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

In short

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

Overview In this episode, Jordan Harbinger interviews Joe Loya, a former bank robber who shares his life story, which includes childhood trauma, crime, and eventual redemption. The conversation explores how Loya's early experiences shaped his criminal behavior and his journey toward self-reflection and healing.

Key Themes and Discussions

Childhood Trauma and Its Impact

Normalization of Violence: Joe discusses his abusive childhood, where trauma significantly shaped his worldview and responses to aggression.
His father physically abused him and his brother, creating a context where violence became normalized.
Psychological Framework: The abuse led Joe to believe aggression was an authentic response to a brutal world.

Transition to Crime

Bank Robbery as Therapy: Loya describes bank robbery as a means to reclaim power lost during his childhood. The act provided moments of control, transforming his victim mentality into that of a predator.
Impulsivity and Lack of Goals: Joe attributes his criminal behavior to early trauma, resulting in a lack of foresight and impulsiveness.
He explains that without a clear goal or a sense of posterity, he resorted to immediate needs, leading to his decision to rob banks.

Life in Solitary Confinement

Isolation as a Catalyst for Change: Loya's time in solitary confinement served as a profound period of introspection.
He confronted the rage he had been running from, leading to self-discovery and reflection on his past actions.
Rebuilding Identity: In isolation, Joe began to reassess his life choices and the narratives he had constructed around his identity.

Lies and Self-Perception

Dangerous Self-Deception: Joe reflects on the lies he told himself to justify his actions, which stemmed from deep-seated childhood shame.
Redemption and Transformation: Loya emphasizes that redemption is not about erasing the past, but about transforming it into something useful for himself and others.

The Experience of Being a Bank Robber

Planning and Execution: Joe details how he carefully planned his bank robberies, often leveraging his understanding of fear and intimidation.
Emotional and Psychological Toll: Loya discusses the fear and adrenaline rush before committing a robbery, illustrating how he managed that fear through anger and the desire for power.

Regret and Reflection

Impact on Victims: Joe acknowledges the lasting trauma he inflicted on bank tellers and others during his criminal career.
He expresses remorse for the emotional damage caused to victims, recognizing that many continue to live in fear long after the incidents.
Confronting His Past: Joe shares the emotional weight he carries and the importance of acknowledging the pain he caused to others.

Conclusion of Part One

This episode sets the stage for the second part of Joe Loya's story, hinting at themes of continued transformation and the journey from crime to understanding and healing.

Key Takeaways

Understanding the Roots of Crime: Loya's story illustrates how childhood trauma can lead to a cycle of violence and crime, emphasizing the need for systemic support for at-risk youth.
The Complexity of Redemption: True redemption requires facing one's past, acknowledging the harm done to others, and using those experiences to foster positive change.
Impact of Crime on Victims: The episode serves as a reminder of the real consequences of crime on victims and the importance of empathy and accountability.

Related Resources

Full show notes and additional resources can be found at [jordanharbinger.com/1264](https://jordanharbinger.com/1264).
Additional episodes related to trauma, redemption, and self-improvement are available for those interested in further exploration of these themes.

Upcoming in Part Two

Stay tuned for the continuation of Joe Loya's story, where he will delve deeper into the consequences of his actions and his path toward recovery and redemption.

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

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Introduction of Joe Loya

0:47 to 2:29

Discussion about Joe Loya's experiences with fear, violence, and redemption.

“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.”

Foundations of a Bank Robber

2:29 to 4:23

Joe shares insights on how childhood trauma can lead to criminal behavior.

“A good place to start is probably how does someone find themselves even with the idea of robbing banks?”

Family Dynamics and Violence

4:23 to 6:28

Joe discusses his family life, including his father's strictness and violence.

“very predominantly middle-class white church.”

The Impact of Loss

6:28 to 8:05

Exploration of Joe's mother's death and its effect on family dynamics.

“Back in LA in 1971, February 9th, there was this huge earthquake.”

A Life of Moral Confusion

8:05 to 10:41

Discussion of the confusion Joe experienced due to his father's dual role as a minister and an abuser.

“My sweater's all been torn up and everything.”

Path to Criminality

10:41 to 13:00

Joe reflects on his early acts of theft stemming from anger and confusion.

“The Bible says, absent from the body, present with the Lord.”

The Breaking Point

13:00 to 14:00

Joe recounts a traumatic incident involving his brother that leads to his contemplation of suicide.

“I feel they must have been ripping God off too because they are like, that bookkeeping was not accurate.”

Facing Cowardice and Trauma

14:00 to 15:10

Joe Loya reflects on a traumatic childhood incident that shaped his identity.

“the dishwater, and I'm standing there paralyzed.”

Sabotaging Relationships

15:10 to 16:50

Joe discusses his attempts to sabotage his father's new relationship after feeling neglected.

“When he gets his new girlfriend, we like, I like her so much.”

The Build-Up to Violence

16:50 to 20:28

Joe narrates a turning point leading to his confrontation with his father.

“He can read that something has happened.”

Show all 28 chapters

The Moment of Stabbing

20:28 to 22:40

Joe recounts the dramatic moment he stabs his father in self-defense during an escalating situation.

“When he told my brother, you should have died instead of your mother, something important happened.”

Aftermath and Confessions

22:40 to 25:20

Joe describes the chaos that follows the stabbing, including telling his aunt and the police involvement.

“Joe used a fedora and a trench coat as a disguise.”

Consequences of Violence

26:35 to 28:00

Joe explains the legal and personal consequences he faced after the stabbing incident.

“How come you didn't go to jail for stabbing your dad?”

Family Dynamics and Early Trauma

28:00 to 29:10

Explore the complex relationship with the speaker's father and the impact of family trauma on his life.

“So there's no more talk about punishing me for anything.”

Life in Foster Care

29:10 to 31:30

Understand the speaker's experiences in foster care and the emotional challenges faced by children in similar situations.

“I mean, did you have a sense of power at that point?”

Self-Reflection and Identity

31:30 to 33:00

Delve into the speaker's reflections on his identity and how past experiences shaped his worldview.

“entire time who tried to kill their father.”

Turning to Crime: A Fork in the Road

33:00 to 34:10

Learn about the speaker's gradual descent into crime as a means to escape his circumstances.

“And, you know, that's biblical, that's mythological.”

Escaping Poverty through Fraud

34:10 to 35:50

Examine the speaker's petty crimes as a response to poverty and the desire for a better life.

“I go work in San Fernando Valley and I'm going working two full-time jobs.”

The First Taste of Criminal Success

35:50 to 37:50

Follow the speaker's journey as he successfully commits his first bank robbery and embraces his new identity.

“and I can't have a feel for 10 years down the line.”

The Mindset of a Bank Robber

44:30 to 47:59

Joe Loya discusses the psychology and planning behind his bank robberies.

“listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors.”

Techniques and Strategies in Bank Robbery

47:59 to 51:31

Joe shares specific techniques he used during his bank robberies.

“I'm banking that it's not, but it could be.”

Reflections on Crime and Consequences

51:31 to 56:00

Joe reflects on his experiences and the impact of his criminal activities.

“Like most of them have bandit glass and all sorts of other stuff.”

The Psychology of Robbery

56:00 to 56:42

Explore the mindset behind Joe Loya's bank robberies and his presence during heists.

“And they said, well, then why did you give him the money?”

Planning the Perfect Heist

56:42 to 57:58

Learn about Joe's strategies and experiences during bank robberies, including timing and execution.

“I'm like, Bank Robert Joe was not that other Joe.”

The Beirut Bandit Identity

57:58 to 59:39

Discover how Joe earned the nickname 'Beirut Bandit' and the misconceptions surrounding his appearance.

“I go to court two days later for arraignment, and they're like, we don't know who he is.”

Reflections on Moral Choices

59:39 to 1:01:18

Joe discusses his lack of remorse during his crimes and the emotional impact on victims.

“I see a big Brinks truck, and the Brinks guard is coming in with the money.”

Consequences of Emotional Trauma

1:01:18 to 1:03:22

Explore Joe's acknowledgment of the trauma he inflicted on bank employees and his personal growth.

“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.”

The Burden of Guilt

1:03:22 to 1:05:07

Joe shares his regrets and the burden of guilt he feels for his past actions.

“they interviewed a woman who was one of the tellers, right?”

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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00Special thanks to Cayman 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 the time, but I'm nursing a couple fractures of rib and an elbow. I'm beat up real good. 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 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's he going to use to hit me? I'm through.

0:32ooh, 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.

0:45Welcome 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.

1:16These 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 jordanharbinger.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 Eleven 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.

1:47The 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 Loya, a guy who robbed 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.

2:18It'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 Loya. 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, it's because I knew Rob Banks actually were drug addicts, which meant they were doing it to subsidize a drug habit.

2:55And 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 was no feel for posterity. They're not thinking, oh, how long is this going to last me? 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 like, here, we do this, we do this, we do that. And then you get to the thing, right?

3:24You get to the payoff. Well, for us criminals, then 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 do 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 LA, which was all a sea of brown Catholics. It's very odd to be those people. But we lived in the East LA Maravilla housing projects.

4:02We were very poor, but ambitious. My dad was very ambitious. My dad becomes a Christian, and he discovers that he loves the languages. 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 raised in that environment. My mother and him in Medina, so they were 12. They love each other. They're like these little brown mascots in the church, like, you know, very predominantly middle-class white church. And my parents, they were young marrieds at 16 and 17.

4:33They had kids. 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 their 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 to the school and we'll do a scholarship thing.

4:56So I get scholarship. I start going to these 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, 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 do a little bit more than the average person. He was always on edge. He would get angrier. He 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 East LA neighborhood when you're in the 60s, right?

5:29My mother gets sick 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?

5:59This is Elizabeth Taylor. She was out there. And my dad was having to deal with this stress, right? So when you're stressed out and 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 of a sudden, 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?

6:29Are you from California? I'm from Detroit. I'm from Detroit originally. Okay. Okay. Back in LA in 1971, February 9th, there was this huge earthquake. It was called the Silmar earthquake. In Silmar, there was a hospital wing fell off, collapsed, 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 had received a lot of love from 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. We are getting bigger too. So when we were little, it was easy to just whack us around and we'd have control.

7:03But now we're getting bigger. And so we're taking punches. We're getting kicked. It's not your basic spankings. 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 with Jesus. And then my dad even became a minister for a while, but he would periodically beat us while he's preparing for our 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.

7:40I'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 past. 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 torn up and everything.

8:12Three 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 time, 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 with 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.

8:45We're going to find those three guys, and I got to fight them each individually. This is what I mean by moral confusion. We're not talking about, oh, my dad, you know, he just raised 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 he 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 higher 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.

9:21And 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. And she was white girl. And we're in, like I said, we're in East LA. It's all brown.

9:51And everyone thinks she's our maid because she's like, she's the, she's so out of all my friends at school. And she would come to pick me up. They'd go, who's that, your maid? White nanny. 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 to literature. In fact, she got me reading a lot of great literature and she cleaned up my English to kind of the East LA stain 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.

10:22Now, she decides what she has to do for herself is she has to leave. Now, this is all not just telling you a story. This is in service of the question you ask. Like, how does somebody become a bank robber? Well, when my dad was a minister, when Brenda was the accountant, they would get the offering. And I'm already like larceness in the heart. I'm so angry and confused. One, nobody's helping with my grief. My mom dies. They catch me crying. You know what the church ladies say? Why are you crying? Don't cry. She's in heaven. Oh, that's helpful. The Bible says, absent from the body, present with the Lord.

10:54You 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. They're terrible. This is the moral guidance or spiritual guidance I'm getting. Now, besides that, that's not helping me in terms of the moral quandary that I'm going and BNT eventually be the guy who rubs banks. But it's just a tough time for me to try and process the grief myself and I'm being brutalized.

11:23So I got all this aggression growing in me now. I got rage growing. You think kids don't have rage? They got, by age 11, I'm rageful. And by age 13, I pulled 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 Award because I'm this great kid, but I'm troubled. And what I do, I pull 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 that 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 become super predators, gangbang, whatever you want to call them.

11:59They're troubled kids. They're messed up. No one's helping them 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's just 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 deteriorate in 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.

12:35And we were talking about how I used to buy all these taquitos of guacamole. I would go 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 bookkeeping was so sloppy. I feel they must have been ripping God off too because they are like, that bookkeeping was not accurate.

13:09Anyway, fast forward. Brendan 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 them. I'm drying them. My dad comes in and we're just like 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 in the ribs.

13:45And 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 dishwater, 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.

14:26And he keeps getting dunked, and at 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 leans into 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.

15:02I let him do that on my 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 his 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 as a girlfriend, I'm going to sabotage her. And we go to the dentist. she wants, she, that's how sweet she is. She takes us out to steak dinner. And at the time, Sizzler was the jam.

15:34Sizzler was the jam. We're talking 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 now she's a wood hen but it's a good steak now i remember if he does it to me again i'm gonna 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 assisting i feel like i'm assisting now i want to have some so i put a little macho in my base in my face and i she puts me down 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 segment 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 a quick be clever about it but 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 salesman the same thing.

16:49They're trying to save you from fire. So he's just a shirt sageman. Yeah, just call them all common. 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 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. He went bankrupt.

17:24He'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 and stuff like that. 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. 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 her. I just need you to admit that you tell her so we can clear it up.

17:54Oh, he's tricking you. And that was the first time and the last time that I ever confessed her a crime. 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 become extremely disillusioned, but you want to be right with your, every child's born wanting to be loved 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?

18:23He has shown magnanimity in time. So I admit to it. Oh my God. Beating commences. First, a teapot's thrown at 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 elbow. 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.

18:57I put it under the pillow, and I just sit 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 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, weight set, starts walking to this weight set. And we're talking about, you know, a big old barbell.

19:30And 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're kind of like bulbous. Yeah, I remember those things. But they do have a really strong, big, strong metal gadget to tie them and loose them in. Yeah, yeah. So I'm thinking like, 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 tightens it, I'm through. This is like a new level of improvised savagery, right?

20:02Yeah. 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 him. He sees it and he drops the weight 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 in the neck again. But I was thinking that's going to kill him because I need to kill him because if I don't, he'll kill me.

20:32Back at once. I'll put a pin in that real quick. When he told my brother, you should have died instead of your mother, something important happened. 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 your experience. And they were happening next to each other, but 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.

21:05That means by extension, his children are expendable. He wants us dead. He's using the dead language. That's one of the reasons it accelerated 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 a 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 give 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.

21:38And we're like, now I'm like, oh. Oh, my gosh. And I end up and he turns his head. And I end up snabbing 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 that 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?

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22:07Yeah, I'm surprised you didn't have a Bible quote ready. Dude, it literally could have been, this is what thy hand hath wrought. 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. Quoting the Bible verse, exactly. Exactly. But I do say something like, no, I didn't kill you. You brought this on yourself thing, right? But in a 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?

22:37I got blood on me and everything. And I go, go, go, and we run, and we run to 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. This episode is sponsored in part by Cayman Jack, America's number one margarita. We had a little backyard hang recently, just a bunch of us friends catching up, snacks on the table, music playing, you know, that kind of thing. A few lawn games that somehow get way too competitive. You know how it goes. Eventually, everyone hit that moment of looking around like, okay, so who brought the good stuff?

23:10That's when we broke out the Cayman Jack. Cracking one open was like flipping a switch. Instant margarita state of mind. It's got that perfect laid back beach bar flavor, but without any of the effort. No squeezing limes, no sticky blender cleanup, just real blue agave nectar and lime juice ready to go right out of the bottle. People were really into it, like really into it. Someone even was like, oh, is this bottled? You serious? Yeah, that's how good it is. So if you're hosting a crew, you just want to feel like you're on vacation for a minute. Crack into your margarita state of mind with Cayman Jack.

23:36Crack into your margarita state of mind. Pick up Cayman Jack at your local store or visit caymanjack.com to find it near you. Please drink responsibly. Premium malt beverage with natural flavors. American Vintage Beverage Company, Chicago, Illinois. This episode is also sponsored by ButcherBox. If you've been a listener, you know I track my macros and I'm decently serious about hitting my protein. It keeps me full, it keeps me on track, and it stops me from turning into a midnight snack goblin munching on crackers and whatever junk is in the pantry. That's why we keep our freezer stocked with high-quality meat from ButcherBox.

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24:30So if you're trying to stay consistent with protein or just make weeknights way less stressful, ButcherBox is a great move. As an exclusive offer, our listeners can get free steak in every box for a year, plus$20 off your first box when you go to butcherbox.com slash Jordan. That's right. Your choice of filet mignon, New York strip, or ribeye in every box for an entire year, plus$20 off your first box and free shipping always. That's butcherbox.com slash Jordan. Don't forget to use our link so they know we sent you. Bank robbery episode seems like a weird place to shill my six-minute networking course, but I'm going to do it anyway.

25:02It 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 sixminutenetworking.com. Now, back to Joe Loya. What did you tell your aunt? Like, hey, um, 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 run a mile to our house, and we were track athletes.

25:33I broke the school record. I like to always brag about it. And the 330 little hurdles. But didn't you have broken ribs at this point? Yeah, but I'm still like, you got adrenaline, oh boy. Yeah. You got adrenaline, right? Yeah. And I'm scared to death because all I'm being driven by is that he could take that knife out 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.

26:02I tell her. she calls the cops. And you know, I've written about this recently, like, man, her own brother, like, she was born and 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 years because she's now dead. And I feel like I see this story from so many different angles now. But my and 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, you know, he tried to kill himself.

26:36Bottom 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 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 for 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, I slayed the giant. I'm him.

27:07I'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 authoritarians, 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. Like, I'm just thinking all authority. You're all back at each other's play. That's how it goes. And he's now sitting there basically. I'm telling him I've been brutalized. Well, why didn't you call the police for your dad left? Why didn't you run to the other house? Nobody asks that question now because you know everything about domestic abuse and how you're paralyzed.

27:39Everyone 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 when you have cracked ribs. Broken ribs, yeah. Yeah, it hurts to breathe. And then my elbows. I'm starting to feel all the pain of it. Yeah, the adrenaline's wearing off. They get one of the female police officers take me to the hospital and then we find out that I've been brutalized. You know, it's right there. X-rays 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.

28:11So he admitted he beat you up and that you stabbed him? Yeah, he admitted everything. Oh, wow. Everything. And he was contrite. 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, the foster care. The county took us away from him. Obviously, he was a delinquent father. But he jumped through every hoop 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.

28:40Like, now it's my turn to be the jerk towards him. I was a 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 when I 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 did. He accepted. And, you know, 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?

29:15I mean, you're in foster care. Surely you're thinking I did the right thing or I did it 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 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? No, it's McLaren Hall is where you go, where when they take you from your parents initially, they put you in this big place.

29:49You're taken out of the home, put in 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 stuff. And then they try to place you in 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.

30:20It'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 like it's not just on your own room there's no doors on the 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 start hearing sniffling i started hearing kind of and i realize oh so i think somebody's crying and then more and more and then pretty soon it gets 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 I just tried to kill my dad.

31:17Yeah. And what I realized that night is I'm not wired like 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 closest 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 of 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.

31:52I 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 to chaos. I'm about to 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.

32:23You 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, like, oh, shit, going to go back, I'm 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 I realized I'm the guy who can try and kill their father and be cool with it.

32:55And 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. And, you know, that's biblical, that's mythological. I mean, all the great Greek myth Roman stories, they have all the, even the, you know, Shakespeare literature, father-son shit is important and big deal. The dramas between them and killing 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 part of the arrogance and the narcissism and the grandiosity, all that's now growing up in me, right?

33:29It'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 moralities, but they're too timid for me. I've seen past the curtain and I see that everyone was suckered into believing 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 a little sociopath looking at like, you guys are falling for the okie doke. And I'm not the guy who falls for the okie doke. I'm the guy who stabs the okie doke and says, get the hell out of my way.

34:01I'm not buying it, right? So time goes on. I graduate high school and I'm a very poor senior, very, very poor. My dad struggles and everything. I leave the house three days later. I go work in San Fernando Valley and I'm going working 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 weapons. 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 East LA College?

34:41I was trying to be arrogant about who I was trying to fit my ego. Harvard. But the fact that my ex-wife went to Princeton and I would tell her for grad school, and I would always say, man, how come you don't tell anyone you went to Princeton? She'd always say she goes to school back east. That's the difference between Between somebody who went to prison and somebody who went to prison. You know what? Yeah. Yeah. She went to Yale. I went to jail. Exactly.

35:08So, but yeah, no, all that to say that I'm doing school. But the thing I want to say about East LA community college is 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, what am I going to make? 45. This is in 1980. So in those days, you know,$45 ,000,$50 ,000 is a lot for somebody to come out of college and make that money. That'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.

35:38I 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. And that's not, I 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 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 at 26. I don't know what happens after that. I just got to make it at 26 because that's where the cutoff date is for me and my head.

36:11A 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 at 26. I just got to make it at 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 bigger little frauds. But, you know, all small scale.

36:39Because I'm not a gang member, because I'm not a criminal, because I don't have anyone in 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 commit 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 733i BMW, which were 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 till this afternoon.

37:10He 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 ,000 or$32 ,000. knowledge so i drive down la from santa barbara and i gave 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 now talking i mean it was so it was so and he buys it he's like it just i have a checker for joe lloyd i'm not even gonna do the voice it was so ridiculous don't do the voice we get canceled for that i'm just saying it happened hollywood people got to figure out how to deal with that delicately.

37:44Yeah, that's really funny. But the fact is that, you know, obviously at that time I didn't care, but he bought it. I look like 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 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.

38:18And 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,$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, you got to get close to them. Right. And I don't have that kind of time.

38:48No. 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, you know, hey, well, you know, I'm in Mexico. This is the place of the bandido, right? But I remember that Pancho Villa, who was a general during the Revolutionary War, Pancho Villa 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.

39:17No 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. Boom. 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 where I'm a petty criminal. I want to go into crime. I don't know how to do it. I just start like innovating.

39:51I turn myself from being this good kid where everyone had aspirations for me being this real intelligent man, maybe a theologian, like all those things I aspired 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 the 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.

40:27I've turned myself into a bank robber now, just like that. Wow. Because I knew I had the gumption. 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 in San, you see, there that night, I get a 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.

41:01Periodically, they do this because people are stealing cars all the time. me. And at that point, I get stopped. I get arrested. I get arrested for all the crimes that I had done that got me my five warrants, but they don't arrest me for the bank robber 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. That's how I became a bank robber, because I lost all sense that my life was going to be long at all.

41:38I 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. This episode is sponsored in part by Quince. I've reached that point in life where I basically rotate between the same 10 favorite pieces. I guess it's dad mode for me, because if I'm standing in front of my closet using more than 10 brain cells to figure out what to wear, my day is just already off the rails.

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44:36They really do make this show possible. All the sponsors, deals, discounts, they're searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbinger.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 dot 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 one with Joe Loya. Do you psych yourself up? Do you make a plan? I got to just 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.

45:09You know, these things you see on like crime TV shows where it's like this is the person And it's like, OK, it's a blob, probably a guy wearing dark ish clothes, one hundred and ten to two hundred and ten 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 able to zoom in on the brand on his clothing like none of that exists. And there was a reason why L.A. was the bank robbery 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.

45:41Oh, I see. Okay. You're close to a lot of freeway. 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 rob a bank, but, and I've never, I never had to jump in my car right away. I'd 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.

46:08I see. There was a lot of things like that, but how did I plan or whatever? I was just robbing mostly towlers. So it's not like I was heat or anything like that. I robbed a couple of vaults, but mostly it was just, you know, towler stuff. I just knew that I was slick about how I would never get caught. Didn't know what ever saw my car because I didn't have my car close to me. And 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 swiveling their heads this way.

46:42If they had looked up, they could see me 30 feet away among the cars. I was just staying there literally watching 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 out and be looking for the horizon. Their eyes are going to be here, right?

47:12And so you learn along the way, do 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 me and this person. They They were taking forever. I was so angry when I walked out. Even though I knew that they 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.

47:41So 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. And sometimes your body, most of the time, almost every time, on the way to a 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 that knows, like, okay, we might die. We might get shot. It could be bad for me. I'm banking that it's not, but it could be.

48:11And 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 wheel. 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 feel like I would have been embassy for three hours. It was like, and it was almost like 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 quell in my body and I was still.

48:49and that's how I'd go in. I would march through it and get it done. Not unlike, you know, how I ended up doing what I did as a prisoner, but also how I started with my father. I just had to get done. I was standing there with my dad, can you put it down, put it down. I'm like, I got resolve 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.

49:32Right. It's really crazy to hear about. I hope you don't mind that comparison. It's just it really is clear that you are a smart, talented person. Thank you. I mean, it's when I came on, 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. But more importantly, it's like I got myself in the magazine I wanted to get into, which is the premier literary magazine in 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.

50:02Okay. The issue is that when you walk in and you hand a note, you've given a reason to look down and not look up. And that's what happened to me. I slid a note the very first time, you know, the first one before I got arrested and went for all those other things in San Diego. I still had the note thinking I'm clever. And then she looks down and she won't look up. And I'm like, hey. And I grabbed the note and she's still holding down the note. And I kind of moved the note around like, come on, come on, hurry up. And she just keeps looking down the note. Right. She's like not going to look up. Why would she look up?

50:28She'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 your money or I'll jump over this counter and I'll shoot you. 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 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.

51:00They 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 the money now. I'll blow your f***ing head off. I might throw in 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 like 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.

51:28That's how I did it. Now, you go to a 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 glass. 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? Here's the thing. I went to this bank that was so big that he was way over at 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.

52:00But 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 he wasn't there. So the point I'm 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 robbing banks, but a lot of these bandit glass things are determined anyway.

52:30And also banks don't keep money like they used to. There's no gold bullion. There's no online banking. 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 paydays, the banks had to have a lot of money. And ATMs were there. But even then, 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 some underneath it. There was a number it had to have. So there was money in those days. But now you have online banking.

53:03I don't have to go in. I get deposited by sending me a picture of my check. You move money around with online. You use apps to move money around. You don't have to go and even withdraw money from ATM. There's all these ways that banks don't have to have money like they used to. Anyway, so that's your answer to 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. What did he say? This guy said this there. He said that here. Yeah. Yeah. So what was the take back then? You're leaving with, you said,$4 ,500, which is what, like probably$10 ,000 in today's money or maybe more.

53:33So the average bank robbery for Taylor 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 to vault and stole$32 ,000 out of it. So like$7 ,000 is what I averaged out of three banks. Okay. $7 ,000 is about$8 ,000. Okay. It wasn't a lot. But it was a lot for 14 months, 30 bank robberies. And it was more than$1 ,200 a bank. How do you get into a vault, though? How does that work?

54:12The vault was savings and loans. And I walk in and I just tell the manager, we got to get in the vault and let's go. And they take me to the vault. And with somebody else, they needed two keys. They take me in there. I put them up against the wall. I said, just put your hands behind your back and kneel 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 and loan 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.

54:44People are looking at me like, I 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. 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 counter, But it was something, if I recall correctly, it was$7 ,000 to$8 ,000 per bank. So let me do 30 banks times$7 ,000. That's$210 ,000 in like 1980 money. Yeah, it was closer to$250 ,000 from how to remember. So I don't know what I was thinking.

55:15Maybe 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 odd friends to concerts. It wasn't big partying. 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.

55:48You walk out calmly, walk through the parking lot, walk around the bank, get in your car and leave. It was really effective. The other thing that was to my favor was I didn't have to make a thing because when they asked the women, like, did he show a gun? They said no. And they said, well, then why did you give him the money? I said, 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 what my dad did when he menaced me as a boy, just slow and just like, and like the energy of that.

56:22I had it. I had a Y because I 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 the sheer madness and intensity of my presence. Now, that said, and also by that time, I got to prison the first time two years and Skinny Joe went in and Joe came all yoked. I'm like, Bank Robert Joe was not that other Joe. So I now had, and I'd committed violence in prison too. Now I had this other new confidence to me. So I go in there and I walked in and I handled business the way I did. And I think that was to my advantage.

56:58Also, you know, I knew that I could make them do the thing I needed to do. I would say, give me the big wheels first. Give me the Andres. Give me the fifth. And they were like automatons at that point once I scared them. And so it became this thing that I could do, right? And I was loose with it, you know, and I made it happen. What time of day is the best bank? Was it morning? I went the morning. Why is that? I tried to be the first guy. And several times I was there when with a couple other people when they were unlocking the bank. I was one of the guys. All right. He let everyone in. I said, oh, can I see you when you close it?

57:28He closed the door and I robbed him right there. Take me to the vault. So like it went in 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 in 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 there. 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. They arrest me.

57:58I go to court two days later for arraignment, 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 Pakistani. Oh, he's Pakistani. Oh, he might be Indian. And the reason that very 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.

58:29Oh, 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. 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 I 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.

59:09I'm still waiting. Yeah. No, just 80s ignorant shit right there. That's how I become the Beirut bandit. Beirut, Pakistan. Beirut by way of Pakistan. That's right. Yeah, so that's how I get it. But the story I wanted to tell you was that I get arrested, and when I get arrested, I get bail. My Aunt Gloria puts up her home, and 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.

59:45it'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 this story. Oh, he's a sexy bankrupt. No, no, I was a real terrible person. Yeah. And not only was I a terrible person, And a lot of people, well, you were robbing banks.

1:00:15I wasn't just robbing banks. I was a real terrible human being, especially in this regard. It's a perfect example. I was willing to put my hands to place a job. I didn't care. This is the grandiosity, narcissist, all that nonsense that was going on inside of me, right? So, yeah, it 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.

1:00:50So 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 so 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.

1:01:19You 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 terrorize the hell out of every teller I got a hold of. I just terrorize them, right? So that's a terrible thing. Whenever I interview people who rob jewelry stores, banks, anything like that. I get emails from show fans that say, hey, you did a good job on this, but be careful glorifying this kind of thing, because we live in fear of people like this.

1:01:49People 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 are when 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, OK, so a couple of things I need to say about that.

1:02:18One, 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 is 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 had ripped off so many people that when they would go into 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.

1:02:54So 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 about it. In fact, the worst thing that I had, worst regrets and shame, what I carried on for 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 Bank Robber Diaries, they interviewed a woman who was one of the tellers, right?

1:03:32But they interviewed her and they played it for me. And when I heard it, I fell apart. I broke down because she said everything you just said. Shit scared her. She had to drop out of night school. She said all these things that happened to her, which are terrible. And 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 they've been inflicted on me. That broke me down, man. Broke me down.

1:03:59Especially when she got to the part where 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? I'm like, what are you talking about? That sounds like the most asinine thing, plan, idea. I don't think they want to hear from you. I'm going to go out on a limb and say they don't want to hear from you. Well, more importantly, this is the way 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, I'm going to give you all my emotional shit.

1:04:29How 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 give it all to you. Yeah. 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. Now, 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 not going to say anything anymore. Just tell me what you need to tell me.

1:05:02And 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 kicking 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 Leave Out.

1:05:39And I was approaching the women in my life, friends and older mentors, with this good faith question. It's like, what do you 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.

1:06:22If 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.

1:06:58To hear Orion 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 jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. Also, our newsletter, Weebitwiser, is really a lot of fun. I love writing it. You love reading it. The idea is to give you something specific and practical that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, psychology, relationships, in under two minutes every Wednesday or just about.

1:07:31And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It's a great companion to this show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about 6 Minute Networking as well over at 6MinuteNetworking.com. I'm at JordanHarbinger 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 Fogerty, Tata Silauskas, 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.

1:08:02In 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 them, 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.

From the publisher

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/1264

What 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!]

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1264: Joe Loya | Confessions of a Bank Robber Part One

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