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

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

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Special thanks to Cayman Jack for sponsoring this episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Joe Loya: The choreography of a beating, right? I don't know at a 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 am I, what's he gonna 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, with a steak knife in my hand.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 [00:01:00] 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 wanna 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/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 eighties and nineties 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 [00:02:00] 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. 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 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 gonna start robbing banks.

Joe Loya: Well, I mean, you have to start a lot earlier than, Hey, I wanna rob banks. Okay. Well, it's the guys that knew Rob Banks actually were, um, 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 [00:03:00] 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 gonna 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. Say, here, 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, 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.

They were, my dad was an ex gang member, now a Christian, Protestant Christian in, in East la, which was all a sea of brown Catholics. It's very odd to be those people. Um, but [00:04:00] when we lived in the East La Monte 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 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 raising that environment. My mother and him have been dating, so they were 12. They love each other. They're like these little brown mascots in the church.

Like, um, you know, they're very predominantly middle class white church. And um, my parents, they were young, married at 16 and 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 their middle twenties.

Right, 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 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?

So I get scholarship. I start going to his private Christian [00:05:00] 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 wanna grow up and I wanna be, I wanna do something at church. My dad, um, would get angry sometimes and he would a little bit more than, you know, than the average person.

He would just, he was always on edge, would get angrier. He was really defensive, really kind of, you know, he is 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. And when you're in your, in the sixties, right? My mother gets sick at when I'm seven and she, uh, gets kidney disease.

I don't know it, but this is gonna 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 mom's. Mom's just 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? I said, Elizabeth [00:06:00] Taylor. She was out there.

Yeah. 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'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 is, and then all of a sudden, oh wait, what?

Why is it so? And it's just confusing that mine. Well, um, when I turned nine, my mom dies and she dies. Where are you from? Are you from California? I'm from Detroit.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm from Detroit originally.

Joe Loya: Okay. Back in LA in, um, 1971 to February 9th, there was this huge earthquake. It was called the Sylmar Earthquake. In, in Sylmar.

There was a hospital wing fell off, fell collapsed at two 10, 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 have 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. Like we are getting bigger too. [00:07:00] 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 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 of Jesus and, and then my dad even became a minister for a while, but he would periodically like beat us while he is preparing for his sermons and stuff.

And it was just a total moral confusion in the house. Total moral confusion.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 religiou.

Lemme go on past, lemme on,

Joe Loya: lemme 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 [00:08:00] 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 all torn up and everything. Three guys just beat the hell outta 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 on Sunday. He's studying the scriptures, he's doing his hermeneutics. He's finding out where, 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 could preach it to you. His boy comes in, broken glasses, torn up story. What happened? I said, I got beat up that he comes over, slaps me and he says his son's not gonna be a sissy. He gets me in the car and says, I gotta go fight all I wanna find those three guys and I gotta fight 'em each individually.

Wow.

This is what I mean by moral confusion. Yeah. 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 [00:09:00] 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, 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 rigamarole. The time goes on, my dad gets married to another woman. Um, she's a great stepmom. Her name was Brenda. I was 10, she was 20. My dad's 26 at this point. 27. Oh

Jordan Harbinger: my God, so young.

Joe Loya: Yeah, very young.

Right. So Brenda was, uh, out of Turlock up here. Um, 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 la, it's all brown. And everyone thinks she's our maid. 'cause she like, she's the, she's so out of all my friends at school.

And she would come to pick me up and say, go, who's that? Your maid? A white nanny? I don't, [00:10:00] I I'm like you. 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, a lot of great literature and she cleaned up my English.

To kind of the, um, the east la staying out of it temporarily. Brenda became disillusioned with my dad too, who became, 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, the way, 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 service of the, 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, Lars, this in the heart. I'm so angry and like confused for one. Nobody's helping with my grief. My mom dies.

They catch me crying. You know, it's a church lady say, why are you crying? Don't cry. She's in heaven. Oh, that's 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 [00:11:00] 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 our spiritual guidance I'm getting now, right? Besides that, that's not helping me in terms of the moral quandary that I'm gonna be in to eventually be the guy who robs banks.

But it's just a tough time for me to try and process the grief myself. And I'm being brutalized. So I got all this aggression growing. I mean, 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 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 warrant in, in the, because I'm gonna, 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 center.

You know, all the stuff that we throw at youngsters now who are having problems, act and act out, become super predators, gang bang, whatever you want to call them. They're [00:12:00] 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's just act. It needs to come out. And the same thing with me. I'm at the same place, so I'm acting out, Brenda's watching all this deteriorating in the home. And so what I start doing is I start stealing money from the, from the, from the offering.

Like I tell everyone my first victim was God. Oh my gosh. 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, you were old school friends of mine. And we were talking about how I used to buy all these taquitos of guacamole.

I would get, go over there buying burritos for us. I was paying for all this 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.

I, there's money. Let me just take it. And I don't care what the consequences are. [00:13:00] I get away with that. For whatever reason, their book keeping me was so sloppy. I feel they must have been ripping God off too. 'cause they were like, that bookkeeping 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, nah, 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, uh, 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 rib 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 he's done to me.

This is the worst moment of my life. Hands down, my dad punches Paul in the ribs. Pounces on his neck, [00:14:00] grabs his neck, and then starts dunking. Paul's head into the soap water, the dishwater drilling, and I'm standing there paralyzed. Now, I have a lot of heart in my body at that time. I'm very arrogant. I feel like I can do.

I'm gonna grow up in the world. I'm gonna be somebody. I just don't know what yet. I have all this confidence in my own. And right there I am shown to be a complete coward. 'cause I'm sitting there watching my brother get dunked and I don't do anything except freeze. And 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 leads 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 conquered 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. Uh, here I am thinking I'm this and I'm this. It does not comport, man. It does not fit. But I [00:15:00] have to accept the fact that I'm a coward. I let him do that on my brother. I didn't do anything. And I hate on myself. I, 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. Her name was Susie, sweetheart of a woman. And I'm like, fuck this. I'm gonna sabotage that relationship to you. No. So, um, he gets Susie as a girlfriend and when he gets Susie as a girlfriend, I'm gonna sabotage her and we go out to dinner.

She went, she, she, that's how sweet she is. She takes us out to steak dinner and at the time, Sizzler was the jam. Sizzler was the Jan. 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 is done to us. Right? The beatings and the, and then all of a sudden I realized, man, I'm just painted myself to look like a big sissy myself.

Like I'm always getting beat up. Woo. And so I remember specifically grabbing the, the steak knife there, and they had those really nice steak knives, you know, wood hand. But it is good steak. Now I remember, ha, if he does it to me again, I'm gonna stab in the [00:16:00] neck. And Susie says, no, Joey, don't do that. Put it down.

Violence doesn't help. You're sweet, sweetheart. And I did that because I wanted 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 sissy, I feel like I'm a sissy now. I wanna have some. So I put a little macho in my base of 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

Jordan Harbinger: stabbing your dad in the neck with a snake? That would be my

Joe Loya: dad in the neck. Right? Wow. 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.

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 conman. Now at this point he's selling insurance. A different kind of like, it's like the pulpit and insurance salesman, the same thing. They're trying to save you from fire.

So he's just a sure agent man. Yeah, just call him all comment. But he can read. He can read that something has happened,

right?

And [00:17:00] finally a week later we go to wash clothes and stuff. He doesn't know what he suspects. And here's how we find out. A week later we go do laundry and long and the short of it is, I, you know, this was the seventies.

A lot of people wore polyester was disco era. I ruined like half my dad's wardrobe accidentally. Putting that stuff in a hot dryer ruined it. Shrunk everything right? He's so angry 'cause we're so poor. Like, you know, he is. 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.

I've just ruined half his wardrobe. Wow. Now, the stress of all this thing's going on and 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 um, he's like, Hey, you know, Susie told me what you told her, and I just wanted to let you know that I'm all right.

I understand you felt like you had to tell her. I just need to admit that you tell her so we can clear it up.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, he's tricking you.

Joe Loya: And that was the first time and the last time that I ever confessed her crying. [00:18:00] And he says, 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 wanna 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 wanna 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? He has shown magnanimity in time. So I admit to it, oh my God. Beating be commences first the teapots thrown at me. By, 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 in our elbow.

I'm beat up real good. My dad is run down to the seven 11. We don't have a phone, 'cause we're, like I said, we're broke. He's gonna seven 11 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 there and I wait [00:19:00] 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, I've seen him many times before the choreography of a beating, right? First, he's all loose in the knack.

He's on the balls of his feet, you know, he is 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, big old, 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

Jordan Harbinger: plastic. Exactly. And they're kind of round and they don't really, they kind of like bulbous. Yeah, I remember those things. But

Joe Loya: they do have a really strong big, strong metal gadget to tie 'em elusive in.

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm thinking like, what am I, what's he gonna use to hit me? And no matter which one of those three pieces, the bar, the weight, the, the nodule that ties it and tightens it, I'm through. This is like, yeah, this is gonna [00:20:00] kill me. This is a new level of improvised savagery. Right? Yeah. So I'm like, okay, screw it.

And I grabbed the knife out and I stand up and now I'm standing there with a, with a steak knife in my hand. He sees me, he drops weight. 'cause I stand up with the knife I'm holding and he sees it and he drops weight. And he is 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 into the neck again, but I thinking that's gonna kill him. 'cause I need to kill him because if I don't, he'll kill me. Back up one sec. 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 we were experiencing, 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 [00:21:00] 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, um, expendable. He wants us dead. He's using the dead language. That's one of the reasons it 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 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, and I don't hit him because he has his arm up. And we're like, now I'm like, ah,

oh my gosh. And

I just, and I end up and he turns his head and bye. I end up snapping right here in the back of the neck. And then I start twisting and try to break it off in his neck. Oh my God. And he is like, ah, he's reaching back.

Ah, you'll kill me. You'll kill me. And he falls to the carpet. And at that point. I was raised religious and all that stuff. And so my feeling is like I have to say something [00:22:00] and I do. I being you a dramatic kid, I stand over him. I say something like, this is what you put, you brought this on yourself. I didn't kill you.

Killed yourself, kind of thing, right?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I'm surprised you didn't have a Bible quote. Ready, dude. It, that would've been pretty, literally

Joe Loya: could have been, this is what thy hand hath rock. It almost feels like, it almost feels like I'm gonna have to put a biblical note on it. Right? So I do kind of be like, yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: this is like some pulp fiction stuff where Samuel l Jackson's like reading the yelling the Bible verse quoted Bible verse.

Exactly.

Joe Loya: Exactly. So, 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 happening? I got blood on me and everything, and I like go, go, go. And we run and we run to my aunt's house.

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Now back to Joe Loya. What did you tell your aunt? Like, Hey, um, I stabbed my dad. He's dead in the foyer.

Joe Loya: 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 her house and we were track athletes. I broke the school record I liked to always brag about and the three third lawyers.

But didn't you have

Jordan Harbinger: broken ribs at

Joe Loya: this point? Yeah, but I'm still like, you got adrenaline. Oh boy. 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 gonna pull out of his neck and, and come after us. Right, right, right. So, because he is just so [00:26:00] 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 her, she was born that my dad was right, 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 'cause she's now dead. And I feel like I see the story from so many different angles now. But my man, 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. Um, and he, you know, he tried to kill himself. Bottom line. How

Jordan Harbinger: come you didn't go to jail for stabbing your dad?

Joe Loya: Or

Jordan Harbinger: did you?

Joe Loya: Well, here's why. So, so what happens is we get the police come, they go look for my dad. Then they, 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 weight. It was attempted murder on my father. 'cause that's what I'm confessing to. I got the knife, I sat there, I waited for when he came back, I [00:27:00] stabbed him, tried to kill him. And I'm bragging about it.

'cause now I feel like King Kong, you know, I'm like, you know, I, I slayed the giant. I'm him. I'm all that. And again, the adrenaline, well a certain point I'm really mad at him because I'm like, oh, all you asshole authoritarians you back. Each other's play. I see you're backing my dad's play. I see the church is already taking a peek at this.

And they didn't punish him. Like, I'm just thinking all authority and you 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 that Well, why didn't you call the police where your dad left? Why didn't you run outta the house? Like nobody asks that question now.

'cause you know everything about domestic abuse and how you've, you know, you're paralyzed all that. 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, rock and ribs.

Yeah, sure. Yeah. It, it hurts to breathe. And then my elbows, it's, I'm starting to feel all the pain of it

Jordan Harbinger: now. Yeah. The adrenaline's wearing off.

Joe Loya: They get a, on one of the, the female police officer taking me to the hospital [00:28:00] 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?

Jordan Harbinger: So he admitted he beat you up and that you stabbed? Yeah, he admitted everything. Oh wow. Everything.

Joe Loya: 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, 'cause we went into foster homes at 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 the new boss. Same as the old boss. You know, it's like, like now it's my turn to be, yeah. Be the jerk towards him. 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, whatever. 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. [00:29:00] He accepted the, and you know, and for, to be honest with you, for years and years, decades, he beat himself up for that stuff.

How

Jordan Harbinger: 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 did it, or I didn't do the right thing. Did you have any sort of feelings about what you had done?

Joe Loya: 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

Jordan Harbinger: this like an orphanage?

McLaren Hall?

Joe Loya: No, 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 taken outta the home, put a county care, and it's just this big facility where you are, while you're going to court, you gotta go to court to get taken from your parents officially and all this stuff.

And then they tried to place you in [00:30:00] 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 all 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 is like, it's not just on your own room, there's no doors on the, on these things. It's like, imagine what? It's an office where they have all these different spaces, but you can see and hear everyone.

It's kinda like that. Anyway, I start hearing sniffling and I start hearing kind of go, [00:31:00] 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, I want my, and these kids start crying to go home. I want my, I wanna go back to my mommy and my dad.

And I'm sitting there like, what the, I just tried to kill my dad.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Joe Loya: 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 brothers beat up their drunk dad. That was as bad as it got. Nobody did what I did. Not one person did 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. 'cause I don't know where I'm gonna go. I don't know where I'm gonna [00:32:00] be and I'm feeling the anxiety of the future 'cause 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 wanna go back and, and I tell you this is important because it, it made me feel like, oh, I'm gonna 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 gonna embrace it. Or you're a person when change comes and, and offers you an opportunity, you're like, oh shit. Gonna go back. Gonna lurch back to a bondage. I'd rather be small. I'm not gonna, 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, and which means everybody else in the world, you're not even my blood.

The whole [00:33:00] 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 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, shit, it's important and big deal.

The dramas between 'em and killing the father's 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, 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 babe for society. They have all these moralities, but they're too timid for me. I've seen pass 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 the little sociopath looking at like, you guys are falling for the okie-doke.

I'm not the guy who falls for the Okie-doke. I'm the guy who stabs the [00:34:00] Okie-doke and says, get the hell outta my way. I'm not buying it. Right. So time goes on. I graduate high school and um, very poor senior, 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 full 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 Community College though I did tell her when I went to school back east and they would say, where I sent East LA College, I was trying to be arrogant about who I was trying to fit my ego, Harvard, but the fact of the No, uh, my ex-wife went, I went to Princeton and I would tell her grad school, and I would always say, man, how come you don't tell anyone you went to Prince?

She'd always say, she goes, let's go back east.

Jordan Harbinger: That's the difference between somebody who went to prison and somebody who went to prison. You know what, that's, [00:35:00]

Joe Loya: yeah. She went to Yale, I went to jail. That kind thing. Anyway.

Exactly.

So, so, um, but yeah, no, all that to say that I'm doing school. But my, the thing I wanna say about Young East LA Community College is I'm going to college and I realize, what am I doing?

I'm gonna get out of what? I'm gonna be a lawyer. I'm gonna be, what am I'm gonna make 45, this is in 1980. So in those days, you know, 45, $50,000 is a lot for somebody to come outta college and make that money. Right? 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. I have to dial up my narrative. I don't know what it is, but this line, this track,

Jordan Harbinger: yeah,

Joe Loya: let me go to college. Let me do the, and that's not, I'm gonna 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 able to have, I'll pay off a mortgage, blah, blah, like none of that.

And so it's already happened to me. I don't have a [00:36:00] feel for posterity. Remember my mom died at 26. There's also included in this, the feeling like I just gotta make it a 26. I don't know what happens after that. I just gotta make it a 26. 'cause that's where the cutoff date is for me and my head. A lot of people think, oh, 76, that's where you know when your parents die.

That's approximately the age. I was like, I don't know if I'm gonna make it to 26. I just gotta 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 gonna do all these years here so I can go make $45,000. That's it. So I start committing little bullshit crimes.

I start bouncing checks, which is the easiest thing to do. Yeah. 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, because 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 'cause I don't know anything. So I commit a bunch of petty, petty crimes, but I committed a lot of them and I ended up being wanted in five different counties. Oh wow. The worst of it. I defrauded some guy out of a $32,000, um, 7 [00:37:00] 33 IBMW, which is top of the line at that time.

Jordan Harbinger: You just bought it, but then the check bounced or whatever. And yeah, it was elaborate. I mean. Okay.

Joe Loya: I literally wrote him a check and told him, Hey, my banker's not there till this afternoon. He can tell you this check's good. And then I'll come back and pick the car. It was, you know, I wrote it for 35 or $32,000.

So I drive down to 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 then 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, it just, I have a checker from Joe Loya, so I'm not even gonna do the voice.

It was so ridiculous. No, don't do the voice. It was a movie. We get canceled for that.

I'm just saying it happened. The Hollywood people gotta 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, hook client a sinker.

So I drive up there that night, Hey, did you talk to my, my banker said, oh yeah. And he gives me the pink slip and everything. I'm gone. I go and I sell it and, and, and that the next day in San Diego, [00:38:00] and then I become a fugitive in Mexico. Right? Oh my

gosh.

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, you know, close to $40,000.

And so. I go to Mexico, I'm a fugitive. I told everyone down there that I'm, that my family's dead. I don't have anyone, and I'm gonna start over. I'm like, now I'm a criminal. I'm a bad guy. And I make some friends down there and 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 to me, they came in and stole all my money. I only have 2,500 bucks, 2000 bucks 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 gotta get close to them, right?

And I don't have that kind of time. No, I can't go back to 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 Bandi, right? But I [00:39:00] remember that trove who, who, um, who was a general during the Revolutionary War trove 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, into Mexico.

So I'm like, you know, maybe I'll do that move. Maybe I'd go up there and start robbing places. Now remember, at this point, I'm Rob anything. No seven 11, 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, that 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 tried to kill him. I come to a place where I'm a petty criminal. I wanna go into crime. I don't know how to do it. I just start like innovating. I 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 aspire to as a kid. I say, [00:40:00] 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 could 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, um, San Diego the next day, and 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, Rob 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, and violence. And so I make it happen. I'm excited. I'm staying in San that night. I get a, you know, a good dinner. Pack up the car and I'm at, 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 [00:41:00] traffic.

'cause they're looking for stolen cars. Oh yeah. Periodically they do this 'cause that's, people are stealing cars all the time. And that's at, at that point I get stopped, I get arrested. I get arrested for all the crimes that I had done in uh, that got me my five warrants. But they don't arrest me for the bank robbery 'cause 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 gonna be a bank robber. That's it. And that's how 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 gonna 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.

Jordan Harbinger: 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.

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If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, email meJordan@jordanharbinger.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? [00:45:00] Do you make a plan? I gotta just say the eighties and nineties 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 and 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.

Joe Loya: And there was a reason why LA was the bank robbery capital of the world at that time. Right. So, and I was just part of it. Why la? Well, a lot of freeways for one.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I see. Okay.

Joe Loya: 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 gonna 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 [00:46:00] 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 outta the bank. I see. There was a lot of things like that, but how did I plan or whatever, maybe it was just, you know, I was just robbing mostly towers. 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, tower 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 outta the bank, run outta the bank, and immediately they started swooping their heads.

This way, if they had looked up, they could see me 30 feet away among the cars. I was just standing there, literally watching them. But they were so sort of like conditioned to look at looking for a getaway car that was right there that everyone can jump into. So they were seeing, wait, which one of these cars here driving by, might he be in.

I was able to look at [00:47:00] them and then turn around and just casually walk away. No one saw me. And so it, it confirmed to me that as long as I park or walk away through something, they're not gonna come out and be looking for the horizon. Their hands, their eyes are gonna 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 tower. And there was only one teller at the time. 'cause 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 were now had set off the alarm. I walked into the bank right next to it and raw bit, even though police were coming. Walked outta 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 a bank robbery, as [00:48:00] also this on the way to commit any crimes that I committed when I was in prison.

Any assaults or whatever, there's a part of your body that knows like, okay, we might die. We might get shot, we might, it's gonna 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 of a tremble, my teeth would start grinding, my stomach would start hurting.

My hands would like jump off the steering wheel. Like I just, I couldn't, there's just so much energy in my hands. Um, and then a wave of fatigue would hit me. Like if I pulled over, I feel like I would've been able to sleep for three hours. It was like in, it was almost like my body was saying, red light.

Stop, stop, stop. You know? Yeah. You get that train crossing. Fight or flight. Yeah. It was really intense. 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 coil in my body and I would 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 as a prisoner, but also how I started with my father. I just had to get [00:49:00] done.

Yeah.

I was standing on my dad, can you put it down? Put it down. I'm like, I got resolve and I'm gonna do it, and then I do it.

Jordan Harbinger: 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.

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 uh, I don't know, in Forbes. Instead of in Rikers Island, for example. Right. Like, it's really crazy Absolutely. To hear about. Yeah, absolutely. 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,

Joe Loya: it's, when I came on, I wrote my memoir. My memoir was, we gave, got a great review in the New Yorker magazine. I turned myself into a literary map. 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 is the literary premier literary magazine of the country.

Jordan Harbinger: How does this work? You walk in and you hand a note to the teller, or have [00:50:00] I just been watching too many movies

Joe Loya: the first time I did that. Okay. And the issue is that when you drop, when you walk in, you hand a note. You've given a reason to look down. And I look up and that's what happened to me. I, I sent a note the very first time, you know, the first one before I got arrested and went to, uh, 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. I'm like, Hey. And I grabbed the note and she's still holding on the note and I kind of moved the note around like, come on, come on, hurry up. And she just keeps looking. She's frozen on the note.

Laughter: She's right.

Joe Loya: She's like, not gonna look up.

Why would she look up? She's better off just looking down. Like, I don't want, pretend like you're not here. And so I have to now say literally like, give money or I'll jump over this counter and I'll shoot. 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. 'cause I still had to open my mouth. Right. So I never did a note again. And so yeah, I had a, a thing that I would say every time. And you say, how do they get you? Well, they went, one of the ways to get you is they don't necessarily need to know who you [00:51:00] are. They need to know what your MO is.

My MO is, we have a bomb. I have a gun. Gimme the money now, you know? Mm-hmm. Sometimes if I said it to somebody like, um, a manager who looked like he didn't want to believe anything, I would say, we have a bomb. I have a gun. Gimme them right now. I'll blow your, I might throw in that last part. Right? But the point is that it was enough to say, I'm serious.

We have a bombing. 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 gimme the big bills first and this and that, and that's how I did it. Now you go in 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 a actual guard in the bank.

Jordan Harbinger: What do they do? They just go, uh, I'll call this one in when the guy leaves. Like, is that what the guard does? What's his job Actually?

Joe Loya: Who knows? Who know? Well, here's the thing. I went to this bank that was so big.

He was way over at an entrance way over there. And it was kind of a rotunda kind of bank. Yeah, it was huge. It was in a, it was in San Diego somewhere in one of those rich [00:52:00] 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, so I rolled the bank, ran out that way, and he was over there and it was just like it.

It was 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. 'cause 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.

And also banks don't keep money like they used to.

Jordan Harbinger: There's no gold bully in buying. There's no online banking. Yeah,

Joe Loya: 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, on paydays. You had the banks had to be, have a lot of money. ATMs were there, but even then, you know, the ATMs were in the bank, so the money was in, was in the bank there.

Right. Becausecause. They had to fill, fill up the bottom of the, yeah, they still have to put in every, at m had to have $160,000 some in the thing, and then under some underneath it, there was a number that had to have, so there was [00:53:00] money on those days, but now you have online banking, you get, you know, I don't have to go in, I get deposited by sending a picture of 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 at TM, you know, there's all these ways that banks don't have to have money like they used to. Anyway, so that's your but answer your question. That's how I robbed it.

That's also when, when they went to get me, they knew that they would look at the mo, right?

Jordan Harbinger: Like, what did he say? This guy said this

Joe Loya: there, he said that here. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So what was the take back then? What, like, you're leaving with, you said 4,500 bucks, which is what, like probably 10 grand in today's money or maybe more.

Joe Loya: So the average bank robbery for tower robberies is like 1200 bucks 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,

Jordan Harbinger: that's like five grand in today's money. So it's not that good for risking your life.

Joe Loya: Yeah. And then I had, uh, 32 thou, I went a vault and stole $32,000 out of it.

So like 7,000 is what I averaged out of [00:54:00] 30 banks. Okay. 7,000, 8,000. Okay. It wasn't a lot, but it was a lot for 14 months. 30 bank robs. Yeah, but it wasn't, and it was more than 1200 bucks a bank.

Jordan Harbinger: How do you get to a, into a, a Vault though? Like what, how does that work?

Joe Loya: The vault was savings and loans and. I walk in and I just tell the manager, we gotta get the vault and let's go.

And they take me to the vault. And with somebody else, they had, they needed two keys. They take me in there, I put 'em up against the wall and say, just put your hands behind your back, kneel down against the wall. And I start taking the money and there's not much money there. Like I said, the bank, it was a savings and loan even.

There wasn't even really a, like a big bank. I take 'em in there, I get the money, I walk out the door to get to the, 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. And people were looking at me like I just walk out. And then I went and robbed another bank.

So that day I robbed two banks,

Jordan Harbinger: 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.

Joe Loya: And the average, I, I don't remember [00:55:00] the exact amount 'cause I haven't done the count, but it was something, if I recall correctly, it was seven to $8,000 per bank.

Jordan Harbinger: So let me do 30 banks times 7,000. That's $210,000 in like 1980 money.

Joe Loya: Yeah. It was closer to 250 from what I remember. So I don't know what I was thinking. Maybe it was, maybe it was $8,000. It's about a million bucks

Jordan Harbinger: is your total take.

Joe Loya: Yeah, it was a lot of money. Yeah. You know, and the thing is, I don't, I'm not doing drugs.

I don't do, I wasn't a big party, I was just a hedonist. I was just like, it was all about like, you know, like nice restaurants and, and nice clothes and taking all friends to, to concerts, that kind of thing. It wasn't big partying. I wasn't the big drug guy. I wasn't, I wasn't that guy.

Jordan Harbinger: 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.

Joe Loya: 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, how did he show a [00:56:00] gun? They said no. And they said, well then why'd you get in 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, menaced. I didn't have to pull out a gun down. I would just speak to weight. You know how I spoke. I spoke the way my dad did when he menaced me as a boy, just slow and turn and just like give and like the energy of that.

I had it, I had a why 'cause 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, which is the sheer medicine intensity of my presence. Now that said, and also by that time I got outta prison the first time two years, and Skinny Joe went in and Joe came all yoked, you know, like Uhhuh Bank, Rob Joe was not that other Joe.

So, um, so I now had, and you know, I'd committed violence in prison too. Now I had this other con new confidence to me. So I go in there and I walked in and I, and I handled business the way I did and I think that was to my advantage. Also, you know, I knew [00:57:00] that I could make them do the thing I needed to do.

I would say, gimme the big bills first. Gimme the hundreds. Gimme the fifth. And it was, they were like auto automatons at that point. Once I scared 'em and so it was, it became a thing that I could do, right. And I was loose with it, you know? And then, and I made it happen.

Jordan Harbinger: What time of day is the best bank?

Was was morning. The morning I went the morning. Why is that? Always,

Joe Loya: 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 there. I think he let 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 to the vault. So like it when 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 morning, the FBI was already there. They arrest him on the spot. So I'm like, yeah, that's not gonna happen to me. Like

Jordan Harbinger: 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

Joe Loya: 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 [00:58:00] arraignment and they're like, we don't know who he is.

He is the Beirut Bandit and here's 16 pictures of him. And these are 16 photos. And we're still counting, your Honor, I was the Beirut bandit because get this, when I would go into these banks to rob him, the police would come and say, you know, what'd he look like? Oh, he looked Indian. He looked back.

Pakistani. Oh, he is Pakistani. Oh, he might be Indian. And the reason 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.

Oh geez. Like

they were so used to being robbed by gang banging, um, drug addicts that I did not fit that profile at all.

So when I walk in with my glasses and my dark hair, it 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 could be confused for calling me, uh, Pakistani or Indian.

Sure. But what the [00:59:00] FBI should not be excused for is saying, oh, did you say Pakistani Indian? Okay, well we're gonna go to Lebanon.

Jordan Harbinger: Right? Like that's, I'm, I'm still like connected to Beirut. I'm still waiting. Yeah, no, just eighties ignorant shit right there. Just, that's how I become the Beirut Bandit. Yeah.

Beirut, Pakistan.

Joe Loya: So Beirut by way of Pakistan. That's right. Yeah. So that's why I get it. But the point, the story I wanted to tell you was that I get arrested and when I get arrested, I find I get bail. My aunt Gloria puts up her home and man, I go Rob five more banks, five more banks that rob on bail. Now when, 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 gonna 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 gotta get the hell out of Dodge.

'cause there's two of them. But

Jordan Harbinger: Are you worried about your aunt [01:00:00] losing her home? She put it up for on bail as collateral. Nope, I was not.

Joe Loya: That's how bad I was. Oh my God. You know, 'cause a lot of people hear this story. Oh, sexy bag. No, no. It was a, I was a real terrible person.

Laughter: Yeah.

Joe Loya: And not only was I a terrible person, we a lot of people, oh, you were robbing banks.

I wasn't just robbing banks. I was a real terrible human being. Especially in this regards, perfect example. I was willing to put my hands to place in jeopardy. I didn't care. This is the grandiosity narcissist, 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 with, but I was emotionally abusive. So I was a terrible person. And I, some people would like to gimme a pass and say, well, you know, you didn't hit them.

My dad beat the shit out of us. And the worst thing that ever happened to me in child is when he said [01:01:00] something to my brother, he didn't have to hit me. Emotional abuse is sometimes worse than actual, the physical thing. The bones heal, the bruises go away. But the emotional stuff, when you say stuff to people, that's terrible.

So I don't give myself a pass on that. But I do wanna 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, uh, 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, my aunt lose her home.

So, yes, that happened and terrorize the hell out of every tower. I got a hold. I just terrorized 'em. Right? So that's a terrible thing.

Jordan Harbinger: Whenever I interview people who rob jewelry stores, banks, uh, uh, anything like that, I, 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. People who have been through robberies, they have nightmares for weeks, they have nightmares for months afterwards. It changes their lives. They don't wanna go out at night anymore, or they don't wanna work anymore. Now that you're [01:02:00] out of the whole mess, what do you think about all that?

I mean, do you think about the women who, uh, and men for that matter, who are just scared to death, that didn't wanna go back to work, that retired early or, you know, had nightmares for six months after this? You know, it's, it's especially scary for women, I think.

Joe Loya: Absolutely. I mean. Okay, sir. A couple things I need to say about that.

One, it's true that I robbed the banks and um, 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 had ripped off so many people that when they would go into those banks like 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 run those banks, I don't feel guilty about it. I did the time for those banks. I [01:03:00] 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 am, that I inflicted on these women and a few men.

So I don't give myself a pass for that. I feel terrible about, in fact, the worst thing that I had, worst regrets and shame, well, I carried on for a long time, was, 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 Diaries, they, uh, interviewed the women who, um, a woman who was one of the towers, right?

But they interviewed 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 I, I, 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. C you know, inflicting trauma on people since they've been inflicted on me. That broke me down, man. Broke me down. Especially [01:04:00] 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 us. I'm like, what are you talking about? That sounds like the most asinine thing. Planned idea. I don't think

Jordan Harbinger: they want to hear from you. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say they don't wanna hear from you. I don't know.

Well,

Joe Loya: more importantly, this is the way I look at it. Once upon a time, Joe Loya couldn't handle his emotional shit and so he ambushed them with it and said, you know, I'm gonna 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 go 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 if how good my spirit is. It's ridiculous to think that, oh, I'm having holding all this stuff now. They gotta 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 [01:05:00] on.

I'm not gonna say anything anymore. Just tell me what you need to tell me. If they said they want to hear anything from me, that's fine. Like it's their, it has to be in their terms. They have to be able to do whatever they want. Yeah. You know, short of kick me in the balls like you can lay into me. I got that coming and I'll take it.

Jordan Harbinger: What if love isn't about fate or chemistry, but cold hidden calculations we don't even realize we're making psychologist. Orion Ban exposes the uncomfortable truth about what men and women really want versus what they say they want.

JHS Trailer: 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, and I was approaching the women in my life, friends and older mentors with this good faith question. It's like, what do you fucking want? 'cause 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 [01:06:00] 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 'cause 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

Jordan Harbinger: To hear O Ryan Ban, break [01:07:00] 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/deals.

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