The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1264: Joe Loya | Confessions of a Bank Robber Part One

Episode Date: December 30, 2025

Former bank robber Joe Loya reveals how childhood trauma transformed him into a prolific criminal — and how he found his way back. [Part 1 of 2]Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1264What We Discuss with Joe Loya:Childhood trauma doesn't excuse criminal behavior, but it explains how violence becomes normalized. Joe's father beat him over 100 times before age 15, creating a psychological framework where aggression felt like the only authentic response to a world that had brutalized him first.Bank robbery became a twisted form of therapy — a way to reclaim power stolen in childhood. Joe describes the "rapture" of robberies as moments where he finally felt in control, transforming victim psychology into predator psychology through carefully orchestrated criminal acts.Solitary confinement can either break you or remake you. Joe spent seven years total in "the hole." Rather than destroying him, isolation became an unexpected crucible for self-reflection, forcing him to confront the rage he'd been running from his entire life.The most dangerous lies we tell are the ones we believe about ourselves. Joe constructed elaborate internal narratives justifying his crimes as righteous rebellion, only recognizing decades later how childhood shame had corrupted his entire moral operating system.Redemption isn't about erasing your past — it's about transforming it into something useful. Joe now channels his understanding of trauma, violence, and recovery into writing and speaking, proving that even the darkest experiences can become tools for helping others navigate their own shadows.And much more... [Part 1 of 2 — stay tuned for Part 2 later this week!]And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: Northwest Registered Agent: Get more at northwestregisteredagent.com/jordanNutrafol: $10 off 1st month: nutrafol.com, code JORDANShopify: 3 months @ $1/month (select plans): shopify.com/jordanApretude: Learn more: Apretude.com or call 1-888-240-0340Homes.com: Find your home: homes.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Special thanks to Kaman Jack for sponsoring this episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. The choreography of a beating, right? I don't know at the time, but I'm nursing a couple fractures of rib in their album. I'm beat up real good. Put my brother in the bathroom. I lock them in. I go to the kitchen and I pull out a steak knife.

And I walk over to the bedroom. I put it under the pillow and I just sit there and I wait. My dad comes in. He looks at me over there, you know, glares at me. So I'm thinking like, what am I, what's he going to use to hit me? I'm through. This is like a new level of improvised savagery, right? So I'm like, okay, screw it.

And I grab the knife out and I stand up and now I'm standing there with a steak knife in my hand. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through

long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional rocket scientist, investigative journalist or hacker. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, social engineering, China, North Korea, crime and cults and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. just visit jordan harbinger.com slash start or search for us in your spotify app to get started. Today on the show, how does someone even get the idea to rob a bank? Not the Ocean's 11 version,

no team, no gadgets, no vault lasers, just you, a piece of paper, and the decision to walk up to a stranger and tell them to hand over a pile of cash. The 80s and 90s were probably the golden age of bank robbery, no cell phone pings, no facial recognition, maybe one blurry VHS tape that looked like some bigfoot footage, and then you're gone. You don't run. you don't speed away, you just walk out. Today we're talking with Joe Loyah, a guy who rubbed dozens of banks, calmly, methodically, often wearing a fedora like he was heading to brunch

or maybe a game of Dungeons and Dragons instead of committing a felony. But the story isn't really about bank robbery. It's about fear and how you push through it the first time you do something that permanently changes who you are. It's about violence, power, and what happens when the person who hurts you the most is also the person who raised you.

It's about prison, redemption, and whether you can really walk away from the worst things you've done. Here we go with Joe Loyah. A good place to start is probably, how does someone find themselves even with the idea of robbing banks? Like, where is it like, hey, here's the move.

I'm going to start robbing banks. Well, I mean, you have to start a lot earlier than, hey, I want to rob banks. Okay. Well, as you guys I knew rob banks actually were drug addicts, which meant they were doing it to subsidize a drug habit. And so they would just go there so they could get a big bunch of money.

They could lock themselves in a hotel, get a lot of drugs, get some women. And then that was it. There's no feel for posterity. They're not thinking, oh, how long is this going to last me? Like, can I save it? Can I invest it? You can't have that feel for it. So how does somebody grow up, become an adult and have no feel for posterity?

Trauma. Yeah. You have to have trauma early on. You have to have lost connections to the things in society. It's to hear we do this, we do this, we do that. And then you get to the thing, right? You get to the payoff. Well, for us criminals,

and part of our impulsivity comes from the fact that we don't have a goal. We don't have that thing. We're just doing what do I need now? What do I need now? What I need now? So I got to there through my childhood, which even though in many ways, I was very fortunate in that I had a lot of love early on. I was raised in some private schools.

My mom and dad got married when they were 16. My dad was an ex-gang member, now a Christian, Protestant Christian in East L.A., which was all a sea of brown Catholics. It's very odd to be those people. But we lived in the East LA Matarvia housing projects. We were very poor, but ambitious. My dad was very ambitious.

My dad becomes a Christian, and he discovers that he loves the language. He wants to study Greek. He wants to study Hebrew. So he becomes this little brown academic, little nerdy guy who wants to learn the languages of the Bible so he can read in the original language.

So I'm raising that environment. My mother and him in Medina said they were 12. They love each other. They're like these little brown mascots in the church. like the very predominantly middle-class white church. And my parents, they were young married at 16 to 17. They had kids.

Wow. So when they would go to the young married department, it was all these middle-class women and men who graduated from college and now they're having kids. But they're in the middle 20s, right? So my dad and my brother, they're little people. And they're like, they get all this love. Everyone's taking care of them. So I'm getting a lot of love.

I'm being raised in this environment in which our family receives a lot of affection. And one of the things we receive too is they're like, hey, you're poor. But why don't you send your kids? kids in the school and we'll do a scholarship thing. So I get scholarship. I start going to his private Christian schools, great education. Unfortunately, my dad had been brutalized as a kid, even though he loves God, even though he loves Jesus, even though, you know, I want, now want, I want to grow up and I want to be, I want to do something at church. My dad would get angry sometimes and he would be a little bit more than, you know, than the average person. He was just, he was always on

edge, he would get angrier. It was really defensive, really kind of, you know, he's got a little volatile, but he's young. We're young. We're just thinking this is the way it is in the style of neighborhood and you're in the 60s, right? My mother gets sick at when I'm seven and she gets kidney disease. I don't know it, but this is going to kill her in two years. And in the meantime, it's dragging her down. There's no fight. She can't get a new kidney. Her body would reject it. That's how far along it was. Now the stress is on my dad. Private schools, driving us to school, has to go visit moms. Moms is having all these experimental drugs on her. and periodically she doesn't know who she is.

Not only does she not know who she is, sometimes she thinks she's Elizabeth Taylor. And she would call the house and say, hey, can I speak to my boys? This is Elizabeth Taylor. She was out there. Yeah. And my dad was having to deal with this stress, right?

So when you're stressed out of then, you're a young man, he goes to aggression. And me and my brother, we would do smallest things and we would get hit pretty good. It's a really weird time. All this stuff's happening. You're a kid. You know something's going on.

You know the mood in the house is changing. You know, you're getting a lot of love. You know, Jesus. And then all this. Oh, wait, what? Why is it so? And it's just confusing the mind. Well, when I turn nine, my mom dies.

And she dies. Where are you from? Are you from California? I'm from Detroit. I'm from Detroit originally. Okay. Back in L.A. in 1971 to February 9th, there was this huge earthquake. It was called the Silmar earthquake.

In Silmar, there was a hospital wing fall out, fall collapse, a 210, which wasn't even completed yet. That was the day we buried my mother. So that was a very traumatic day, too. When my mother died, we received a lot of love from me. her and everything like that. My dad can't handle the stress. It's just too much for him. And when he gets angry now, he gets brutal. Like, we are getting bigger too. So when we were little, it was easy to just whack us around and we'd get, have control. But now we're getting bigger. And so we're taking

punches. We're getting kicked. Like, it's not your basic spankets. Now, it's not happening all the time. Okay. But only when you would get stressed and he would get angry, which is why we get so discombobulated because there's all this love and there's all this ambition to be like Jesus and love of Jesus. And then my daddy became a minister for a while, but he would periodically like beat us while he's preparing for his sermons and stuff. And it was just a total moral confusion in the house, total moral confusion. I'm not sure that that's that rare. I think a lot of people who grew up with religious parents got beat quite severely. I'm not trying to downplay what you went through at all. I'm just saying the moral confusion.

I think is shared by quite a few people with a religious path. Let me go on. Let me go on. No, I know it gets a lot worse. Okay, so listen, all I'm saying is I'm getting you ready. But more importantly, what most people don't have is they don't have a minister for a father. Here's what I mean by moral confusion, what most people don't have, certainly none of the kids and friends that I had growing up. When one day I get beat up by these bullies at school, I come home, my glasses are broken right here. My sweater's all been out of torn up and everything. Three guys just beat the hell out of me, right? I come home and my dad is at the kitchen table with about five commentaries open because he has to give a sermon on Sunday. He's studying the scriptures. He's doing his hermeneutics. He's finding out what's going on at that time in the Bible, at that particular politically, geographically, like everything. He wants to know that passage so he can preach it to you.

His boy comes in, broken glasses, torn up, sorry. What happened? I said, I got beat up for that. He comes over, slaps me and he said his son's not going to be a sissy. he gets me in the car and says, I got to go fight all, we're going to find those three guys and I got to fight them each individually. Wow. This is what I mean by moral confusion. We're not talking about, oh, my dad, you know, he just raises his voice, he slaps us around. I'm telling you, I walk in, he's preparing for church.

And this disillusions me even further because had you just been a regular blue collar worker who went to church with me on Sunday and beat me up, I'm like, okay, that's everybody. You're right. But this is different because I'm being encouraged to aspire to hire themes. and I'm watching my father do it. And on Sunday, I'm watching the entire congregation, love on my dad, because he's that guy who's inspiring them to the higher themes. And I'm looking around saying, you guys don't see it?

We're getting beat up all the time. We got bruises on us. What are you guys doing? And it disillusions me to the whole rigmarole. The time goes on. My dad gets married to another woman. She was a great stepmom. Her name was Brenda.

I was 10. She was 20. My dad's 26 at this point, 27. Oh, my God. So young. Yeah, very young, right? So Brenda was out of Turlock up here. She was like a country girl.

Her family was from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Kentucky or something. She was white girl. And we're, like I said, we're in East Nathlet. It's all brown. And everyone thinks she's our maid because she's like she's so out of all my friends of school and she would come to pick me over there. Who's that your maid? White manny.

I don't know what you're talking about. But they did not know she was my mom. But she was great. You know, she introduced a lot of things. She introduced me literature, in fact. She got me reading a lot of great literature. and she cleaned up my English to kind of the East L.A. staying out of it temporarily. Brenda became disillusioned with my dad, too.

They became violent with her as well. And she saw all the violence that was going on with us. Now, she decides the way she, what she has to do for herself is she has to leave. Now, this is all not just telling you a story. This isn't the service of the question you ask. Like, how does somebody become a bank robber? When my dad was administered with Brenda was the accountant, they would get their offering. and I'm already like larceness in the heart.

I'm so angry and that confused. One, nobody's helping with my grief. My mom dies. They catch me crying. You know what's the church lady say? Why are you crying? Don't cry. She's in heaven.

Oh, The Bible says absent from the body present with the Lord. You should be celebrating that she's in heaven. This is the counseling I'm getting from everyone around me, which has the effect of making me feel like shit because I'm like, oh, man, I'm selfish. I should be happy for my mom. And why am I feeling these feelings? These feelings are nothing but bad.

terrible. This is the moral guidance or spiritual guidance I'm getting. Now, right. Besides that, that's not helping me in terms of the moral quandary that I'm going to be into eventually be the guy who robs banks. But it's just a tough time for me to try and process the grief myself and beyond being brutalized. So I got all this aggression going to me now. I got rage growing up. You think kids don't have rage. They got by age 11. I'm rageful. And by age 13, I pull a bunch of fire alarms at school. Now I'm a delinquent. I'm getting A's. I'm the best kid in school. Getting the American Legion Warren because I'm this great kid, but I'm troubled.

And what I do, I put all these firearms one week and I get suspended. You know, I'm fighting. I'm just acting out because nobody can help me. And so as far as they're concerned, the language it gets thrown at me is sinner, you know, all the stuff that we throw at youngsters now who are having problems and act out. We come super predators, gang bang, whatever you want to call them. They're troubled kids. They're messed up.

No one's helping to figure it out. And so they act out. They act out of rage. And rage that has been put into them. Rage that has been fanned in them, and they don't know why, they don't know where it is. It needs to come out. And the same thing with me. I'm at the same place.

So I'm acting now. Brenda's watching all this deteriorating the home. And so what I start doing is I start stealing money from the offering. Like I tell everyone my first victim was God. Oh, my God. And then I would go to school and I would pay for all my friends. And I got these sixth grade, seventh, eighth grade friends that are old school friends of mine. And we were talking about how I used to buy.

all these taquitos of Wakamole, I would get over there buying burritos for us. I was paying for the stolen money, right? So I wanted to make myself look not poor. And so that is the beginning of me getting a bank. You could track it to that. I'm like, I don't like being poor. I don't like having, not having money. I'm angry as hell all the time.

There's money. Let me just take it. And I don't care what the consequences are. I get away with that for whatever reason. Their book keeping me was so sloppy. I feel they must have been ripping God off to it because they are like, That book even was not accurate. Anyway, fast forward.

Brenda leaves my dad. I'm 15. And he now bruised around the house like a drunk. When I would tell the story to guys in prison, I'm talking about hardcore, badass guys. They would say, oh, he was a drinker. And I was like, no, didn't drink. And one day when I'm 16, he was angry. Brenda left, kind of humiliating him and stuff.

And so he walks into the kitchen. My brother is drying the dishes. Paul's washing him. I'm drying him. My dad comes in, and we're just saying. terrified. And we're skinny, skinny, skinny kids, real skinny. And my dad comes in and he all of a sudden sucker punches my brother under wrist. And Paul winces, and this is the worst memory of my life. Of all the terrible things I've done and all the terrible things done to me, this is the worst moment of my life,

hands down. My dad punches Paul in the ribs, pounces on his neck, grabs his neck, and then starts dunking Paul's head into the soap water, the dish water. Drilling. And I'm, and I'm, standing there, paralyzed. Now, I have a lot of heart in my body at the time. I'm very arrogant. I feel like I can do. I'm going to grow up in the world. I'm going to be somebody. I just don't know what yet. I have all this confidence in myself. And right there, I am shown to be a complete coward, because I'm sitting there watching my brother get dunked and I don't do anything except freeze. And he keeps getting dunked. And on one point, he looks up at me with terror in his eyes. And I can't do anything. And he finally lifts my brother up the third time. And he leads in

his ear and he says you should have died instead of your mother. Oh my God. So that night, I'm thinking I have to kill myself. That's the first time I contemplated suicide. I cannot be this guy. I cannot handle this new version of me that has been shown me. I'm a coward. I have no guts. Here I am thinking I'm this and I'm this. And it does not comport, man. It does not fit. But I have to accept the fact that I'm a coward. I let him do that. I'm a brother. I didn't do anything. and I hate on myself. I sit with this for like six months, hating myself, wanting to die.

I don't like this at all. My dad gets a new girlfriend. When he gets this new girlfriend, we like, I like her so much. And he was Susie, sweetheart of a woman. And I'm like, fuck this. I'm going to sabotage that relationship.

So he gets Susie as a girlfriend. And when he gets Susie's a girlfriend, I'm going to sabotage him. We go to dinner. That's how sweet she is. She takes us out of steak dinner. And at the time, Sizzler was the jam. Sizzler was the jam.

We're talking in 1978, something like that. She takes us out. We're having dinner, and I start telling her a litany of the things he's done to us, right? The beatings and the brutality. And then all of a sudden I realized, man, I've just painted myself to look like a big sissy myself. Like I'm always getting beat up. And so I remember specifically grabbing the steak knife there. And they had those really nice steak douse, you know, woodhand.

It's a good steak knack. I remember if he does it to me again, I'm going to stab in the neck. And so he says, no, Joey, don't do that. Put it down. violence doesn't help. Just sweet, sweetheart. And I did that because I wanted to take back some of the, you know, like, I'm over here just doing nothing but talking about how I'm being beat on and a sissy.

I feel like I'm a sissy. Now I want to have some, eh, eh, so I put a little macho in my base in my face and I, she puts me down and says, don't do it. Well, now it's in my head. And I'm thinking, you know, what's in your head? Stabbing your dad in the neck with a sake? That'll be my dad in the neck, right? That's when I say it.

Now I tell her, listen, you cannot tell my dad. If you tell my dad, we're in trouble. You need to leave him. And do it quick, be clever about it. Well, she's so sweet. She can't lie. She doesn't know how to lie. So all she can do is just pull back from my dad.

And someone like my dad, who's like a con man, now at this point he's selling insurance, a different kind of, like it's like the pulpit, and insurance salesmen are the same thing. They're trying to save you from fire. So he's just insurance age, maybe that, yeah, just call him all con men. But he can read.

He can read that something has happened. Right. And finally, a week later, we go to wash clothes and stuff. He doesn't know, but he suspects. And here's how we find out. A week later, we go do laundry. And long and the short of it is, you know, this is the 70s. A lot of people wore polyester.

It was disco era. I ruined like half my dad's wardrobe accidentally. Putting that stuff in a hot dryer, ruined it. Man, shrunk everything, right? He's so angry because we're so poor. Like, you know, he went bankrupt. He's in a bad way after the divorce. It broke him.

And so now we're really in the poor place. And I've just ruined half his wardrobe. Well, now the stress of all this thing's going on is a fan. So I go home, I get punched a little bit. He throws me in the room and I'm sitting there and they say, hey, Joey, come over here. And I come in there. I'm trembling, you know. And he's like, hey, you know, Susie told me what you told her.

And I just want to let you know that I'm all right. I understand you felt like you had to tell it. I just need to admit that you tell her so we can clear it up. Oh, he's tricking you. And that was the first time and the last time that I ever confessed her crying. And he said, you just have to, you know, just please just admit what's going on. That's it. And I'm like, all right.

And now here's the thing. As a kid, you want to be right with your parents, man. You do. You can have shitty parents. And there's a point where you come extremely disillusioned, but you want to be right with your, every child's born wanting to be love and love their parents. That's it. And that's all.

I don't care who you are. In this moment, I'm like, maybe he is being magnanimous, right? He has shown magnanimity in time. So I admit to it. Oh, my God. Beating commences. It's first a teapot's thrown on me, but by the end of it, he leaves the house. I have a concussion.

I don't know at the time, but I'm nursing a couple fractures of rib and an album. I'm beat up real good. My dad has run down to the 7-Eleven. We don't have a phone because, like I said, we're broke. He's going to 7-Eleven to break up with Susie. This is what I find out later. While he's gone, I put my brother in the bathroom. I lock him in.

I go to the kitchen, and I pull out a steak knife. And I walk over to the bedroom. I put it under the pillow, and I just sit. up there and I wait. Again, we're going towards, how does somebody decide to rob a bank? This is all towards that. My dad comes in, comes to the bedroom door, and now he's ready. I've seen him many times before, the choreography of a beating, right? First, he's all loose in the neck. He's on the balls of his feet. You know, he's loose. You're ready for it. He looks at me over there, you know, glares at me. Then he looks over on the other side of the room and he sees a weight set,

glares at me, weights set, starts walking to this weight set. We're talking about, you know, big old barbell. And in those days, it was like the weights of 25 pound, 20 pound cement blocks with plastic around them. They're like made out of that garbage can, thick plastic. Exactly. And they're kind of round and they don't really, they kind of

like bulbous. Yeah, I remember those things. But they do have a really strong, big strong metal gadget to tie him, I'm losing. I'm thinking like, what am I, what's he going to use to hit me? And no matter which one of those three pieces, the bar, the weight, the nodule that ties it, tightens it, I'm

through. This is like a new level of improvised savagery, right? So I'm like, okay, screw it. And I grab the knife out and I stand up and now I'm standing there with a steak knife in my hand. He sees me, he drops the weight because I stand up with the knife. I'm holding and he sees it and he drops the way and he's like,

put it down, put it down. And I'm just standing there. Now, I've not done this before but I have thought about it. And I'm thinking that neck is a kill shot. What do I know? I've learned since then. I've never stabbed anyone on the neck again. But I'm thinking that going to kill him because I need to kill him because if I don't, he'll kill me. Back at once

I put a pin in that real quick. When he told my brother, you sure has died instead of your mother, something important to happen, something clicked in me that gets me to this point. Up until that point, I had twin traumas, my mom's death and the brutality of you were experimenting. And they were happening next to each other, but never, they never were connected. I see. When he says, you should have died instead of your mother, we're getting beat up. And he's talking about the death of my mother and now they're locked and I think oh shit he wants us to be dead too he wishes my brother was dead that means by extension his children are expendable he wants us dead he's using the dead language that's one of the reasons that accelerated into me this idea that oh shit he could

kill us or i could kill myself but this is like in my head i've made this be a big thing so now i'm standing there with the knife i've thought about it it's time for me to stand up do the right thing I'm not a coward, and I'm showing him I'm not a coward, and he starts walking to me, and he gives it to me, give it to me, and I charge him. And when I charge him, he puts his arm up, and I go to swing, and I don't hit him because he has his arm up, and we're like, now I'm like, oh, my gosh. And I just, and I end up, and he turns his head and by, I end up snapping right here in the back of the neck.

And then I start twisting and try and break it off in his neck. Oh, my God. And he's like, ah, he's reaching back, ah, you kill me, you kill me. And he falls to the carpet. And at that point, you know, I was raised religious and all this stuff. And so my feeling is like I have to say something. And I do, being a dramatic kid, I stand over him. I say something like, this is what you brought this on yourself.

I didn't kill you, killed yourself kind of thing, right? Yeah, I'm surprised you didn't have a Bible quote ready. Dude, it would have been literally could have been, this is what thy hand hath rock. It almost feels like, I have to put a biblical note on it, right? So I do kind of be like. This is like some Pulp Fiction stuff where Samuel L. Jackson's like reading the, yelling the Bible verse. Coded Bible verse, exactly. Exactly. So, but I do say something like, no, I didn't kill you. You brought this on yourself thing, right? But in the biblical sense. And at this point, I run, Paul, Paul, and Paul's already at the front door. Joey, what's happened? What's happened? I got blood on me and everything. And I go, go, go, and we run in my aunt's house. Joe used a fedora and a trench coat as a disguise. I use sarcasm and denial when I check our expenses. Different tools, same anxiety. Quick break. Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. Bank robbery episode seems like a weird place to shill my six-minute networking course, but I'm going to do it anyway. Anyway, it is a relationship-building course.

It is non-cringy, down-to-earth. Won't put you in prison. Six minutes a day is all it takes, and many of the guests on the show already subscribe and contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course for free over at six-minute networking.

Now, back to Joe Loyah. What did you tell your aunt? Like, hey, I stabbed my dad. He's dead in the foyer. We run in and I'm like, call the police. My dad's dead. I just killed him. Oh, my God.

And at this point, we've been. run a mile to her house. Now, we were track athletes. I broke the school record. I liked always brag about it, and the three-third laurels. But didn't you have broken ribs at this point? Yeah, but I'm still like, you got adrenaline. Yeah.

You're adrenaline, right? Yeah. And I'm scared to death because all I'm being driven by is that he could take that knife on and chase me. This is the monster that I've been afraid of my whole life. Yeah. And as much as I think I killed him, I'm still afraid that he's going to pull out of his neck and come after us, right?

Right. Right. So, because he's just so monstrous in my imagination. So we get there, I tell her she calls the cops. And, you know, I've written about this recently. Like, man, her own brother, like, she was born that my dad was right after. They were very close. And for part of that afternoon, she believed her brother was dead.

I've never processed that until the last couple of years because she's now dead. And I feel like I see this story from so many different angles now. But, my aunt Gloria, we go to her house. They call the cop. The cops go to him. And bottom line is, my dad has some drama with himself on the other end. He lives. He survives barely.

They pull him in, and he tried to kill himself, bottom line. How come you didn't go to jail for stabbing your dad, or did you? Well, here's why. So what happens is we get, like the police come, they go look for my dad, then they get me, and they take me to jail in Alhambra. And when they take me there, the detective actually was interviewing me. He's treating me as if I laid in wait. It was attempted murder on my father, because that's what I'm confessing to.

I got the knife. I sat there. I waited from when he came back. I stabbed him. tried to kill him. And I'm bragging about it. Because now I feel like King Kong. I'm like, you know, I slayed the giant.

I'm him. I'm all that. And again, the adrenaline was a certain point. I'm really mad at him because I'm like, oh, all you asshole authoritarian, you back each other's play. You're backing my dad's play. The church is already taking a peek at this and they didn't punish him. I'm just thinking all authority.

You're all backing each other's play. That's how it goes. And he's now sitting there basically. I'm telling him I've been brutalized. He said, well, why didn't you call the police reader that I left? Why didn't you run another house? Like, nobody asked that question now because you know everything about domestic abuse and how you've, you know, you're paralyzed eyes.

Everyone knows that now, but back then he acted like I, in the wrong. Well, not long after that, I can't breathe very well. It hurts to breathe, you know, when you're, when you have a cracked rib. Broken ribs, yeah. Yeah, it hurts to breathe. And then my elbows, it's, I'm starting to feel all the pain of it. Yeah, the adrenaline's wearing off. They get a one of the female police officer taking me in a hospital,

and then we find out that I've been brutalized. You know, it's right there. X-ray show everything. So there's no more talk about punishing me for anything. I was, you know, I was defending myself. And then by that point, my dad had been arrested and, you know, he said what happened. So he admitted he beat you up and that you stabbed. Yeah, he admitted everything.

Oh, wow. Everything. Okay. And he was contrite. My one thing I'll give my dad, after it was all said and done, obviously he never hit us again. But when we went to foster care, because we went out of foster homes at foster care, the county took us away from him. Obviously, he was a delinquent father. But he jumped through every.

They told him to jump through to get us back. And he humiliated himself. He had to come into the homes. I was not nice to him. It's like the old who song. Like something about the new boss, same as the old boss. You know, it's like, now is my turn to be the jerk towards him. You're right?

I wasn't magnanimous. And I had the power. I had, you know, figuratively I had social services on speed dial. They came to see us all the time whenever. So I could threaten him with that shit. So anyway, I was not nice to him my senior year when I went back. But he was humble. He knew what he.

He did. He accepted. And to be honest with you, for years and years, decades, he beat himself up for that stuff. How did trying to essentially kill your dad? How did that change your life? I mean, did you have a sense of power at that point? Did you regret it at all? I mean, you're in foster care. Surely you're thinking, I did the right thing or I didn't do the right thing. Did you have any sort of feelings about what you had done? Yeah. So first of all, one of the worst experiences of my life. But one of the most powerful observations, like as a human looking at human dynamics, was that first night that I get to McLaren Hall. And it's all the kids that have been brutalized. I'm 16, so I'm sort of at the older age of the spectrum. Is this like an orphanage, McLaren Hall?

Now, it's McLaren Hall is where you go, where they, when they take you from your parents initially, they put you in this big place. You're taking out of the home, put a county care. And it's just this big facility where you are while you're going to court. You got to go to court to get taken from your parents officially and all this. And then they tried to place you on foster homes. But you have to stay somewhere until you're in a foster home. And this is where they take you like first night. This is where you go, right? It's been closed down now because of a lot of abuse occurred there and all that stuff. So it was terrible. But in what I saw there when I was there, there was a lot of little kids. And we're talking patches over their eyes, burns, bruises, crutches. It's the worst of the

worst kids brutalized in LA County, this is where they are. And they've all been rescued. They've all been emancipated. They've all been rescued from the abuse. And now they can go somewhere else and start over. And what happens is the end of the night, we all start going to bed and I'm in bed and all of a sudden I start hearing sniffling. First, I think somebody has a cough, maybe a cold. And it's open dorms kind of, right? So you can hear things down the hall and all this. It's not just on your own room. There's no doors on these things. It's like, Imagine what is an office where they have all these different spaces, but you can see and hear everyone.

It's kind of like that. Anyway, I started hearing sniffling. I started hearing kind of, and I realized, oh, so I think somebody's crying. And then more and more. And then pretty soon it becomes like, I want my mommy. And these kids start crying to go home. I want to go back to my mommy and my dad. And I'm sitting there like, what the?

I just try to kill my dad. Yeah. And what I realized that night is I'm not wired like every. everybody else. And I went to prison and I saw the same thing. I'm not the only one who was treated like that, but I'm the only one I ever met in the entire time who tried to kill their father. The close as anyone got, several guys, their dad was beating on their mom and they picked up a band. They threatened him or they jumped on him and a couple brothers beat up their drunk dad. That was as bad as it got. Nobody did what I did. Not one person that I meet tried to kill their dad.

So I knew in that little McLaren Hall place, I'm not wired like everyone else. I wanted to get there. I'm gone. I'm going forward. And I know forward is anxious and anxiety-ridden because I don't know where I'm going to go. I don't know where I'm going to be. And I'm feeling the anxiety of the future because it's coming on me. It's like, oh, everything's about to change.

But I'm like, I'm about the chaos. I'm about the change agent. I need to go there. One thing I'm not doing, I'm not lurching back to the bondage I just escaped from. And all these kids want to go back. And I tell you this is important because it made me feel like, Oh, I'm going to start looking at people one way or two ways, one division. You are either the kind of person who confronts change and emancipation with vigor and fear, yes, but drive and like I'm going to embrace it.

Or your person, when change comes and offers you an opportunity, you're like, oh, shit, going to go back, going to lurch back to a bondage. I'd rather be small. I'm not going to, I'm too afraid. And I'm the guy who goes that way. So I was always interested in meeting people and taking a measure of them and saying, okay, you're that person. or you're that person. And that night was important to me because they realized I'm the guy who can try and kill their father and be cool with it. And which means everybody else in the world, you're not even my blood.

The whole world could be a victim to me because if I got over that one taboo thing where you're not supposed to kill your father, you know, that's like that's biblical, that's mythological. I mean, all the great Greek myth, Roman stories, they have all the, even, you know, Shakespeare literature. Father, son should, it's important. And big deal, the dramas are between them and kill. the father is not a good thing. So I'm that guy, right? I feel like I have an epic soul. So that's also the part of the arrogance and the narcissism and the grandiosity. All that's now growing up in me, right? It's like, oh, shit, here's who we are. Back to your question, how do you get to be the guy who

bankrupts? Well, I realize I'm not made for society. They have all these morality, but they're too timid for me. I've seen past the curtain, and I see that everyone was suckered into believe in my dad. They're also suckered to believe that the police are cool. They're suckered to believe that every of the politicians are. Like, I become in my heart, like the little sociopath looking at like, you guys are falling for the okie-doke. And I'm not the guy who falls for the ok-doke. I'm the guy who stabs the ok-doke and says, get the hell out of my way.

I'm not buying it, right? So time goes on. I graduate high school and very poor, senior, very, very, very poor. My dad struggles and everything. I leave the house three days later. I go work and San Fernando Valley. and I'm going working for two full-time jobs. I'm like, this sucks.

Yeah, of course. Because I remember, I feel like I'm a giant now. I'm like, I've become, I know who I am. I'm this guy who has this verve, right? I have gall, I have all of this, and I have, I have weapons. You know, I'm like a guy who can do something, but I'm not feeling it. I'm going to college. East LA Community College, though I did tell her when I went to school back East,

and they'd say, where is it, East Della College? I was trying to be arrogant about who I was trying to fit my ego. Harvard. My ex-wife went to prison and I would tell up for a grad school and I would always say, man, how come you don't tell anyone you went to prison? She would always say she goes to school back east. That's the difference between somebody who went to prison and somebody who went to prison. You know what?

Yeah. She went to Yale. I went to jail. Yeah. Exactly. So, but yeah, all that to say that I'm doing school. The thing I want to say about East Valley Community College is I'm going to college and I'm going to college and I realize. What am I doing? I'm going to get out of what? I'm going to be a lawyer. I'm going to be a

what. I'm going to make 45. This is in 1980. So in those days, you know, $45,000, is a lot for somebody to come out of college and make that money. It's a big deal. And I'm thinking, wait, what? That doesn't sound right, man. Somebody who has what I have, and I'm feeling it. I'm really feeling this. Like something is roaring. I have to be much bigger. I have to dial up my narrative. I don't know what it is, but this line, this track. Let me go to college. Let me do that. That's not. I don't have no feel for that. And again, this is where the erosion of posterity has already occurred. And I can't have a feel for 10 years down the line. I'll behave it. I'll pay off a mortgage. Like, none of that. And so it's already happened to me. I don't have a feel for posterity.

Remember, my mom died at 26. There's also included in this, the feeling like, I just got to make it a 26. I don't know what happens after then. I just got to make it a 26 because that's where the cutoff date is for me and my it. A lot of people think, oh, 76, that's where, you know, when your parents died, that's approximately the age. I was like, I don't know if I'm going to make it to 26. I just got to make it a 26. And after that, I have no feel for them. So put all that in the mix. And I think, you know what, I'm not going to do all these years here so I can go make $45,000.

That's it. So I start committing little bullshit crimes. I start balancing checks, which is the easiest thing to do. And I start borrowing money and not paying it back. I start doing little frauds and then big of little frauds, but, you know, all small scale. Because I'm not a gang member, Because I'm not a criminal, because I don't have any one of my family to bring me into it, I have to connive my way into the underworld because I don't know anything.

So I commit a bunch of petty, petty crimes. But I committed a lot of them. And I end up being wanted in five different counties. Oh, wow. The worst of it, I defraud some guy out of a $32,000, $733, IBMW, which are top of the line at that time. You bought it, but then the check bounced or whatever. Yeah, it was elaborate. I mean, I literally wrote him a check and told him, hey, my banker's not there until this afternoon.

and he can tell you this check's good, and then I'll come back and pick the car. Because it was, you know, I wrote it for $35 or $32,000. So I drive down in L.A. from Santa Barbara, and I crossed out the guy's number. I gave him my dad's phone number, and he calls me. And I pretend, literally pretend to be an Asian banker on the phone.

Oh, no. Talking. I mean, it was so, it was so. And he buys it. He's like, does Joe, I have a checker from Joe Loyal and stuff. I'm not even going to do the voice. It was so ridiculous.

No, don't do the voice. We get canceled for that. I'm just saying. saying it happened. Hollywood people got to figure out how to deal with that delicately. Yeah, that's really funny. But the fact is that, you know, obviously at that time I didn't care, but he bought it. I was lying a sinker.

So I drive up there that night. Hey, did you talk to my bankers? Oh, yeah, and he gives me the pink slip and everything. I'm gone. I go and I sell it in the next day in San Diego. And then I become a fugitive in Mexico, right? So I'm down there with a lot of money that I've just cashed out everything. All the crimes I've done and everything, you know, close to $40,000.

And so I go to Mexico. I'm a fugitive. I told everyone down there that my family's dead. I don't have anyone. And I'm going to start over. I'm like, now I'm a criminal. I'm a bad guy. And I make some friends down there, a family, part of the Corona family, in fact.

I go there and make friends with them. And one day, I hid my money on walls and all over the place in the house. I come home one day and somebody who's, you know, a shooter criminal than me, they came in and stole all my money. I only have $2,500 bucks, $2,000 in my pocket. I'm done. I don't have any money. I had to rip off a lot of people to do that, defraud them.

And in order to defraud people, we've got to get close to them. Right. And I don't have that kind of time. No. I can't go back to the United States. I'm like, what do I do? So I'm sitting there on my couch, drinking Corona. And I start thinking, hey, well, you know, I'm in Mexico.

This is the place of the Bandido, right? But I remember that Pontravia, who was a general during the Revolutionary War, Bonchervia used to come up to the United States and he would rob post offices, banks, and then he would take his army back down. into Mexico. So I'm like, you know, maybe I'll do that move. Maybe I go up there and start robbing places. Now, remember, at this point, I haven't robbed anything. No 7-Eleven, no nothing. I'm not a robber. Now we get to your first question. How does somebody do it? One thing I know is I have come to several points in my story in my life already by that point where I did not like who I was and I knew I was

bigger than where I was. I just jumped into my future and I innovated and I became the next thing. I was getting victimized by my dad. Oh, I see a future in which I'm bigger. I innovate and I become that bigger guy. I try to kill him. I come to a place from a petty criminal. I want to go into crime. I don't know how to do it. I just start like innovating. I turn myself from being this good care where everyone had aspirations for me because this real intelligent man, maybe a theologian, like all those things I aspire to as a kid. I say, nope, I innovate and I become a criminal. But I'm a petty criminal. And now I'm here and I say, I've been a petty criminal. Now I can go to United States. I can dial up my narrative, jump in the future, and I'll become a real

badass criminal. And that's what I do. I drive up to San Diego the next day. I spend all day trying to figure out how to rob a bank. And I rob a bank by the end of the day. And when I robbed that bank, $4,500 bucks, first bank, excited. I've turned myself in a bank robber now, just like that. Wow. Because I knew I had the gumption. I knew I knew. I knew I had the violence. I knew I had the greed because I'd been so poor. I hated being poor. And so it was a perfect marriage of greed and violence.

And so I make it happen. I'm excited. I'm staying and saying, you see it all that night. I get a, you know, good dinner, pack up the car.

And I'm there at the last on ramp to Mexico. And right when I do, there's a bunch of traffic. And all the traffic is there on the freeway because the highway patrol has stopped the traffic because they're looking for stolen cars. Periodically, they do this because that's, people are stealing cars all the time. And at that point, I get stopped. I get arrested.

I get arrested for all the crimes that I had done in, they got me my five warrants, but they don't arrest me for the bank robbery because they don't know I did it. So I get to keep that money. I go to prison. And for two years while I was in prison, I was like, all right, now I'm going to be a bank robber. That's it. And that's all when I get out. And when I got out, two years later, for 14 months, I robbed 30 banks, sometimes several in one day. day. That's how I became a bank robber because I lost all sense that my life was going to be long

at all. I just wanted to grab the loot and get the hell out of dodge as fast as possible and go spend it and have fun. That was my ethos. And so I did. Money apparently smells terrible when you hide it long enough. I wouldn't know, but I'd love to find out someday and you can help me in that cause by supporting the amazing sponsors who make this show possible. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. They really do make this show possible. All the sponsors, deals, discounts.

They're searchable and clickable on the website at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor or you can't find the code, email me. Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com. We are happy to surface codes for you. Yes, it is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, for the rest of Part 1 with Joe Loia. Do you psych yourself up?

Do you make a plan? I got to say the 80s and 90s must have kind of been a good era to be a bank robber. Maybe they have one crappy tape that's blurry. You know, these things you see on, like, crime TV shows where it's like, this is the person. It's like, okay, it's a blob, probably a guy wearing darkish clothes, 110 to 210 pounds. He has a hat and glasses. And you're just like, how the, who is that? You know, there's no cell phone pings. There's no facial recognition. There's not, like, they're not looking at able to zoom in on the brand on his clothing. Like, none of that exists. And there's the reason why L.A. was the bank where every capital of the world at that time, right? So,

and I was just part of it. Why L.A.? Well, a lot of freeways for one. Oh, I see. Okay. You're close to a lot of freeways. So you get on a freeway. And guess what? You go left, you go right, and then you're going to come at an intersection. And then you can go northwest, east. You know, like you can, there's all these options. And then secondly, tons of banks. And there's a lot of ways to get away, meaning, like me, I had a way of doing it where I would drive a bank. And I never, I never had, jump in my car right away. I had, I always parked my car behind a building, a building I could run through to get to the other side so nobody could see my car when they ran out of the bank. I see. There was a lot of things like that, but how did I plan or

whatever? It was just, you know, I was just robbing mostly towelers. So that was, you know, it's not like I was heat or anything like that. I robbed a couple vaults, but mostly it was just, you know, tether stuff. I just knew that I was slick about how I would never get caught. Then no one ever saw my car because I was, I didn't have my car close to me. And, you know, you learn along the way things that work for you. One of the things I learned when I walked out once, I walked out into a parking lot. I could see the people walk out of the bank, run out of the bank, and immediately they started swoving their heads this way. If they had looked up, they could see me 30 feet away among the cars. I was just staying. They literally watched them. But they were so

sort of like conditioned to look at looking for a getaway car that was right there and everyone can jump into. So they were seeing, wait, which one of these cars here driving by might he be in? and I was able to look at them and then turn around and just casually walk away no one saw me. And so it confirmed to me that as long as I park, I walk away through something, they're not going to come on and be looking for the horizon.

Their eyes are going to be here, right? And so you learn along the way little things like that. So that benefited me. I walked in a bank once and it took so long to just get like whatever, a thousand dollars or something out of these people, this one teller. And it was only one teller at the time because it was just right

when the bank opened up. And there was nobody else in the lobby just being this person. They were taking forever. I was so angry when I walked out. Even though I knew that they were now, had set off the alarm, I walked into the bank right next to it and robbed it, even though the police were coming, and walked in my car and got away. So it was like, part of it was just ballsy, too. Remember, you know, I already had stepped through fear. Yeah. On the other side of fear is where you get things done, so you just have to walk through the fear to get the thing done. I had to do that to stab my dad. It was a very, and sometimes your body, most of the time, almost every time. On the way to bank robbery, as also on the way to committing crimes that I

committed when I was in prison and the assaults or whatever, there's a part of your body and knows like, okay, we might die, we might get shot, it's going to be, it could be bad for me. I'm banking that it's not, but it could be. And so your body wants to shut down. And in my case, on the way to the bank robbery, I would tremble, my teeth would start grinding, my stomach would start hurting. My hands would like jump off the steering. We're like, I just, I couldn't, there's just so much energy in my hands. And then a wave of fatigue would hit me. Like, if I pulled over, I felt like I would have been embersy for three hours.

It was like, it was almost that my body was saying, red lines, stop, stop, stop, you know. Train crossing. It was really intense. And so I would just push through it by bringing up all this rage. I would just remember humiliating things in my life. And the rage would come up and then immediately all the noise would quow in my body. And I was still. And that's how I would go in.

I would march through it and get it done. Not unlike, you know, how I ended up doing what I did. I was a prisoner, but also how I started with my father. I just had to get done. Yeah. I was standing on my dad, can you put it down, put it down? I'm like, I got resolved, and I'm going to do it. And then I do it.

A lot of this sounds like the same thing you hear from a keynote speaker who's talking about winning a boxing match, a Super Bowl, or starting some sort of really big business, except for you were robbing banks. Like you kind of were just a Catholic slash college education away from applying a lot of these same concepts and being, you know, somebody who is, I don't know, in Forbes instead of in Rikers Island, for example, right? It's just really crazy to hear about. I hope you don't mind that comparison.

It just, it really is clear that you are a smart, talented person. Thank you. I mean, it's when I came on and I wrote my memoir, my memoir was, got a great review in the New Yorker magazine. I turned myself into a literary man. Did you see that coming? Yeah. No.

And, but more importantly, it's like, I got myself in the magazine I wanted to get into, which as the literary, premier literary magazine of the country. How does this work? You walk in and you hand a note to the teller, or have I just been watching too many movies? The first time I did that. Okay. The issue is that when you drop, when you walk in, you hand a note, you've given a reason to look down and not look up.

And that's what happened to me. I said a note the very first time, you know, the first one before I got arrested and went to, for all those other things in San Diego. I slide the note thinking I'm clever. And then she looks down and she won't look up. And I'm like, hey, and I grab the note, and she's still holding on the note. And I kind of moved the note around. I'm like, come on, come on, hurry up.

She just keeps like down on the note. She's like, not going to look up. Why would she look up? She's better off just looking down. Like, I don't want to pretend like you're not here. And so I have to now say literally, like, give me money. I'll jump over this counter and I'll shoot her. And I pat my gut a little like I got a gun.

And then she slowly looks up and she starts giving me the money. And I'm like, I had to talk. I had to talk. The note was worthless. Yeah, that's right. Because I still had to open my mouth, right? So I never did a note again. And so, yeah, I had a thing.

that I would say every time. And you say, how do they get you? Well, one of the ways they get you is, they don't necessarily need to know who you are. They need to know what your MO is. My MO was, we have a bomb, I have a gun, give me the money now, you know? Sometimes if I said it to somebody like a manager

who looked like he didn't want to believe anything, I would say, we have a bomb, I have a gun, give me their mind now, I'll blow your fucking head. I might throw on that last part, right? But the point is that it was enough to say, I'm serious, we have a bomb, meaning there's other people like make it sound. It was more than me, like really threatening and shocking.

So then I would say, now give me the big bills first and this and that. That's how I did it. Now, you go into bank now, you can't do that. Like, most of them have bandit glass and all sorts of other stuff. So it's not like it was back then. There was no bandit class. I robbed three banks where there was an actual guard in the bank. What do they do?

They just go, I'll call this one in when the guy leaves. Like, is that what the guard does? What's his job, actually? Who knows? Well, here's the thing. I went to this bank that was so big that he was. was way over in an entrance way over there. And it was kind of a rotunda kind of bank.

It was huge. It was in San Diego somewhere, one of those rich neighborhoods. But it was almost like a rotunda inside. And then he was way over there. I walked in that door and I walked all the way over here to talk to him. So I robbed the bank and ran out that way. And he was over there. And it was just like it was like he wasn't there.

So the point of trying to make is not that I was some great bank robber, but that in those days you could get away with it because it just wasn't that like it is. It wasn't like it is now. They have one door to get into, maybe two, and there's a guard there, sometimes two. It doesn't stop people from urban banks, but a lot of these bandit glass things are determined to anyway. And also, banks don't keep money like they used to. There's no gold bullion.

There's no online bank. Yeah. You had a check. You had to go and get a cash. Or you had to deposit it. You had to go into the bank. And on pay days, the banks had to be have a lot of money. And ATMs were there.

But even then, you know, the ATMs were in the bank. So the money was in the bank there. Right. Because they had to fill up the bottom of it. Yeah, they'd still have to put in. Every ATM had to have $160,000, some in the thing, and then under, some underneath it. There was a number it had to have. So there was money on those days.

But now you have online banking. You get, you know, I don't have to go on. I get deposited by sending him a picture over my check. You know, you move money around with online. You use apps to move money around. You don't have to go and even deposit money, withdraw money from ATM. You know, there's all these ways that banks don't have to have money like they used. Anyway, so that's your answer your question.

That's how I robbed it. That's also when they went to get me, they knew they would look at the MO. Right. Like, what did he say? This guy said this there. He said that here. Yeah. Yeah.

So what was the take back then? What you're leaving with, you said $4,500, which is what like $10,000 in today's money or maybe more? So the average bank robbery for Taller robberies is like $1,200. Today. It might even be less today. This was back in the day. Wow.

But because I had a couple big robberies, you know, $12,000, $16,000. That's like $5,000 in today's money. So it's not that good for risking your life. Yeah. And then I had a 32,000. I went a vault and stole $32,000 out of it. So like $7,000 is what I averaged under three banks. Okay.

$7,000, $8,000. Okay. It wasn't a lot. But it was a lot for 14 months, 30 bank robberies. Yeah. But it was, and it was more than $1,200 a bank. How do you get into a vault, though? Like, how does that work?

The vault was savings and loans. And I walk in and I'd just tell the manager, we got to get into a vault and let's go. and they take me into the vault. And with somebody else, they had, they needed two keys. They'd take me in there. I put them up against the wall. So just put your hands me on your back and you go down against the wall. And I started taking the money and there's not much money.

Like I said, the bank. It was a savings alone even. It wasn't even really like a big bank. I take them in there. I get the money. I walk out. The door to get from the back to the lobby, it's locked. So I just jump on the counter and jump off right in the middle of the bank.

If we were looking at me like, I'd just walk out. And then I went and robbed another bank. So that day I robbed two banks. And pardon me if I misunderstood. You robbed 38 banks. The average from each bank was 7,000. Did I get that right? I robbed 30 banks.

30 banks, okay. And the average, I don't remember the exact amount because I haven't done the county, but it was something, if I recall correctly, it was $7 to $8,000 per bank. So let me do 30 banks times $7,000. There's $210,000 in like 1980 money. Yeah, it was closer to $250 from I to remember. So I don't know what I was thinking. Maybe it was $8,000.

It's about a million bucks. is your total take. Yeah. It was a lot of money. Yeah. You know, and the thing is, I'm not doing drugs. I don't do, I wasn't a big party. I was just a hedonist.

So I was just like, it was all about like, you know, like nice restaurants and nice clothes and taking a lot of friends to concerts. Like that kind of. It wasn't big party. I wasn't a big drug guy. I wasn't that guy. Do you think you're going under the radar because people think bank robberies happen like they do in movies like gunshot in the air?

Everybody get on the floor? Like, you're just sort of going in, getting. some money, you walk out calmly, walk through the parking lot, walk around the bank, get in your car, and leave. It was really effective. And the other thing that was to my favor was, I didn't have to make a thing because when they asked the women, like, do you show a gun? They said, no.

And they said, well, then why did you get in the money? It's because of his eyes. It was weird to read that when I got the discovery. I was menacing enough to do it. And it was quiet menace. I didn't have to pull out a gun. I would just speak to a way. You know how I spoke?

I spoke to me. My dad did when he menaced me as a boy, just slow in time. and just like give and like the energy of that I had it. I had a why? Because it was conditioned habituated to it. So when I would dial up my thing and I would look at them and do it, they'd be like, oh, okay. I was able to get things done with just a sheer menace and intensity of my presence. Now, that said, and also by that time, I got her prison the first time two years.

And Skinny Joe went in and Joe came all, yo. I'm like, Bank robber Joe was not that other Joe. So I now had, and, you know, I'd commit a violence in prison too. Now I had this other, new confidence to me. So I'd go in there and I walked in and I handled business the way I did. And I think that was to my advantage. Also, you know, I knew that I could make them do the thing I needed to do. I would say, give me the big bills first, give me the hundreds, come me a fifth.

And they were like automaton's at that point. Once I scared them. And so it became a thing that I could do, right? And I was loose with it, you know, and it made it happen. What time of days the best bank was warning? morning? I went the morning. Why is that? I tried to be the first guy in. Several times I was there with a couple other people when they were unlocking the bank. I was one of the guys there. He led everyone in. I said, oh, can I see you when you close it? He closed the door and I robbed him right there. Like,

take me into the vault. So like, it went to the morning because what happens is I knew somebody in prison who went to go rob a bank in the afternoon. It had been robbed the morning. The FBI was already there. They arrest him on the spot. So I'm like, yeah, that's not going to happen to me. It's a bad day for you. We got no money, but what we do have is a shitload of cops, you just put your hands in the air. That's so crazy. That's bad luck for him. I was eventually arrested and they got me for at that point 16 banks and they're counting, right? They arrest me. I go to court two days later for a raiment and they're like, we don't know who he is. He's the Beirut Bandit and here's 16 pictures of him and these are 16 photos and we're still counting, Your Honor. I was a Beirut Bandit because, get this, when I would go into these banks to rob him,

the police would come and say, you know, what he looked like? Oh, he looked Indian. He looked Oh, he's Pakistani. Oh, he might be Indian. And the reason where every few of them said Mexican is because they said, oh, no, he wasn't Mexican. He didn't have an accent. Oh. They would say he didn't have tattoos on his hands or his neck. Oh, geez. Like, they were so used to being robbed by gangbanging drug addicts that I did not fit that profile at all. So when I walk in with my glasses and my dark hair, I was black hair at the time, really thick black hair, really dark skin.

And like right now you can't tell, but I'm a Mexican from northern Mexico. And when we get the sun on us, I get almost black. Like, I get dark brown, right? So they can be confused for calling me Pakistani or Indian. Sure. But what the FBI should not be excused for is saying, oh, did you say Pakistani and Indian? Okay, well, we're going to go to Lebanon. Right.

Like that's, I'm still like connected to Beirut. I'm still waiting. Yeah, nope, just 80s ignorant shit right there. That's how I become the Beirut Band. Bay, Bah, Pakistan. Beirut by way of Pakistan. That's right. Yeah, so that's how I get it.

But the story I want to tell you was that I get arrested. And when I get arrested, I get bail. My aunt Gloria puts up her home. Oh, man. I go rob five more banks. Five more banks that rob on bail. Now, when I go rob this one bank, the day before I get arrested, it's the last one. When I'm walking out of the bank, who's coming to the bank, walking out with the bank?

I see a big Brinks truck and the Brinks guard is coming in with the money. it's even to see who's going to get to the door first. And I have money. In my blue bag, I got money. He's got a bag of money much bigger than mine. And part of me wants to rob him. But a part of me is like, I just got to get the hell out of Dodge because there's two of them. But are you worried about your aunt losing her home?

She put it up on bail as collateral. Nope. I was not. That's how bad I was. Oh, my God. You know, because a lot of people hear of this story, oh, he's a sexy background. No, no, I was a real terrible person. Yeah.

And not only was that terrible person, a lot of people who are. while you were robbing banks. I wasn't just robbing banks. I was a real terrible human being, especially in this regard, the perfect example. I was willing to put my hands to place in Jeff. I didn't care. This is the grandiosity, narcissists, all that nonsense that was going on inside of me, right? So, yeah, I was fun, and I spent a lot of money throwing around, and yeah, I was poking the banks in their eyes. But that's not happening in a vacuum. It's happening because I don't care about anything except myself and my pleasure. That's it, and that's all. Cheating on my girlfriend all day long. emotionally brutalizing her.

I was never physically violent with any women that I was with, but I was emotionally abusive. So I was a terrible person. And some people would like to give me a pass and say, well, you know, he didn't hit them. My dad beat the shit out of us.

And the worst thing that ever happened to me in childhood is when he said something to my brother, he didn't have to hit me. Emotional abuse is sometimes worse than actually the physical thing. The bones heal. The bruises go away. But the emotional stuff when you say something to people, that's terrible.

So I don't give myself a pass on that, but I do want to say that. I was that guy. I was a terrible guy there and all the way around. I could be generous, you know, like when I steal money, sometimes I would give it to poor mothers who were single mothers at Christmas time who had a bunch of kids. I could do that, but that doesn't cover the fact that I was a bad person and was willing in this case to have my aunt lose her home. So yes, that happened. And terrorized the hell that of every tally dollar I got a hold of.

I just terrorized them, right? So that's a terrible thing. Whenever I interview people who robbed jewelry stores, banks, anything like that, I get emails from show fans that say, hey, you did. did a good job on this, but be careful glorifying this kind of thing because we live in fear of people like this. People who have been through robberies, they have nightmares for weeks. They have nightmares for months afterwards. It changes their lives. They don't want to go out at night anymore or they don't want to work anymore. Now that you're out of the whole mess, what do you think about all that? I mean, do you think about the women who, and men, for that matter,

who are just scared to death, that didn't want to go back to work, that retired early or, you know, had nightmares for six months after this? You know, it's especially scary for women. I think. Absolutely. I mean, okay, so a couple things I need to say about that. One, it's true that I robbed the banks and banks are terrible places. I have no respect for banks. They do really terrible things, and always have. There was a reason why in this country, the original bank robbers from the Depression, those guys were heroes. They're folk heroes. Why? Because they knew that the banks have ripped off so many people that when they were going to those banks, like a pretty boy Floyd, he would go there and because they didn't have computers at that time, he would set fire to the mortgages that the banks held

on those farmers. So they became folk heroes because they were like banks had brought on the depression for everyone. So when I rolled those banks, I don't feel guilty about it. I did the time for those banks. I served my time. That's equal now. Like I did something bad. I served time for it. But I never could serve time for the pain that I inflicted on these women and a few men. And so I don't give myself a pass for that. I feel terrible. But in fact, worst thing that I had worse regrets and shame. What I carried off a long time was for that. That's the terrible part of the crime that I couldn't deal with. And also what's interesting is they, for a podcast once about me called the Bank Robber Divers, they interviewed the women

who, a woman who was one of the towers, right? But they interviewed and they played it for me. And when I heard, I fell apart, I broke down because she said everything you just said. She had scared her. She had to drop out of night school. She said all these things that had happened to her, which are terrible. Now that I'm on this side, now that I have a conscience, now that I'm raising a young daughter, you know, whatever. I've been out here 29 years now. I'm a new man. I'm different.

I have a different relationship to people, you know, inflicting trauma on people since I've been afflicted on me. That broke me down, man, broke me down, especially what she got to the poverty. She said, but I forgive him. Oh, man. And here's the other thing, too, right? People will say stuff like, hey, so have you tried to reach out to these women who you robbed us? I'm like, what are you talking about? That sounds like the most assonite thing, plan, idea.

I don't think they want to hear from you. I'm going to go out of the limb and say they don't want to hear from you. Well, more importantly, this is why I look at it. Once upon a time, Joe lawyer couldn't handle his emotional shit. And so he ambushed them with it and said, you know, I'm going to give you all my emotional shit. How do you like it? Right. And now, to me, if I was to contact them, I'd be like, I can't handle my regret and my grief.

Right. I need to contact you so I can, blah, give it all to you. Can you forgive me? Like, it's the same thing. Exactly. It's the same thing to me, right? And I don't care how good my spirit is. It's ridiculous to think that, oh, I'm holding all this stuff.

Now they got to hold it too. No. If a woman came up to me and says, by the way, you robbed me and I want to tell you some things. I would just say, first, I'm sorry. And now go on. I'm going to say anything anymore. Just tell me what you need to tell me. And if they said they want to hear anything from me, that's fine.

Like it's there. It has to be in their terms. and they have to be able to do whatever they want, you know, short of kick me in the balls. Like, you can lay into me. I got that coming and I'll take it. What if love isn't about fate or chemistry, but cold, hidden calculations

we don't even realize we're making? Psychologist Orion Taraban exposes the uncomfortable truth about what men and women really want versus what they say they want. It's not socially acceptable to come right out and say what it is that you want. One of my most popular YouTube episodes

is called The Part That Women Always Leapes. out. And I was approaching the women in my life, friends and older mentors, with this good faith question, it's like, what do you can want? Because I want to give it to you or someone like you so that I can have a successful relationship with a woman. And I heard all kinds of things that were like, I want somebody who's kind, and I want somebody who makes me feel safe, and I want somebody who buys me flowers and makes me feel like a little girl. And I'm thinking, what the fuck, man? I'm all of those things. I don't understand what the problem here is. And so the part that women always leave out is that they do want those things, but they want those things from the men

they're already attracted to. If she's not attracted to you, buying her flowers is not going to make her attracted to you. So the determination of attractiveness is based on other variables. And as a guy, you have to attend to those because if you don't, it won't matter if you're the kindest, gentlest, sweetest man on the planet. Sometimes people know what they want, but they're not allowed to say it out loud because they will be judged for being superficial. If you want to observe or understand what people actually want, you have to notice who they hook up with, who they actually enter into relationships with.

That's what they want, regardless of what they say with their mouths. To hear O'Ryan Taraband break down the hidden rules of attraction, check out episode 1212. of the Jordan Harbinger show. That's it for part one, part two out in a few days. If it's not already, advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all on the website at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. Also, our newsletter, Webit Wiser, is really a lot of fun.

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I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Silouskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something, useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who loves a good crime tale, definitely share this

episode with a redemption story, if you will. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by What Was That Like Podcast. If you're looking for a new show to add to your rotation, something that'll make you stop mid-dishwashing and go, wait, what that actually happened? You got to subscribe to What Was That Like? It's real people telling the most surreal moments of their lives and they're not just giving you the highlights. They're walking you through it from the inside as the person who actually lived it, which means you're basically getting a front row seat to the chaos. One episode is about Scott getting locked up in a foreign jail for a crime he didn't commit. Sure, Scott. Another

is Sue's parachute failing. Wow, I'm surprised she was around to tell that story. And then there's Michael who was stabbed on a bus, which makes your commute instantly feel a little bit more relaxing. Do you anything you think? So if you want to hear some wild and inspiring firsthand stories, I invite you to check out what was that like. Every story is verified. Their site even has photos so you know even the most bizarre stuff you're hearing is somebody's real life. Listen to what was that like on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whatever app you're using right now. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like

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