany where they amputated his mangled arm just below the shoulder. He lay in a coma for six weeks.

• 16:56John Kiriakou?

  When he finally awoke, surrounded by family, his body was a complete and total wreck. His right arm was gone, and he had one of the gnarliest scars anyone had ever seen, courtesy of the bullet that had "grazed" his stomach. The scar, shaped like a diamond and about the size of a football, stretched from his breastbone to his pubic bone and was nearly a foot across at the center. The resulting mess had moved Sher's belly button from where it was supposed to be, at his belly, to his side. It can be mind-boggling what bullets and bombs can do to human flesh.

• 17:40John Kiriakou?

  As you can imagine, PTSD became a constant and unwelcome companion. So on top of his broken body, unable to do even basic tasks, there was rage at everyone and everything. Sher got a multimillion-dollar legal settlement. He had therapy and drugs for the PTSD and the depression, but the rage, the rage is what won out. One day during an argument with his family, Sher beat his wife and threw a vase through a brand-new 72-inch TV. He was arrested and sentenced to six months of anger management classes.

• 18:21John Kiriakou?

  His psychiatrist suggested that he volunteer to return to Afghanistan and confront his demons there. And that's what he did! Working as a translator, Sher made several trips per year, spending most of his time in-country at the US Air Force Base at Bagram. Mark, wanting to do right by his lawyer, hoped I could track Sher down, bond over our common experiences, and make him feel comfortable when he arrived. Perhaps I could take him over to the chapel and, for example, introduce him to the other Muslims there. Five weeks after Dave's departure—sorry, I have hiccups—five weeks after Dave's

• 18:59John Kiriakou?

  departure, a CO delivered a 5' 4" bearded, one-armed Afghan man to my room and said, "Here's your new cellie." We gave Sher a pair of shower shoes, a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, and shampoo, and I took him to the chapel to introduce him around and to get him a Quran. Also, I introduced Sher to Wahid, another Afghan inmate and a former pharmacist. So far, so good. Back in our room, I explained to Sher that we had a good room, in part, because we respected each other's privacy and because we were all honest with each other. "Look," I said, "I don't know anything about your crime, but everyone is gonna ask you. Everybody!

• 19:43John Kiriakou?

  You have to be honest if you hope to get along here." "So, he might as well just start right now." I looked him dead in the eye, and I said, "What did you do?" He smiled as if about to tell a joke and then he just threw up his hand. Silly craziness, as if that was an answer. Like, what did that even mean? I told him, "That is a really bad answer for prison. What did you do?" So now, he was searching for the right word. Maybe this one would answer the question. "Computer," he says finally. When you've lived at a place like Loretto long enough, a person in prison because of something they did involving a computer means only one thing.

• 20:28John Kiriakou?

  "Pictures on the computer?" I asked. "Pictures of children?" A reluctant pause, a resigned sigh, and then a meek, "Yeah." That was disappointing. I said, "You're gonna have to be honest about this." I told him that there were lots of people who would not talk to him or associate with him, and he would have to eat at the chomo table. Just then, Beard, one of our other roommates, walked in. A career criminal and drug dealer, Beard was unbelievably easy to get along with. In a lot of ways, he was really the perfect roommate. A drug dealer, as I said, from Lansing, Michigan, Beard actually liked prison.

• 21:09John Kiriakou?

  His routine every single day involved some combination of eating, sleeping, lifting weights, and watching TV. Strange as it might seem, from Beard's perspective, life was good. Having Beard as a roomie had unexpected benefits for me. He frequently offered surprisingly sage advice on a variety of subjects. His sagacity was the product of all those years spent in prison. And Beard was almost never in the room. He preferred hanging out at his reserved seat in the TV room. But he was back in the room now, and though he usually trusted Frank and me to handle the roommates, something about this new roommate stuck in his craw, like he sensed something.

• 21:53John Kiriakou?

  He cut right to the end of the chase. "What's your crime?" "I made a stupid mistake," said Cher, giving the wrong answer again. Beard knew exactly what the answer really meant. "We have rules in our room. Child molesters can't have visitors. Got it?" Cher nodded. "He got it." Beard looked at me, his eyes saying wearily, "Not another child molester." But that's what Cher was, and worse. He confessed to me in private one day just how much worse. Yes, there was a computer and a photo, but it turned out that Cher had been having what he called "an affair," again, his word, "with his 14-year-old niece."

• 22:39John Kiriakou?

  He got her to send him a nude photo of herself. That was the photo on Cher's computer. One day, Cher's teenage daughter saw the picture, this naked picture of her cousin on her dad's computer, and she called the police. They, in turn, called the FBI, who then arrested Cher. He took a plea and was sentenced to six years in federal prison. He seemed relieved, as if telling me this story had unburdened him. And then he said, "I forgive them," as if closing the book. "Forgive who?" "I forgive my niece and my daughter." That just triggered my indignation. Pedophiles always do this.

• 23:21John Kiriakou?

  As furious as it made me, I remembered my promise to try and ease Cher's way at Loretto. I told him, "That is not a healthy attitude for a whole bunch of reasons. My advice is that maybe you shouldn't talk about your crime at all." Cher's eyes lit up. Now he was triggered. He shouted at me, "If people don't like it, I will fuck them up the ass." Yeah, that was gonna win friends and influence fellow inmates. I took Cher to the chapel. I showed him where all the books on Islam were kept, and I introduced him to the chaplain and some of the other Muslims. One of the very few Shia Muslims in prison, Cher asked if he could buy any religious

• 24:06John Kiriakou?

  items that he might need. "Sure," said the chaplain. There was a catalog, and any inmate, including Cher, could order whatever they needed. Cher explained that what he would need was a ritual bowl in which to wash his penis and testicles before he prayed. "Seriously?" The chaplain looked at me. "Remember, I'm the guy with the degree in Middle Eastern Studies, with a concentration in Islamic theology." But that request was as new to me as it was to the chaplain. So Cher and I headed back to our room. As we walked, Cher said quite seriously, "I think he hates Muslims." "Yeah, sure, sure. That's what the problem here is."

• 24:51John Kiriakou?

  Like Beard, Cher enjoyed being in prison. He felt completely comfortable in prison. In fact, he saw prison as some kind of exclusive men's club. He slept most of the day, played soccer in the evenings, and then prayed all night long. He swore a lot at people he didn't know. That, I told him, was guaranteed to get him a hearty ass-kicking, especially since he was 54 years old, 140 pounds, short, stout, and had one arm. Cher was not a guy who was gonna defend himself easily. To top off the whole pile of bad roommate dynamics, he was a filthy slob, too.

• 25:36John Kiriakou?

  Absolutely filthy. He would return from playing soccer, drenched in sweat. He would take off his dirty, wet, smelly clothes and then drape them on our lockers. That included his wet, smelly, funky underwear, his socks, his shirt, his shorts, and his filthy towel. Then on top of that, Cher had a festering, so large you couldn't miss it, herpes sore on his upper lip, and then put his now tainted washcloth, which had touched the herpes sore on our roommate Eric's bed. I thought Eric was gonna lose his mind.

• 26:19John Kiriakou?

  Cher then hung up a string to dry the clothes. He would hang the clothes on the string to dry them. It stretched from one end of his bunk to the other. This was against regulations and would never pass weekly inspection. But Cher was on the lower bunk, and Eric was on the top bunk, so the string was actually on Eric's bed rather than Cher's. Cher put the herpes washcloth inches from Eric's face, right next to his pillow. You can certainly see the blowout coming. When Eric opened his eyes after a nap and saw the herpes washcloth next to his face, he jumped out of bed, pulled the string, snapped it in half, and shouted at Cher to

• 27:00John Kiriakou?

  not ever do such a disgusting thing ever again. Was Cher contrite? Did he take the big-picture view? Absolutely not. Instead, he shouted at everyone, "I will fuck you in the ass!

• 27:16Alan Katz?

  I will fuck your mother in the ass!"

• 27:19John Kiriakou?

  And it just got crazier from there. Eric walked out. For the next 40 minutes, Cher ranted randomly about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, and he was obsessed with Nancy Reagan being pregnant before she was married to Ronald Reagan. "I shouldn't even be in prison to begin with," he shouted, because, as he said, his niece's parents had forgiven him, and according to Islamic law, according to his version of it anyway, that meant that he hadn't done anything wrong. Clearly, Cher's presence in the room was not gonna fly long term. We were gonna have to do something about it.

• 27:57Alan Katz?

  It's Alan, Dead Drop's producer, and it's time for our October meeting of the Quince Fan Club. John, is there a piece or a couple of items in your closet or chest of drawers that your hand always finds first?

• 28:10John Kiriakou?

  Actually, Alan, there are a couple of Quince pieces in my growing collection. There is a sweater that I absolutely adore. It's actually the first Quince piece that I bought. It's cashmere, and it is the softest, yet lightest, cashmere sweater I've ever owned. And I just bought a pair of linen trousers. I'll tell you, when I go to the doctor, I always wear jeans, and then I get on the scale, and the doctor's like, "Oh, you should lose three pounds." Well, my jeans are three pounds. And so, I bought these linen trousers. I wore them to the doctor, and he says, "Hey, buddy, you lost a pound or two." The truth is, these linen trousers are light, they're beautiful, they're comfortable, and

• 28:53John Kiriakou?

  now they are my go-to pants.

• 28:56Alan Katz?

  For me, it's my two 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters. I love how they feel. I love how they make me feel. And because they go with everything. They make getting dressed easy. And being somewhat lazy that way, I think you and I both love the easy part, don't

• 29:12John Kiriakou?

  we? Quince focuses on high-quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials, like that 100% Mongolian cashmere we were talking about, or organic cotton and merino wool.

• 29:26Alan Katz?

  Everything is timeless and versatile. As we've said here, Quince makes classics but without all the stodginess that often comes with them. And we haven't even mentioned how reasonable everything at Quince is priced.

• 29:38John Kiriakou?

  Their 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters start at just $60, giving you the softness and the quality you'd expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag.

• 29:49Alan Katz?

  Not to go all Game of Thrones, but winter is coming, and when the temperatures start to drop, Quince is the perfect destination to find everyday clothing staples like premium down jackets and classic wool outerwear.

• 30:02John Kiriakou?

  All versatile layers designed to keep us warm and comfortable all season long, and always priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands.

• 30:11Alan Katz?

  Quince does that by working directly with ethical factories that cut out the middlemen, so you're paying for high-quality, not brand markup.

• 30:19John Kiriakou?

  The ethical part is very important. In these here times, it absolutely is. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Dead Drop. It's the best way to support the show.

• 30:52Speaker 06

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• 31:36Speaker 06

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• 31:55John Kiriakou?

  If you're enjoying Dead Drop, and of course, we hope you are, then while you're waiting for new episodes, I'd like to suggest another great granular story podcast from the Costard and Touchstone family. Just the Photographer with David Swanson does for photojournalism what Dead Drop does for spies. Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Swanson tells you stories his amazing news photos just can't. What it felt like being in all those dangerous places, like war zones and natural disasters, doing his job taking pictures. Having been to a few war zones myself, I can tell you this. Just the Photographer will put you right there, on the ground, right next to David, inside his head, in fact.

• 32:39John Kiriakou?

  It's a hell of a podcast, and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts, or at costardandtouchstone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at Costard and Touchstone, like The Donor, a DNA horror story, The Hall Closet, Sage Wellness Within, and the How Not to Make a Movie podcast. Who knows? Your next favorite podcast might be just a click away. Now, back to Dead Drop.

• 33:10John Kiriakou?

  That night, Cher picked a fight with Eric after lights out. I was still up reading, and Frank was sitting on the edge of his bed. Beard was in the TV room, and Steve was asleep. Eric felt something moving beneath him, and he looked over the side of the bed and saw that Cher had re-hung his drying string and stuck the herpes washcloth right next to Eric's head again. Cher looked at Eric defiantly, saying nothing. Eric, also saying nothing, pulled down the drying string again. The washcloth landed on the floor. After some quick fuck yous back and forth, Cher ran out of the room. I looked at Frank.

• 33:55John Kiriakou?

  Frank looked at me, and we both thought, uh-oh. Well, the uh-oh arrived in the form of eight Muslims who rushed our room a few minutes later. "Get out of bed, kid," one of them shouted at Eric. I jumped up to my feet. "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this cannot get out of hand," I said. One of the Muslims said, "The kid stabbed the brother with a pencil," meaning Cher. Frank and Eric both pointed out how ridiculous that was. As the discussion raged on, one of the senior Muslims motioned for me to step out into the hall, and he asked me, "What happened here?" So I told him about the herpes washcloth. He, of course, hadn't heard anything about that. He just wanted to know, "Did Eric stab Cher?" "Absolutely not," I shot back.

• 34:40John Kiriakou?

  "He was in bed, half asleep." The senior Muslim took it all in. Finally, he nodded thoughtfully, and we headed back into the room. "Cher," the Muslim said, "where exactly did he stab you?" Cher hesitated. "Well, he tried to stab me." "Where's the pencil?" That was going to be a problem, since there had never been a pencil in the first place. "Well," Cher insisted, "he wanted to stab me." The Muslims, now realizing Cher had lied to them and had pulled them into this conflict, apologized to Eric, and walked out. I looked at Cher. "So, now you're a rat in addition to being a pedophile. Good luck with that."

• 35:25John Kiriakou?

  The next day, we had a room meeting and decided that Cher had to go. I wrote the request to staff, which Cher then signed, asking that he be moved to another room. He gave it to the counselor, who rejected it immediately. "Tough luck," he said when we opened our mouths to protest. So now, we were stuck with the guy. And being stuck with Cher began to get harder and harder to put up with. Prison, directly and indirectly, surrounds the rule breakers within its walls with lots of rules that they absolutely must follow. Some are the prison's rules, of course, but many are unwritten rules laid down by prison culture. And Cher flouted those rules the way other people breathe.

• 36:09John Kiriakou?

  He prayed constantly, upwards of 20 times a day. Fair enough, if that's what you're into. Despite the fact that Muslims pray five times a day, and if you're Shia Muslim, you can combine the morning prayers and the evening prayers and actually make it three times a day. But this man was devoted to his religious faith. With that said, it's prison. There are rules about these things. You're supposed to pray in the designated prayer area down the hall, but Cher insisted on praying in the room. And I'll remind you, our room was 160 square feet for six people.

• 36:50John Kiriakou?

  Lots of that floor space was taken up by our bunk beds and lockers, and that left not much other space for six of us to move around in. So having Cher on his prayer rug in the very center of the room didn't work. For a little while, he prayed on his bed, until finally taking his devotion to where it belonged, the designated prayer area. I mentioned in an earlier podcast how important cleanliness is in prison. No one wants to deal with other people's messes, but Cher never, ever cleaned the room. He never took out the garbage. Even in prison, someone's got to take out the trash. And he walked around shirtless so that we could all see his grisly stump

• 37:34John Kiriakou?

  and his, you had to see it to believe how grisly it was, stomach wound. Nudity, even partial nudity, is anathema in prison. It breaks one of the fundamental rules by which we all live peaceably. For that reason, we told Cher constantly to cover up. His reaction was simply to shout, "Fuck you! Everybody should see what the American Army made happen to me." I shouted at him, "Nobody gives a shit about what happened to you." And I told him that if he didn't cover up, someone was going to give him a beat down. Cher also ignored the prison's rules. The rules regarding prison uniforms, for example, is clear.

• 38:17John Kiriakou?

  All inmates must be in full uniform from 6:00 AM until after lunch. If you sleep during the day, you must sleep in uniform, and you must sleep on top of the covers so that the cops can see your uniform. Anyone sleeping under the covers would have their pillow confiscated, plus they would suffer some sort of administrative sanction, like three-month suspension of commissary, telephone, email, or even visiting privileges. But Cher didn't give a shit. Because he was up praying all night, he would sleep all day, in shorts and a t-shirt, meaning not in uniform, and he was always under the covers.

• 38:58John Kiriakou?

  One day, the warden came through on one of his periodic walkabouts. He saw Cher in bed, woke him up, and told him, "Get up! Get your uniform on. You can't sleep under the covers." Cher looked up at the warden like he was an alien. "And who the hell are you?" With eyebrows arching in surprise, he said, "I'm the warden." "What does that mean, warden?" I said, "It means he's the boss of the whole prison." I looked at the warden, and I circled my ear with my finger. "He's crazy," was what I meant. "Get up and get dressed," the warden said as he exited, done with us. Cher's response? What was that all about?

• 39:41John Kiriakou?

  Cher was the only Shia Muslim among a large group of Sunni Muslims in our housing unit. Most of the Muslims in prison were converts who knew little to nothing about the Sunni Shia split. They cared even less about it, and they didn't want lessons from a one-armed Afghan child molester on why they should instead be praying to some obscure 18th-century Iranian ayatollah. Next thing, Cher is lecturing the other Muslims on how their prayers are wrong. His word. How they repeated Arabic sayings without knowing the meanings, and how none of them were authentic Muslims. For good measure, he added that he didn't like praying with African-Americans

• 40:24John Kiriakou?

  because, quote, "They're stupid, they smell bad, and they don't know the prayers," unquote. As you might imagine, this caused quite a rift. Cher was thrown out of the group and told that he couldn't pray with the Sunnis anymore. His reaction later? He would shove his prayer rug, quote, "up their mother's cunts," unquote. So pious. Our room's Cher problem became the whole unit's Cher problem. He would literally stand in front of the large floor fan outside the bathroom after playing soccer for two hours.

• 41:05John Kiriakou?

  He would pull down his pants so he could air out his balls. Seriously. That was his explanation, and it violated just about every single kind of prison protocol imaginable. If you provoke a group of prisoners, at least a few of them will react, having been provoked. A few days after airing out his balls in front of the fan, somebody came into our room and gave Cher's locker a vigorous shake. Well, as you know from a previous podcast, that was Joey. When Cher returned later and opened his locker, nearly everything inside fell out onto the floor. This happens a lot in prison. It's one of the easier ways to fuck with people.

• 41:48John Kiriakou?

  If you piss someone off, rather than fight you, which could then land everybody in solitary, they'll just give your locker a good shake instead.

• 41:58John Kiriakou?

  Frank, Eric and I thought it was pretty hilarious that one of Cher's many enemies was taking the game right to him. Cher pointed the finger at Wahid, the Afghan Sunni who had befriended him upon his arrival, who had introduced him to the other Muslims, and had given him clothes and a watch to get him started. Cher accused Wahid right to his face. "You shook my locker!" he raged at him. "If you do it again, I'll kill you!" Wahid said, "I didn't do shit to you." With that, Cher was persona non grata with the Muslims. He couldn't pray with them, he couldn't even talk to them. As far as they were concerned, Cher was a total apostate. By then, word had gotten out that on top of this steaming pile of shit, Cher was a

• 42:43John Kiriakou?

  pedophile. Not just a clicker, someone who looked at pornographic pictures of children, but a toucher, the lowest of the low. One of the leaders of the Hispanic Pisces gang, a fellow soccer player, asked Cher directly if he had committed a sex crime. Because it really does matter to the prison community. Cher said, "It's very complicated." The gangbanger cut him off, and he was not allowed to ever play soccer again. "Fine," said Cher. When the gangbanger was no longer within earshot, Cher couldn't help adding, "I don't care about their soccer. I fuck them all!

• 43:23Alan Katz?

  I fuck their mothers! I will shove my fist up their asses!"

• 43:28John Kiriakou?

  Okay Cher, you be you. The cold hard truth was that Cher had serious mental problems. His mental problems were becoming our mental problems. To sit on our hands and do nothing seemed...well, it seemed insane, but taking action might put me at odds with prison culture. I went to my buddy Mark's room. I needed a second opinion, and Mark was always great about giving me level-headed advice. I asked him this: "If I tell the chief psychologist that Cher is nuts, that he's depressed and potentially violent, does that make me a rat?" "Yes," said Mark, "stay away from it." That was not the answer that I wanted to hear.

• 44:12John Kiriakou?

  But Mark said, "You're always talking about your CIA rules. Why don't you just do what you need to do to protect yourself?" Yes, that was the way out of trouble. Go back to being a spy, rather than a prisoner playing by spy rules. If stability...remember, if stability is not to your benefit, chaos is your friend. Got a problem? Solve it with a dirty trick. Alright then. My mission was this: get Cher to check himself into the shoe, where he would get much closer psychological observation. I wasn't gonna win any nice guy awards doing this, and I admit that the whole thing makes me look bad, but the mission was the mission, and we could not live with this monster any

• 44:57John Kiriakou?

  longer.

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• 46:40John Kiriakou?

  The first thing I did was to crush up an entire sleeve of saltine crackers and spread them all over Cher's bed, under the sheet, when he was outside walking the track. When he returned to the room and saw the crumbs on his bed, he shouted, "Fucking pieces of shit!" I eased next to him, very empathetic. "Cher," I said, "obviously you have enemies. This harassment is gonna continue. Maybe you should just check yourself into the shoe. It's quiet down there, and nobody's gonna bother you." Frank jumped into the chorus. "Listen to him, Cher," he said, "this is only gonna get worse. Just go to the shoe." Cher shouted at me, "I fuck their shoe!

• 47:24John Kiriakou?

  I am not a fan of blasphemers!" By which he meant, of course, the Sunni Muslims.

• 47:29Speaker 03

  "I am Cher Maulani, follower of Ali, follower of Hussein. I will give my life to kill the enemies of Islam."

• 47:37John Kiriakou?

  And then he beat his breast with his fist for a few minutes. So, that plan didn't work. The next day, I mentioned to Joey...remember Joey was one of the Italians who lived across the hall...that we were facing a challenge in our room. I told Joey how badly we wanted this guy in the shoe, but that it was too risky for us to do things to him ourselves. It would be much better if things just sort of happened while everybody in the room was outside exercising. We knew from a friendly CO that the nearby security camera did not work, so Joey said he would take care of it. All the rest of us went outside, except for Joey. When we all returned to the room, there was Joey's handiwork.

• 48:19John Kiriakou?

  He had broken into Cher's locker, he had stolen 10 bags of mackerel, he had taken a pair of scissors and he cut the pockets out of Cher's pants, and disappeared his prayer beads. Joey told us later that he flushed the prayer beads down the toilet. Moments after we entered the room, Cher arrived with a CO. "Look what they did to me!" he shouted. "I demand that you check the security tape!" "Buddy," the CO responded, "the cameras aren't for you, they're for us. If you have a problem with somebody, you deal with it." Cher tried to argue, but the CO, already bored, just moved on with his day.

• 48:59John Kiriakou?

  With Cher's rage growing like a lava plume, I told him again to check into the shoe. Frank piled on, "Just go to the shoe." But Cher was having none of it. "I will feed them their own balls!" The next day, Cher hired another Muslim pedophile, a Roma. We used to use the now disfavored term "gypsy" from Cleveland to keep an eye on our room. He paid the Roma by having his wife transfer money into the kid's account to buy a radio and an MP3 player, strictly against the rules and punishable, of course, by confinement in the shoe. If Cher was gonna zig, I was gonna zag. In response, I went up to the Roma and I demanded to know why he was hanging around our room.

• 49:44John Kiriakou?

  "I'm just looking for Cher," he said, like that was good enough. So, time to shut this down. I said, "Pedophiles can't have visitors in our room." I told him pointedly, "Get lost, before I do something I'm gonna regret later." The Roma understood, and he left immediately. Joey wanted to move quickly, but I called him off. I said, "Joey, we've heated up the area." Using a phrase from my CIA surveillance training, I said, "Let's let a week pass before we move on him again. Besides, I can try to convince him, in the meantime, to go to the shoe." Yet again, though, the shoe conversation was a nonstarter. Cher wasn't going anywhere. And a week passed. And Joey asked me what I wanted him to do.

• 50:29John Kiriakou?

  "Joey," I said, "I don't care what you do, but I want you to have some fun with it, whatever it is." Two hours later, we got back to the room after walking the track. A familiar scene confronted us. Cher in front of his bed complaining loudly to the same CO as before. But this time, the offending thing in Cher's bed wasn't crumbs. This time, the thing driving Cher nuts was a drawing made by Joey using a Sharpie permanent marker of an erect cock and balls, permanently marking Cher's bed sheet. I said, Cher, this is out of hand. Whoever your enemy is, make peace with him.

• 51:13John Kiriakou?

  Beard was not in on the conspiracy, and he exploded at Cher. Do you know what this means? Beard shouted at him. It means somebody is coming into our room when we're not here. Our room is getting disrespected because you have enemies. End this shit, or go to the shoe. The CO offered the same amount of encouragement as before, which was none. He walked away, just smiling. Words spread around the unit like wildfire that somebody had humiliated Cher. He in turn blamed everybody. The Hispanics, because they'd thrown him off the soccer team. He blamed the blacks he'd insulted. He blamed the Muslims. He confided in Frank, of all people, that the only thing worse

• 51:57John Kiriakou?

  would have been if the perpetrator had called him an asshole. He said, there is nothing worse than the human asshole. He was giving us deeper insight into his psyche. He added this, he said, assholes are the most disgusting things imaginable. Well, as any good spy can tell you, some people just don't know when to shut up. A few uneventful days passed. Cher was a nervous wreck, in part because he still didn't know who exactly his enemies were. He had threatened to stay in the room 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to quote, "catch and kill", unquote, his tormentor.

• 52:42John Kiriakou?

  That lasted for one day. Things then got quiet again for the better part of a week. That should have made Cher even more nervous. We all went to dinner one night, and then we went outside to walk the track. At 6:30, Frank, Joey, and I ran into our friend Doc Griebus. He said, there's a present waiting for you in your room. Well, that got us moving. We headed back to the room, curious as hell what Doc could have meant. We arrived just about when Cher arrived. Cher's prayer rug was opened and turned upside down, and another large erect cock decorated it. But this one had writing above it.

• 53:24John Kiriakou?

  It said, asshole you are. And then it was signed, Yoda. Cher physically shook, he was so angry. He tore off the underside of the rug and threw it away. He wanted to go to the CO again. Don't, I told him. It'll just make you more of a rat. Fuck you, he shouted back at me. I then shouted back at him. You're a rat, you're a child molester, you're always talking about who you want to fuck up the ass. Fuck you, I said. Get out of here and go to the shoe. Of course, Cher did run right back to the CO again, who told him, again, that there was nothing he could do. Cher was even further incensed now.

• 54:07John Kiriakou?

  But he went about his business, muttering to himself and praying for the rest of the night. He didn't sleep at all. In the morning, he refused to speak to any of us. He went to breakfast, and then up to the library for his pre-GED class. I forgot to mention that Cher read at a third grade level. Frank and I sat in the room together, just the two of us. I said, Frank, I think I can push him over the edge today. That's when I rubbed the sliced pork pepperoni that I had gotten from the commissary under Cher's pillow. It was a terrible, culturally insensitive thing to do.

• 54:48John Kiriakou?

  But spies, don't forget, have sociopathic tendencies. In pursuit of a higher goal, we willingly navigate the gray that hangs between the black and the white. And there was very much a higher goal at play. If I was going to have to bring the spy in me forward while sending the prisoner on his way, so be it. It's not like I was gonna kill the guy. I just put some pork under his pillow. Cher ran to the cops to complain, but they were well past giving a shit, which made him even angrier. A crowd then began to form around him as he shouted how this person and that person had done all of these different things to him.

• 55:32John Kiriakou?

  Now, he wasn't wrong, of course. We were doing these things to him. But now that he was on the brink, we owed it to ourselves to finish the job. Rather, I owed it. I was probably the one person who could do it. As the crowd continued growing, I stepped forward and I shouted, you're the one doing this to yourself for attention. We're tired of all your bullshit. We're tired of you. Just get out. Cher had zeroed in on the lead. I'm doing it to myself? I said, aha, so the truth comes out. You're doing it to yourself. Cher and his mind just reeled.

• 56:16John Kiriakou?

  And he screamed,

• 56:18Alan Katz?

  I will fuck you all. I will kill you all.

• 56:22John Kiriakou?

  I'm not afraid of your prison. I'm not afraid of death. I am not afraid of your government. You created Al Qaeda. I fuck Al Qaeda.

• 56:31Alan Katz?

  I fuck the Taliban.

• 56:34John Kiriakou?

  As he continued to rant like a crazy person, now completely unhinged, I ran to the unit manager's office. It was his last day on the job before transferring to Washington. He was just about ready to leave the office. I said, Cher's gone nuts, ruining his exit. I think he needs psych attention. A second later, over the PA system, I heard, Cher Maulani, report to the unit manager's office. Well, Cher refused to go to the office. So the unit manager, now aching to just leave his job behind for good, sent a couple of COs, who cuffed Cher's one arm to his waist and hauled him away. Frank and I watched him go.

• 57:17John Kiriakou?

  Thank God that worked, said Frank. If it hadn't, I was gonna poop in his boots. A few weeks later, a guy in the next room came back from the shoe. I asked him if he had encountered Cher down there. He had, and he said Cher was having a rough time. He was kicking the cell door all the time and shouting, I fuck you, I fuck your mother. That just pissed off the cops, who would then kick in the door when Cher was asleep. They would wake him up and say, we thought you liked to kick the door, you piece of shit. Look, prison is a hard place to be angry. And yet, it's the easiest. I had thought when I got there

• 58:02John Kiriakou?

  that I'd be leaving the spying world behind. It turned out that I was diving even more deeply into it. During the latter part of my stay at Loretto, I was asked to teach a class on how to build a small business for inmates preparing to go home soon. As the class began, we went around the room, and I asked everyone to talk about what they wanted to do when they got home. One guy said, I'm a welder, so I'll probably go back into welding. The guy next to him had a heating and air conditioning company. He too was gonna go back to what he knew. There was an auto mechanic who wanted to open his own repair shop, and there was a guy who wanted to be a rap mogul. Not a rapper. He wanted to be a mogul.

• 58:47John Kiriakou?

  He didn't know how to rap, but he wanted to be like P. Diddy. So I asked him, how does one become a rap mogul like P. Diddy? He said, first, you write a hit rap song, then you play it in the strip clubs in Atlanta, then it gets onto the radio because the strippers use it as their official song, then you make millions of dollars from it. So that was a man with a plan. I asked the other prisoner who was there what he wanted to do. He said, I want to create a business called The Adventure Club. I'll take boys between the ages of like nine and 13 out into the woods for weekends. We can go hiking and camping. They can link their Facebook pages to mine, and we can stay in touch that way.

• 59:30John Kiriakou?

  I said, do you mind if I ask you what your crime was? He said, well, child molestation. Later in the day, I went to see the counselor, who had asked me to teach the class. I told him about the pedo who wanted to open a business where he would take young boys into the woods for the weekend. I said, I think we should report him. The counselor looked at me. Nobody's gonna take boys into the woods. They're all gonna end up selling drugs or going into food service. Now get the fuck out of my office. The class was not renewed for a second session. We, however, will be back for more. Until then, thank you for listening and for liking, rating, reviewing, and commenting on the podcast. I'm John Kiriakou.

• 1:00:15John Kiriakou?

  Dead Drop is written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz. Costart and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast, and John Kiriakou, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers.