Going to prison for exposing illegal CIA programs is one thing. Navigating the social hierarchy of a federal penitentiary on your very first day is another. For this former intelligence insider, the two experiences turned out to be equally disorienting — and, in retrospect, darkly comic.
A Guard's Parting Advice
The orientation was brief. When the guard escorted him to his cell during intake, the only guidance he offered was a single sentence: "If somebody comes into your cell uninvited, that's an act of aggression." Forty minutes into his prison sentence, that warning was tested.
Two men walked straight into his cell without knocking. One had a swastika tattoo that covered his entire neck and crept up onto his face. The other had the word "you" tattooed on his eyelids.
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Speaker recounting the appearance of the two men who entered his cell on day one
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His instinct was to stand his ground. "I figured if I was going down, I was at least taking one of them with me," he recalled. He jumped up and demanded to know what they wanted.
The Intake Interview
What followed was less a confrontation than a screening process. The man with the swastika ran through a short checklist:
- "You the new guy?" — Yes.
- "You a fag?" — No.
- "You a rat?" — No.
- "You a chomo?" — Unknown. (Definition provided: child molester.) — No.
Having cleared all four criteria, he received his assignment: "You can sit with the Aryans in the cafeteria." He had been in prison less than an hour and had already been sorted into a faction he had no interest in joining. But the rules, as he quickly learned, were simple and non-negotiable — at least until someone with more authority weighed in.
Getting Drafted by the Mob
A few months into his sentence, his housing situation brought an unexpected upgrade. He was living across the hall from a captain in the Bonanno crime family, who eventually pulled him aside with a question: "Why do you sit with those Nazi retards every day?"
He explained that he hadn't exactly chosen the arrangement — it had been assigned to him on day one, and he hadn't known it was negotiable. The captain's response was immediate and final: "From today, you are with the Italians."
His reaction? Relief. "It's about time," he thought. "Took you long enough."
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Speaker describing the moment he was reassigned from the Aryan table to the Italian mob's table
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What Prison Actually Is
He captured the experience in a line from his second book, which frames the absurdity better than any anecdote: prison is a combination of seventh grade, Lord of the Flies, and a mental institution — set in the 1950s.
The social dynamics, the arbitrary hierarchies, the territorial rules enforced by men with face tattoos — none of it operates on logic that translates to the outside world. You don't choose your table. Your table chooses you. And if you're lucky, a mob captain eventually takes pity on you and offers a better seat.
