Confessions of a dangerous mind

Joe Loya has a successful career as a journalist and performer in San Francisco, but in his new memoir, he comes clean about his first career path -- robbing banks.

By Sheerly Avni

Aug. 25, 2004 | OAKLAND, Calif. -- It's late afternoon, the July summer sun still bright on the booths at Hunan Yuan, the favorite Chinese restaurant of former bank robber, former solitary confinement inmate, and soon-to-be-published memoirist Joe Loya. Joe and I have just slid in for an early dinner: We've ordered two Tsingtaos, along with chicken eggplant, sautied string beans and fried orange chicken, which he calls "bullets to the heart."

Bullets to the heart -- an apt metaphor for a man who had lawmakers' rifles trained on him at least three times during his life as a criminal. Loya's new memoir, "The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell: Confessions of a Bank Robber" (due out in early September from HarperCollins), tells the story of how he went from being a religious and sensitive Protestant East Los Angeles schoolboy to a cynical con man and petty thief, to a bank robber with more than two dozen heists to his name, to a maximum-security convict, to a budding cellblock writer, and -- finally -- to a new man, released after a grand total of nine years in 1996 at the age of 35, and bent on living an honest life. Or, at least, the reader must hope he is redeemed: The book's last page is Loya's first day of freedom from jail.

Loya had a short but lucrative career as a bank robber. His first heist was in downtown San Diego; he left the midsize bank with $4,500. On and off over the next three years, he robbed his way up and down Southern California, netting enough money to always keep 30 to 40 grand in cash stashed under his bed. He never used a gun (a note for the tellers claiming gun or bomb ownership did the trick), and, with the money he stole, he lived a fantasy life of good cars, good clothes and good-looking women. The memoir does full justice to this portion of his life, and the book is a satisfying read -- offering lots of car chases, comical accounts of his failed first attempts to strike fear in the hearts of jaded tellers, lurid yarns laced with thick jailhouse raconteur profanity -- except for the one question that lingers in the mind after shutting its pages. Once the con man has convinced you he's a con man, how do you know you're not still being conned?

For this reader, the question is further complicated by the fact that the con man in question is an old and dear friend, and, since his release in '96, a model of upstanding citizenship as well, with -- to the best of my knowledge -- not even a parking ticket to his name. Occasionally, over the years, he'd remind me he used to be a "bad, bad man," but I never saw it. I knew he used to rob banks, and I'd heard about the car chases, the near misses. I knew he used to be violent; I knew he was abused by his father. I knew that, at age 16, he finally fought back, stabbing his father with a steak knife during a fight. I knew that he had once bitten off part of a fellow prisoner's ear in a dispute over a stolen porn magazine. But that was the Old Joe, and little in my day-to-day interactions with the New Joe had prepared me for the creepiness of the young man who emerges through the pages of "The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell." Right now, as we wait for our food and the sun sets over the Oakland Hills, I've got the tape recorder running, arms folded across my chest, wondering if I ever even knew Joe Loya at all.

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