Washington D.C. – CNN, Feb. 15, 2026
James Luckey-Lange has been spending a lot of time looking at the names he carved on a bar of soap he smuggled out of a Venezuelan prison in his underwear.
The 28-year-old New York native spent just over a month detained by Venezuelan officials, whom he says beat him, deprived him of food for multiple days at a counterintelligence facility and only released him on January 13 following the US capture of the country’s then president, Nicolás Maduro.
At one point, he said, “I thought they were just going to execute me. That was the scariest time. Besides that, I was just really frustrated, really aggravated [and] angry.”
Now back at his aunt’s home in New Jersey, Luckey-Lange is looking up the names of his former prison mates on his soap and searching for their families on Facebook to let them know they might be alive.
He was initially held in solitary confinement for long stretches at the counterintelligence facility. But even when he wasn’t in solitary, he didn’t get a good look at many of his prison mates. “I’ve never seen a lot of these people’s faces. It’s hard to find their families if you don’t know what they look like,” Luckey-Lange told CNN.
“I hope they don’t think I’m up there getting tortured right now,” he said of those he was held with. “I hope they know I got out.”
