S2E15 The Home Stretch

Frank. Nine. Frank. [MUSIC PLAYING]

His podcast, "It's a Costart and Touchdown 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 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.

“That's why good rooms deserve the extra work they demand”

to keep them as good as possible.

A few episodes back, I told you the story

about Shafer, the Chomo with a taste for ballet. David planted a shank in Shafer's cell. That had gotten rid of Shafer, but at the cost of Dave getting sent to the shoe 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 be lining 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. 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 stood under our own bunks.”

Except Dave wouldn't be rejoining the room. The SIS told me not long after they took Dave, that was gonna be the case. It was a little strange. Dave hadn't received a charge or even a disciplinary report

related to Shafer, but then Dave was extremely unpopular among the Aryans 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 collars had gone to SIS 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 gonna beat the shit out of him

and we're not gonna 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 let Dave, a piece of paper fell out, hmm, 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 Coldproof 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 read it me out.

I'm John Kiryaku. Welcome to DeadDrop, 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. 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.

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. 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 in hindrance of national security. That's a felony. Though we 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. 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 CEOs, 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 David stashed his copies, I couldn't betray them. Now, I had assumed Dave had 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.

“Full-ish 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 Lanzellotti's room,

because his name was on the list. As I told you a few episodes back, Mark was a bookie, as well as a chef. They took 12 hundred 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 notebooks pages. 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 and a hail of machine gun fire.

Not only did the prison authorities call Luke off to the shoe, they upgraded him to a medium-security prison. Talk about rookie mistakes. Of course, there were dozens of other entries for Shafer, the child molester, and for an arsonist name,

Owl with whom Dave viewed it 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. When the SIS called me into 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 shoe. 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. 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. Forman Slater, my subscribing friend emailed me,

"The magazine is being told that it's undeliverable

“"and that the name on the subscription has changed”

"from yours to somebody named Dave Phillips." Who, my friend asked, is Dave Phillips? Who and D, 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.

Dave was appealing his sense 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, topped a 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. 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 spine 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. 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 are always things that bothered me about those conversations. While Dave could generally talk to talk, pretty convincingly,

he made a lot of silly mistakes with the jargon. He'd mentioned 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 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. There was Doc Revis, a Medicare fraud doctor from Long Island. He wanted a lower bunk, but that was on the table, so pass. There was chin, a crooked and incontinent concrete mobile.

The man with un-concrete 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 and charge of bed assignments.

That wasn't going to happen either. So the bed sat empty for five weeks. In the meantime, my friend Mark Landslottie 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 Cher Mulani. Now, I told part of Cher's story a few episodes back. That is, I told the headlines about how we dealt with them. But it's worth a deeper dive. Cher was a naturalized citizen from Afghanistan.

He had emigrated to the US in 1980 after the Soviet Union invaded his country. Cher landed in Washington, DC's Virginia suburbs where cab driving made ends meet. Then, September 11th happened.

A defense contractor recruited Cher as a translator for American forces in Afghanistan. During an operation in eastern Afghanistan, Cher's armor, humbiqued and improvised, explosive device and flipped upside down.

Enemy fire reached the vehicle, killing everyone who wasn't already dead, except Cher and one American soldier. They crawled through a broken window. When Cher stood to try and run, a Taliban fighter shot him shoulder and the stomach

The American soldier pulled him down,

“called in reinforcements and tried to staunch the flow”

of blood pouring from Cher. Eventually, they were rescued. Cher 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.

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 nirliest scars anyone had ever seen courtesy of the bullet that had, quote unquote, 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 Cher's belly button

from where it was supposed to be at his belly to his side.

“It could be mind-boggling what bullets and bombs”

can do to human flesh. As you can imagine, PTSD became a constant and unwelcome companion. So on top of this broken body, unable to do even basic tasks,

there was rage at everyone and everything.

Cher got a multi-million dollar legal settlement.

He had therapy and drugs for the PTSD and the depression, but the rage, the rage is what one out. One day during an argument with his family, Cher 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. 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 shared made several trips per year, spending most of his time in country at the U.S. Air Force Base at Bagram.

“Mark wanted to do the right thing by his lawyer,”

hoped that I could track Cher down, bond over our common experiences and make him feel comfortable. Mark wanted to do right by his lawyer, hoped I could track Cher 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 the hiccups.

Five weeks after Dave's departure, a CO delivered a five-foot four-inch bearded, one-armed Afghan man to my room. And said, "Here's your new celly. "We gave Cher a pair of shower shoes,

"a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, and shampoo, "and I took them to the chapel to introduce him around "and to get him a Quran." Also, I introduced Cher to a heat, another Afghan inmate and a former pharmacist.

So far, so good. Back in our room, I explained to Cher 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, 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 the red o' long enough, a person in prison "because of something they did involving a computer, "means only one thing." "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 Chomotevel. 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. His routine, every single day, involved some combination of eating, sleeping, lifting weights,

and watching TV. Strange isn't might seem from beard's perspective.

Having beard as a roommate had unexpected benefits for me.

“He frequently offered surprisingly sage advice”

on a variety of subjects. His sagacity, the 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 crawl, like he sensed something. He cut right to the end of the chase. What's your crime? I made a stupid mistake, said share, 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? Share noted.

He got it. Beard looked at me.

“His eyes saying, "Weirly, not another child molester."”

But that's what share 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 share had been having what he called and a fair, again, his word, with his 14-year-old niece.

He got her to send him a nude photo of herself. That was the photo on Share's computer. One day, Share'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 Share. 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.

As furious as it made me, I remembered my promise to try and ease Share'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. Share'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 going to win friends and influence fellow inmates. I took Share 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 shea Muslims in prison, Share asked if he could buy any religious items that he might need. Share said the chaplain. There was a catalog and any inmate, including Share, could order whatever they needed.

Share 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 Green Middle Eastern studies, with the concentration

in Islamic theology. But that request was as new to me as it was to the chaplain.

“So Share and I headed back to our room, as we walked Share said quite seriously, "I think”

he hates Muslims." Yeah. Sure. Sure. That's what the problem here is.

Like beard, Share enjoyed being in prison. He felt completely comfortable in prison. In fact, he saw a 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. Share was not a guy who was going to defend himself easily. To top off the whole pile of bad roommate dynamics, he was a filthy, slob, to 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, Share had a festering, so large you couldn't miss it, herpesore, on

his upper lip, and then put his now tainted washcloth, which had touched the herpesore on our roommate, Eric's bed. I thought Eric was going to lose his mind. Share then hung up a string to dry the clothes, he would hang the clothes on the string

It stretched from one end of his bunk to the other.

“This was against regulations, and would never pass weekly inspection.”

But Share was on the lower bunk, and Eric was on the top bunk, so the string was actually on Eric's bed, rather than shares. Share put the herpes's washcloth and chis 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 it shared to not ever do such a disgusting thing ever again. Share can try, did he take the big picture of you? Absolutely not. Instead, he shouted at everyone.

"I will fuck you in the ass, I will fuck your mother in the ass," and it just got crazier from there. Eric walked out.

From the next 40 minutes, Share 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, Share's presence in the room was not going to fly long-term. We were going to have to do something about it. "No, no, no, no, I didn't even want to go back to the room."

"No, just an old trauma." With mobile phones in real life, no old trauma, Frank. From the beginning to the unknown, it's time to talk. It's possible for you to see Euro-Emonaut. Frank, no.

Frank. 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 cost-art and touched-own 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 is head-in-fact. It's a hell of a podcast and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts or at cost-art and touch-stone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at cost-art and touch-stone.

Like the donor, a DNA horror story. The Hall closet. Age 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. That night, Sheriff 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 Sheriff had rehung his drying string and stuck the Herpes' washcloth right next to Eric's head again. Sheriff 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-cused back-and-forth, Sheriff ran out of the room. I looked at Frank, 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

Sheriff, 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, Sheriff? Absolutely not. I shot back. He was in bed half asleep.

The senior Muslim took it all in, finally, he nodded thoughtfully and we headed back into

Sheriff, the Muslim said, "Where exactly did he stab you?"

“Sheriff 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, Sheriff insisted, "He wanted to stab me." The Muslims now realizing Sheriff had lied to them and had pulled them into this conflict and apologized to Eric and walked out. I looked at Sheriff, so now you're a rat in addition to being a pedophile. Good luck with that.

The next day we had a room meeting and decided that Sheriff had to go. I wrote the request to staff, which Sheriff ensigned, asking that he'd 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 Sheriff began to get harder and harder to put up with." Prison, directly and indirectly, surrounds the rulebreakers within its walls with lots of rules that they absolutely must follow. Some are the prisons rules, of course, but many are unwritten rules laid down by prison culture and Sheriff flouted those rules the way other people breathe.

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 Shia insisted on praying in the room and I'll remind you, our room was 160 square feet for six people.

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 Shia on his prison rug in the very middle of the room simply wasn't going to work. So having Shia 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 Shia never, ever, clean 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 grizzly stump and his, you had to see it to believe how grizzly 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 Shia constantly to cover up. His reaction was simply to shout, "Buck 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." Shia also ignored the prison's rules, the rules regarding prison uniforms, for example, is clear, all inmates must be in full uniform from 6am 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 months suspension of commissary, telephone, email, or even visiting privileges, but Shia 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.

One day the warden came through on one of his periodic walkabouts. He saw Shia and bed, woke him up and told him, "Get up, get your uniform on. You can't sleep under the covers." Shia looked up at the warden, like he was an alien, and who the hell are you? With eyebrows arching and 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.

It was what I meant. Get up and get dressed." The warden said as he exited, done with us. Shia's response, "What was that all about?" Shia was the only Shia Muslim among a large group of Sunni Muslims in our housing unit.

Shia's 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 Iatola.

Next thing, Shia's lecturing the other Muslims on how their prayers are wrong, his word. How they repeated Arabic sayings of that 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 because "they're stupid, they smell bad, and they don't know the prayers," unquote.

As you might imagine, this caused quite a rift. Shia was thrown out of the group, and told that he couldn't pray with the Sunni as any more. His reaction later, he would shove his prayer rug, quote, "up their mother's cons," unquote. So pious.

Our rooms, Shia problem, became the whole unit's share problem. He would literally stand in front of the large floor fan outside the bathroom after playing soccer for two hours.

“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 Shia's locker a vigorous shake. Well, as you know from a previous podcast, that was Joey.

When Shia 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. 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. Frank, Eric and I thought it was pretty hilarious that one of Shia's many enemies was taking the game right to him. Shia pointed the finger at Waheed, 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. Shia accused Waheed right to his face. You shook my locker. He raged at him. If you do it again, I'll kill you.

Well, he'd said, "I didn't do shit to you." With that, Shia was persona non grotto with the Muslims. He couldn't pray with them. He couldn't even talk to them. As far as they were concerned, Shia was a total apostate.

By then worded gotten out that on top of the steaming pile of shit, Shia was a 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 Shia directly if he had committed a sex crime.

Because it really does matter to the prison community. Shia said, "It's very complicated." The gangbanger cut him off, and he was not allowed to ever play soccer again. Fine, said Shia. When the gangbanger was no longer with a near shot, Shia couldn't help adding, "I don't

care about their soccer. I fuck them all. I fuck their mothers. I will shove my fist up their asses." OK, Shia.

You be you. The cold hard truth was that Shia 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 Shia 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.

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 at rules. If stability, remember, if stability is not to your benefit, chaos is your friend. Got a problem? Solve it with a dirty trick.

All right then, my mission was this, get Shia to check himself into the shoe, where he would be out of our hair and where he would get much closer psychological observation.

makes me look bad, but the mission was the mission, and we could not live with this monster any longer.

The first thing I did was to crush up an entire sleeve of saltine crackers and spread them

all over Shia'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, Shia, I said, "Obviously, you have enemies. This harassment is going to continue.

“Maybe you should just check yourself into the shoe.”

It's quiet down there, and nobody's going to bother you. Frank jumped into the chorus, "Listen to him, Shia," he said, "This is only going to get worse. Just go to the shoe."

Shia shouted at me, "I fuck their shoe!

I am not a fan of blasphemers, by which he meant, of course, the Sunni Muslims. I am Shia Moulani, follower of Ali, follower of Hussein, I will give my life to kill the enemies of Islam." 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 CEO that the nearby security camera did not work. The 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 handy work. He had broken into Shia's locker, he had stolen 10 bags of macro, he had taken a pair

of scissors and he cut the pockets out of Shia's pants and disappeared his prayer beads. Joey told us later that he fleshed the prayer beads down the toilet. Once after we entered the room, Shia 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." Shia tried to argue, but the CO already bored, just moved on with his day. With Shia'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 Shia was having none of it. I will feed them their own balls! The next day Shia hired another Muslim pedophile, Aroma. We used to use the now disfavored term Gypsy, from Cleveland, to keep an eye on Aroma. He paid the Roma by having his wife transfer money into the kids' account to buy a radio

and an MP3 player, strictly against the rules and punishable, of course, by confinement and the shoe. If Shia was going to zig, I was going to zag in response. I went up to the Roma and I demanded do know why he was hanging around our room. I'm just looking for Shia, 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 going to 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 and again.

Besides, I can try to convince him in the meantime to go to the shoe." Yet again, though, the shoe conversation was a non-starter, Shia wasn't going anywhere, and a week passed, and Joey asked me what I wanted him to do. 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 can front of us.

Shia, in front of his bed, complaining loudly to the same CO as before, but this time, the offending thing in Shia's bed wasn't crumbs.

of an erect cock and balls, permanently marking Shia's bedsheet.

I said, "Shia, this is out of hand." Whoever your enemy is, make peace with him. Beard was not in on the conspiracy, and he exploded at Shia. "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, and 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 Shia.

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 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, "Ask holes 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 un-adventful days passed, Shia 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" on quote "his tormentor," that lasted for one day. James then got quiet again for the better part of a week.

That should have made Shia 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 Grievous.

“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 how what Doc could have meant. We arrived just about when Shia arrived. His prayer rug was opened, and turned upside down, and another large erect cock decorated it.

But this one had writing above it. It said, "As whole you are," and then it was signed Yoda. Shia physically shook, he was so angry. He tore off the underside of the rug and threw it away. He wanted to go to the CEO again.

"Don't!" I told him. I'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, Shia did run right back to the CEO again, who told him again that there was nothing he could do.

Shia was even further in sense now, 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 Shia 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 Shia's pillow. It was a terrible, culturally insensitive thing to do, 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 going to kill the guy. I just put some pork under his pillow.

Shia 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. Now he was a 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

For attention, we're tired of all your bullshit. We're tired of you, just get out. Shia had zeroed in on the lead. I'm doing it to myself. I said, ah-ha, so the truth comes out.

You're doing it to yourself.

“Shia and his mind just reeled and he screamed.”

I will fuck you all. I will kill you all. I'm not afraid of your prison. I'm not afraid of death. I'm not afraid of your government.

You created Al-Qaeda, I fuck Al-Qaeda, I fuck the Taliban. 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, Shia is gone nuts, ruining his exit. I think he needs psychic attention.

A second later over the PA system I heard, Shia Malani report to the unit manager's office,

well, Shia refused to go to the office.

“So the unit manager now aching to just leave his job behind for good, sent a couple”

of CEOs, who cuffed Shia's one arm to his waist and hauled him away. Frank and I watched him go, 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 Shia down there.

He had, and he said Shia 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 then kick in the door when Shia 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 that I'd be leaving the spine world behind. It turned out that I was diving even more deeply into it. During the latter part of my state, 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. He didn't know how to rap, but he wanted to be like PDD. So I asked him, "How does one become a rap mogul like PDD?"

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 9 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." I said, "Do you mind if I ask you what your crime was?" He said, "Well, child molestation." Later in the day, I want 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 going to take boys into the woods. They're all going to end up selling drugs or going into food service.

Now get that 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 Kiryaku. Dead Drop is written by John Kiryaku and Alan Katz.

Costart and touched on Productions produces the podcast and John Kiryaku, Alan Katz, and Nick McKanick are its executive producers. In the podcast, it's a cast with a touchstone production. Schicks als waltz in Sachsenanheit. For the Landfax waltz, I'd like to ask how the land is going to work.

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