I had promised my attorney, Jesselyn Radack, that I would write an open letter to my supporters once I settled in at Loretto, and I sat down to do that six weeks after my arrival. That first letter would set the tone for the rest of my stay in prison. It was the guards and the administration that would be reactive. Not me. It was they who would have to make sure that they understood their own regulations. I wasn’t going to back down in the face of official bullying. My sentence was short. I could take whatever they threw at me.
I mentioned earlier how two SIS COs tried to trick me into fighting an Iraqi Kurdish prisoner. This was unethical and patently illegal. The COs, Graham and Yardley, probably weren’t bad guys, personally. They were just stupid. They didn’t know how to deal with people, which is a serious disadvantage when the success of your job rests on your ability to recruit spies. Graham was the more senior and the more hapless of the two. For all his sources that he claimed to have all around the prison, he apparently didn’t know that his CO wife was getting boned by a Puerto Rican prisoner until she was caught and fired. Also, the inflatable rat that he kept on his desk didn’t do much to show his respect for any misguided prisoner who may have wanted to volunteer information. (Most people, I think, would say, “I risk my personal safety to come in here to give you information, and you just consider me a rat? Fuck you!”)
On another occasion I was visiting a friend in his housing unit when the red ceiling light went on, mandating that all prisoners return to their cubes, and that the gate be locked. This was highly unusual, and it caused me to be locked in a unit where I technically didn’t belong. A lieutenant arrived and ordered all prisoners who did not live in the unit to go to the front. All of us, about two dozen in total, had their ID cards confiscated, were strip-searched, and sent back to our own units. (The reason for the strip search was that there had apparently been a fight, and the COs were looking for injuries.) The next day, I was called into SIS. Yardley was there. “So, do you want to tell me about that fight last night?”
“There was a fight? Where?” I responded.
“Very funny,” Yardley said.
I retorted, “What, you want me to do your job for you now, too?”
Yardley gave me my ID back. “Get the fuck out of my office!”
The only other encounter I had with either Graham or Yardley, other than a nod in the hallway, was in the visitation room. All inmates are strip-searched after each visit, and on one particular Sunday Graham was doing the searches. I entered the search room and said, “So you have butthole duty today. Your parents must be so proud!”
Graham sighed and said, “You exhaust me. I give up. Truce?”
“Sure. Truce.”
But a truce wasn’t going to be possible with another foul-mouthed CO I had mentioned in my first Letter from Loretto. This was “Sarge,” the CO who had called me “Fuckface” and who had trashed my room.
“Sarge” was by far the meanest, angriest, and unhappiest CO I encountered. A woman who embodied the phrase “rode hard and put away wet,” she once may have been attractive. But nineteen years as a CO, an inability to get along with her colleagues, a filthy mouth, lots of poorly-done tattoos, and an epic mean streak made her an even uglier person than her physical features let on.
I frankly had no idea that COs weren’t allowed to speak to us like she had, so I never reported it to anyone. But what happened next was so much more satisfying.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had accused Sarge of a regulatory violation that could have (and probably should have) resulted in a two-week suspension without pay. As a result of the letter, I was called to the SIS office and asked to swear out a complaint against her. I did, and several days later the warden transferred her out of my unit and reassigned her to a position driving a car around the outside of the compound while the yard was open for exercise. She remained in this exile for six months and she never forgave me. I didn’t care.
A year later she returned as the afternoon shift CO in my housing unit. She called me into the CO office, a sort of glass bubble, and spat, “Don’t you dare fucking speak to me. Turn your head when you see me.” I responded similarly. “Stay the fuck away from me,” I told her. “Mess with me and you’ll regret it for a very long time.”
I worked hard to keep my temper on an even keel, but this woman was a potentially serious problem. After all, I was under her complete control. She could trump up any charge at all and send me to solitary. She could accuse me of a crime. She could do anything she wanted. But in the end, she left me alone. She would not even speak my name for the rest of my time at Loretto. Even at mail call, when I received mail she just tossed it aside and I picked it up after everybody else had received their mail. That arrangement was fine with me.
The reaction in the press to this letter was astounding. I wrote another Letter from Loretto, this one about the COs in the Special Investigative Service. But I eventually destroyed it because I feared retaliation. And then I had a bit of good luck.
My cousin Kip Reese was a regular visitor and is a dear friend of mine. He came to visit shortly after my first Letter from Loretto was published. As he was waiting to be processed for the visit one Sunday morning, he heard this exchange between two COs.
First CO: “Who is that guy here to see?”
Second CO: “Kiriakou.”
First CO: “The CIA guy? Why isn’t he in solitary?”
Second CO: “I asked the warden that. He said they couldn’t lock him up because he hadn’t used anybody’s name [in the Letter from Loretto.] Otherwise, they would have put him in the SHU.”
Kip told me about this conversation as soon as I saw him in the visiting room thirty minutes later. This was a very valuable piece of intelligence. I could essentially write whatever I wanted—this was my constitutional right, after all—so long as I didn’t mention any prison employees by name.
Rather than self-censor, which I had done by destroying my would-be second letter, I would write freely. It was in that visit that I decided to make Letters from Loretto a series, and to focus on the problems that I saw in our prison system firsthand. It would help me to remain relevant in the press and in the national debate over prison reform, it would give me something to do to pass the time, and it would eventually result in a book. This one.
Another prize of a CO was Horseface, a middle-aged blonde version of the Wicked Witch of the West. Her long face and pointed chin made her look like the daughter of Dudley Dooright, but I preferred the “Horseface” moniker. (“A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, ‘Why the long face?’”) Horseface’s job was to sit on a stool in the cafeteria to make sure no prisoner got an extra portion and that the kitchen employees didn’t steal the food—well, didn’t steal too much of the food.
One Sunday morning, I rolled out of bed just as the call for “chow” was made. I went to the cafeteria disheveled and still half asleep. After picking up my tray I passed Horseface, who said, “Excuse me! Are you grown?”
I looked at her with confusion and said, “Pardon?”
“Are you grown?”
Still confused, I said, “I’m not understanding you.”
“Are you a grown man?” she said, her voice rising.
I had had enough, “Look, why don’t you just say what you want to say?”
“Tuck your damn shirt in!” she shouted. I tucked my shirt in and moved on.
At lunch, Horseface was again in the cafeteria, sitting with a young male CO who always gave everybody a fair shake. As I passed the two, I whinnied like a horse and kept walking. Horseface turned to the young CO and said, “Why the fuck do people keep doing that? That’s the fourth time today that’s happened! What is that supposed to mean?” The young CO looked at me, winked, and smiled. Sometimes there really is satisfaction in passive-aggression.
Sarge and Horseface hated each other. (Sarge and almost everybody hated each other.) The two of them once got into a fistfight in the parking lot over a man, something that I learned was not such an unusual occurrence at Loretto. One female lieutenant, the rumor went, had children by three different COs and was collecting child support for all three while living in the luxury of her doublewide trailer. The CO wife of another CO got herself transferred to the satellite work camp so she could have sex with her CO boyfriend while her husband worked his shift in the main prison. It was Peyton Place, just at a lower socioeconomic level.
It wasn’t just the COs’ prurient antics that amused me. Their flat-out stupidity was fun to watch, too. The prison chapel is a place where just about everybody could practice their faith: Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Wiccans, Rastafarians, Santerians, Mormons, and a bunch of smaller groups I had never heard of until I got there. All faith groups held their “feasts” in the chapel on the appointed days. These celebrations were a way to reflect, spend time with friends, and forget for an hour or two that they were in prison.
For Muslims, the most important feast of the year is the Eid al-Adha, which marks the end of the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. The chaplain had made all the arrangements for the 2013 Eid—tables, chairs, and food—and took the rest of the day off. At sunset, sixty-one Muslims descended on the chapel for their feast. The CO in charge of the chapel that night, however, Big Dummy, said that he hadn’t “heard nothin’ about no Mooslims,” and he refused to open the chapel. Chapel inmate employees told him that the chaplain had made all the arrangements and that his was the holiest day in Islam. “Fuck the Mooslims!” he responded. That night sixty-one Muslims filed sixty-one formal complaints against Big Dummy. The next day the chaplain was back at work, the feast was back on, and Big Dummy was at the door telling each inmate, “As-salāmu ‘alaykum. I’m sorry.”
Lieutenant Gramble was by far the biggest jackass in the entire prison, and I knew immediately that I was going to have ongoing problems with him. When I first arrived I was told to avoid him. Tall, thin, with a shaved head and a perpetual grimace, his jutting chin made him look more like Dudley Dooright than anybody else I’d ever seen, including Horseface. Gramble was a bully, a provocateur, and a foul-mouthed sadist. He was nothing but trouble, and it was best to stay away from him.
I heard lots of rumors about Gramble. I don’t know which were true and which were the products of prisoners’ imaginations, but they all sounded plausible to me, especially as I saw more and more of him in action. For example, he had worked in, and been forced out of, several other prisons. He had sexually harassed a wide variety of women in and out of the prison. I personally heard him berate an inmate for standing in the hall between moves as a “stupid motherfucking cocksucker.” Although this behaviour is against BOP regulations, there wasn’t much that anybody could do. The cops all covered for each other anyway.
On Thanksgiving night 2013 I called my wife to see how the day had gone. During the course of the conversation, I recounted to her an experience I had had in the commissary a day earlier, where one of the COs had berated me for asking for more Cup-a-Soups than I was apparently entitled to. I told my wife that these COs are all tough guys when a prisoner can’t respond to them and when they’re sitting behind two inches of glass. I wondered aloud how tough they might be if I ran into one of them on the street. And during the course of the call, I said one of them was a “nimrod.”
Well, as it turned out, Gramble would spend his free time in his tiny office listening to recordings of my phone calls. I knew this, of course, because on my first day in prison I was forced to sign a form acknowledging that I would be monitored electronically. So I frequently used my calls to plant messages among the staff: “if CO X doesn’t get off my back I’m going to write an article about him and humiliate him in print,” or “an idiot in my room, who I hate, stole one hundred dollars worth of chicken and has it in a cooler under his bed. I hope I don’t get in trouble for it.” The idiot COs thought they were gathering “intelligence,” when, in fact, they were hearing only what I wanted them to hear.
So on Thanksgiving night, my wife and I hung up at 7:30 p.m. and I went back to my room. Count was at 9:30 p.m., and nobody ever missed count for any reason. You can imagine my surprise when at 9:20 p.m. a prison-wide announcement came over the PA system, an angry-voiced Gramble shouting, “Kiriakou! Lieutenant’s office! Immediately!” Everybody looked at me wide-eyed. I stuck out my hand. “Guys, it’s been great knowing you. Help yourselves to whatever you want from my locker. Dave, call Heather and tell her I’m in solitary.” As I left the unit, one of the few good COs said, “Good luck, buddy.”
I walked downstairs to the lieutenant’s office and knocked on the door. Gramble looked up and I walked in. “Did you want to see me?”
“I did. Can we talk man to man?” This was prison code for “I’m going to scream and swear at you and I don’t want you to report me for it.” Of course, it also meant that I could scream and swear at him and there was nothing he could do about it. I knew from this first question that I had him.
He began with “are you an educated man?” I responded quickly with “I don’t answer rhetorical questions and I’m not going to play games with you. Why don’t you just say what you want to say.”
He exploded. “Do you think I’m a fucking nimrod?! Do you?! Who the fuck do you think you are?!”
I shot back, “I don’t know if you’re a nimrod. You might be. I haven’t formed an opinion yet. But I am surprised that a private conversation with my wife that had nothing to do with you so offended your delicate sensibilities.” Things just got worse from there.
Gramble told me to “stand at attention when a lieutenant is talking to you!” I told him to go fuck himself. In my book he was a nothing, a nobody, a medium-sized fish in a very small pond. He countered, “You think you’re so tough. I’m the one who grew up tough! I got my GED in a youth correctional facility in Philadelphia!”
I said, “Congratulations. Your parents must be so proud.”
He was enraged. He continued. “You think you’re the only one who served your country around here? I did a tour in Afghanistan!” I thanked him for his service, which just pissed him off even more.
Getting back to his odd point, he said that he had better never hear me criticize another CO in a call to my wife again. I said he needed to bone up on the BOP’s regulations and on the Constitution. When I walked through those prison doors I didn’t give up my right to freedom of speech. I can tell my wife anything I want, so long as it’s not a threat, not in furtherance of a crime, and not for the purpose of running a business. “I read the regs,” I said. “You should, too.”
Gramble exploded again, saying that I needed to learn my place and start “acting like an inmate.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. “Should I get a tattoo on my face? Should I steal food from the cafeteria? If you mean I should wring my hands and say ‘yes, sir, no, sir,’” that’s never going to happen. Never. You’re not going to institutionalize me. And in the meantime, if I have to follow the rules, you have to follow the rules.”
At that, I heard the announcement for count time, and Gramble’s phone rang. It was the unit CO asking if he should count me, or if I would be counted in solitary. “Count him!” Gramble snapped, and hung up the phone. Our conversation was over, and I had won, at least this time. “Just go back to your fucking unit,” he said. I turned and walked out.
The unit CO unlocked the gate, smiled, and said, “I can’t believe you survived Gramble. Nobody survives Gramble.”
“He underestimated me,” I said. “And he’s not as tough as he thinks he is. He also has a serious self-esteem problem.”
My problems with Gramble were not over, but they were manageable. I had humbled him, and he decided to pretty much leave me alone. Pretty much. A month or so later, the chaplain mentioned to me that I was “wildly unpopular” in the prison. Shocked, I said “among prisoners?” No, he said. Among staff. “Ah,” I laughed. “You’ve spoken to Lieutenant Gramble. You had me worried there for a minute, Chaplain.” He said that Gramble had come down to the chapel to ask if I arrived on time for all my shifts. He was looking for a reason, any reason, to send me to solitary. The chaplain said I was an exemplary employee.
Five months later I decided to apply for a no-show job as a hallway orderly. I filled out the form, bribed the head orderly with three books of stamps, and waited for approval. Finally, the head orderly, a seventy-five-year-old bank robber (and a poor one, at that) came up to me to say that I had been rejected for the job. “Why?” I asked. “Well, Lieutenant Gramble is in charge of the hallways. I think he really hates you.” He handed me my three books of stamps and my application, which Gramble had crumpled into a ball. I decided to go public and have some fun.
On March 31, 2014, I wrote a Letter from Loretto. It was ostensibly about life in the chapel. I wrote about how nice the chaplains were, how good the job was, and how I enjoyed the quiet there, but that I hated the fact that the chapel was a hangout for pedophiles. I segued into Gramble’s denial of my job request, I made a copy of the crumpled-up application, and I recounted the Thanksgiving conversation. I knew that SIS had a Google Alert on me, and that they would read the letter as soon as it was published. They did. They launched an “investigation,” and I didn’t see Gramble for the next six weeks. It was six weeks of glorious peace. Gramble wasn’t done with me, nor I with him. But he never again so much as made eye contact with me. And that’s exactly how I liked it.
Just a few weeks before my release, I was called into the unit manager’s office. He asked me to raise my right hand. “Do you swear that the information you are about to give is true and complete to the best of your knowledge and belief?” I did. We sat down, and he said, “Tell me about Gramble, slowly, while I type it. It’ll be your affidavit for the formal complaint.” He had made my day. Sweet revenge.
Although Gramble, Sarge, and the others were no Einsteins, some COs had even fewer brains. Drunk with power and with the idea that they could abuse people who had no recourse, they picked on prisoners for kicks. One of the things they liked to do was, during scheduled moves, open only one of the double doors into the main hallway. So instead of an easy flow of 1,400 prisoners from one part of the prison to the other, there were constant traffic jams. The prison wasn’t big physically; there was only one hallway. So everybody was jammed up at the doors at the same time. Why do this? Because the COs want there to be a fight. They can break it up, look like tough guys, send somebody to solitary, and maybe even get a performance bonus. I wanted to take a swing at them every time I saw them standing at the locked door laughing as people struggled to get through.
One particular bully enjoyed the locked door game even more than the others. One day Dave and I were trying to get to the cafeteria for lunch, but we were delayed at the locked door, manned by CO Harrah. Dave politely said, “Do you mind unlocking the other door so we’re not all jammed up here?”
Harrah’s response was “Get over here, fella.” I thought, Oh, crap. We’re going to miss lunch now. But I decided to wait with Dave in case he needed a witness. After every person finally made it through the door, Harrah got in Dave’s face. “Who the fuck do you think you are, challenging me?”
Dave, much nicer than I would have been, said, “I’m not challenging you at all. I’m just saying that it would be easier for everybody if both doors were unlocked.”
Harrah replied, “You’re being insolent.” That was another CO code word. Insolence can mean anything they want it to, and it’s grounds to be sent to solitary. But Dave remained calm, and I was standing there as a witness, so Harrah said, “Get the fuck out of here.” We walked to the cafeteria, but not after Harrah had placed himself prominently on my shit list.
Harrah didn’t have anything personal against Dave. He was an equal-opportunity douchebag. He was the midnight-shift CO in our unit one night. All other COs kept the gate unlocked, so when breakfast was called at 6:00 a.m., we just walked down there. For whatever power-trip reason, Harrah had the gate locked. One of the Mexican guys knocked on his door and asked Harrah to unlock the gate so that as soon as the call was made people could get to the cafeteria ahead of several other units that were farther away than ours. Harrah, in typical fashion, said, “I don’t take my fucking orders from you.” A minute later, the call to chow came. Harrah sat there with his feet on his desk, laughing, while every other unit went to breakfast. Finally, five minutes later he unlocked the gate. I heard several Mexicans talk briefly about stabbing him, but nothing ever came of it. I concluded that he was just a twenty-something punk who had never accomplished anything in his life, and he was trying to prove to himself how important and how badass he was.
Of course, my own run-in with Harrah was inevitable. I’m a hothead and, try as I might, I knew I would eventually lose my temper with him. It finally happened in June 2014, just after Dave was sent to the SHU. I was paged over the loudspeaker to go to the visiting room for a meeting with my attorneys. When you have a visit, you go to a door that leads to the small strip-search room and you activate a flashing light to alert the visiting room CO that you’ve arrived. I activated the light at 10:00 a.m. (The wait time was usually a few seconds to a few minutes.) After forty-five infuriating minutes, Harrah came out. I said, “What’s the delay? I’ve been out here for forty-five minutes.” He looked at me with indignation. “I don’t fucking answer to you!” He said he would let me in when he was damn good and ready to let me in. Meanwhile, my attorneys had been waiting for me for an hour.
I thought, Well, here we go. This was a long time coming. I said to Harrah, “What’s your problem, kid?” I used the word “kid” on purpose, of course. I knew it would enrage him, and I knew I was pushing the envelope.
“Insolence!” he shouted. “That’s all I have to say is ‘insolence’ and you go to the SHU!”
I laughed. “You think I’m afraid of your SHU? You think solitary is worse than Yemen? Worse than Pakistan? Worse than Afghanistan? Don’t make me laugh. Besides, you send me to solitary and it’ll be on CNN by tomorrow. Do you really want to go down that road?”
Harrah was on his heels, stunned. He tried to recover. “This is my house, motherfucker. In my house you do what I say.”
I shot back, “This may be your house, but this is my neighborhood.” This statement was patently ridiculous. It just came out. I still don’t even know what I meant by it, but, I thought, In for a penny, in for a pound, so I continued. “Do you really want to fuck with me? Really? Do you know what I can do to you? I’m not some piece of trash doing twenty years. I’m out in seven months. And I know where you live.” I had no idea where he lived.
We stared at each other for a moment, and he said, “Go to your visit.” I never had another problem with him.
It’s not that all COs picked on me. They didn’t. As I’ve said, most ignored me and some were actually nice. Many were just frustrating, the kind of people you would observe and just shake your head. These were people like Sarge and Horseface who got into a fistfight over a man who had come to prison to do some contract work. (Sarge won. She was much rougher and scrappier than Horseface.) They were people like the CO who had a prisoner read out the names at mail call, either because he simply couldn’t read or because he was so severely dyslexic that it was too emotionally painful for him to try to do it in front of a hundred people. They were people like the CO who, during count time had to count on his fingers, still lost count, then had to do the whole thing over again—three times. They were people like the two COs who played chicken on the perimeter road around the prison yard. One raced his new Ford F-150 pickup head-on into the other, who was driving a prison-owned Jeep. They crashed into each other, destroying both vehicles. In any other government agency they would have been fired—maybe even prosecuted. But not in the BOP.