Hi, there's Steve Fishman from Orbit Media. You're listening to Get the Money and Run. Over seven episodes, we're gonna learn how Joe Layer became one of California's most daring bank robbers. We're gonna hear about high speed getaways, a relentless FBI, about disguise's body doubles, and also about another side of Joe. Joe Layer is a soul searcher, a soul searching criminal, one of the most original criminals in true crime podcasts, and I listened to a lot of them.
Today's episode First Time Out Remember to binge All seven episodes ad free. Subscribe to True Crime Clubhouse on Apple Podcasts. Our host and creator is the Great Benedair, producer of shows like Lost Hill's, Ripple Pulse, The Untold Story. All right over to Ben?
How much? How do you planned this all out in advance? But what did you know going into it? How are you going to go in? How are you going to get away?
No?
None?
None?
I mean you can't just rob a bank with no plan, can you?
What I do remember about the day is this I started ten. I walked into the first bank, and I grab a slip and I write we have a bomb, just a bank cropper, and I wrote a bank rubbing note and then I'm like a fucking I don't want to do this year. For some reason, this doesn't feel right. So I start walking away and as I walk away, there's like three cameras on me at the door, and
I realized, I think I could have been busted. Right if anyone just kind of like you know, zoomed in the guy who was writing something on the back of that slip, they could have seen I was trying to rob that bank. So I wrote my next one, next note at McDonald's, just run it there. And I would walk in the banks and I would leave them all day long, you know, Like I would walk in and I would stand in line, go a couple of steps up, A couple of customers would be going and I was like, nah,
that I don't got a feel for this. I'd walk in, I'd see you know guards, Noah, God, I swear to God man. I probably nibbled a little bit of food from every fast food joint available at the time, KFC, Wendy's. If this was a short film, it would be a comic film because you would see me going in there, Okay, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. And the next thing, you see me drinking coffee at McDonald's. You see me, Okay, I'm gonna do it. I gonna be
all fucking nerve you in there. The next scene, I'm biting the whopper at or like it would just be okay, let's do it, let's do it, Taco Bell, do it, let's do it, Wendy. It was like fucking hilarious.
Where were you feeling inside?
Fear? I was just like, at this point, I'm not going to jail, just standing in line thinking about robbing a bank. When I go do the next thing, this is the real thing. So I know that on the other side of this is a payoff, a big payoff, because when you run past your fear, then it cannot harass you anymore. On this side of it, it's a big, dark, menacing curtain and it's saying, try to come back here, see what the fuck's gonna happen, And you're like, I
don't know if I want to open that curtain. Oh fuck. Once you open that curtain, that curtain fucking evaporates. There's no more curtain you could turn around like, where's that freaking curtain? It was menacing me. There's no curtain, And that's what you have to do. You have to push past your fear to get to the next level.
Right now, walking in and out of these banks all day staring at that curtain.
Oh, that curtain is just like taunting me, you fucking punk. And I knew that I had this in me where I could cough up a nutsck and do something if I need to do it now. All day I wasn't coughing up the nutsack all day, I was not calling up my courage. It would just go somewhere. We only get me so far, and then it would peter out. But it was like this point, I was like this, so we're doing it. We're doing it right now. Fuck all the bullshit, Let's go do this.
Part one, first time out. Okay. So I'm sitting here in the studio. This has been adare and I'm sitting here in the studio with Joe Loya. Hi Joe Joe. Today you're wearing a sort of a black pullover shirt. You have got black glasses, silver goatee. You normally you have a City of Oakland baseball cap, right here on the chair next to you. How do you describe yourself to people?
I say I'm fluffy. I mean, I don't say I'm fat, but I'm very heavy. I mean you're living, Yeah, living, I'm existing large.
I don't know why to liver you.
Yeah, so I'm I'm a thick man, Mexican man, dark skin, you know, in a.
Late fifties, late fifties.
Yeah, easy to say.
I mean, looking at you now, you're charming. I don't think people would understand that you used to break school records and track.
Though nobody's get into My friend Danny Diego Swan City, said, man, you look like you ate that guy I showed on the photo of me when I was eighteen years old.
He says, man, you look like you ate that guy. I mean, which, that's what I look like. But let's get back into it. It's nineteen eighty four. You've never robbed a bank before. You've committed crimes, but mostly small stuff, fraud, stealing cars. Enough that has gotten the attention of the cops. You're wanted by police. So you've been hiding out in Tijuana. Uh, You've driven up to San Diego from Tijuana. You're in a stolen car, and you're walking in and out of
banks all day. But now it's deadline time.
HM. Okay, So finally four forty five, I gotta rob this bank. I know it. There's no getting around it. We're doing it right now. I don't have a choice. I stand in line, have my note and go to the line and say, how are you doing, sir? I said, I'm fine. How you doing is? I'm walking over Let everybody like see us, and then let not pay attention to us. And as I walk up there, I slide the note here, she puts it. I put it down
on the table. I slide it to her. She looks down at it, and she reads it and reads it and reads like has plenty of time to have read it, turned it over, copied it, turned it back over, read it again, like too long. So I reached forward and I realized I got to get her attention. So I grabbed a note and I move it around a little bit, like hey, let's do something about this, And she still won't look up. So I had to pull the note away from her because I realized, oh shit, I've given
her something to distract her. She does not want to look up. And she doesn't have to look up. So I tried to pull the note back, and she tries to pull the note to her. And when she's pulling the note, we're doing this a little bullshit war. Now I'm just fucking pissed. So I lean forward and say I'm not fucking around. I'll jump the counter. And I reached down like I got a gun, and I pat my waistband like I'm coming over. I will fuck you
up for this bullshit stuff. And it was in that moment she looks up and just with my eyes I menace her. And then when she looked at me, she saw I was serious. She opened her drawer and just gave me the money. Now, I put on the table on the counter, I put a fanny pack. I start throwing the money in it, and then I tell her good I walk away.
So then you get the money, you take the fanny you pick up the fanny.
Pack, walk away with my family was zipping it up. I'm walking away like I just did banking. I'm not like running. I'm not like I just robbed the plane. Now, no energy other than you know, walk away. I turn around to walk out of the bank, like I'm a customer. Just finish my transaction. I get to the door, and before I can even walk out the door, somebody yells he robbed the bank. He dropped us. And so I
start running, and I mean I run. I'm bending it over, driving my arms and I'm high stepping it, and I'm running to the far away. At the end of the block. I knew there was a trolley station a cab there, and I jumped into the cab, pulled away from these guys kept looking back and they were like in the beginning, they were chasing after me in earnest, and then they realized there's no catching me this this jack Rabbit's gone, gone gone. So get in the car, tell him to
get me to Sanya Sidro. He drops me off on the other side of the freeway in Santa Cidro, and then I walk over a bridge to where I had my hotel room. So again inside my room, and obviously the first thing I'm excited to do is figure how much Monday. The guy looked like a lot of money, and so I start counting the money. I break up the twenties, the fifties, one hundreds of five. It's the ten is that I always did, and then I say, okay, that's count it because this looks good, and sure enough,
forty five hundred dollars a man of glory felt glorious. Okay, so already when I was in college, I used to think I did this math and thought, you know, I'm gonna get out of college. I'm gonna do four years. I'm going to be working through college because we don't have a lot of money. And when I get out, what do I think I might get start off at forty thousand dollars, maybe fifty if I'm lucky. I don't know, but I don't think that I'm going to make a lot of money, and then I'm gonna have to do
that over a year of work. And one of the reasons I went into crime was I thought, no, a guy who has that kind of gumption, he should be getting paid buckets of money. I felt like, this, this is what my time is worth. So this money already felt so much better. It felt like I got it based on my wit, on my ferocity. I was getting paid for fucking heart. And also I love the cleanness of it. Like everyone's like, oh, okay, we're gonna go do this game where we exchange money all the time
and life, and then we all die. Here I'm gonna get it. Here's a paycheck, and okay. Then here I'm gonna go buy food, and we're all exchanging money and then we die. And I felt like, man, we've been duped. This is no way to fucking live. But if we're gonna be having exchanges of money, let's make it this way. Hi, you have a lot of money, give me your fucking shit. Now it's my money. Buy Just give me the money. That's what I want by It's just clean, and it
was fast, and it was commiserate to my time. That's great. I love getting four thousand, five thousand dollars for five minutes of work. I felt like that's I should be getting that every day of my life, every five minutes of my life. So I was happy. It was like, I don't have to be a petty criminal ever again. I never have to steal a snicker bar, a shirt, I never have to defraud anybody. I owe somebody fifty bucks,
I get to give them fifty bucks. I get to be honorable now and in my life except for this one thing, because I'm a bank robber. Now, I'm gonna rob Banks. That's all I'm gonna do too too.
We'll be right back Part two. Mama's Boy. Not to be out telling me about your mother. But what was life like for a young Joe growing up?
Okay? So I was born in East Los Angeles, the old Matavia housing projects, back in those days. My parents were sixteen when I was born. My mother had just turned seventeen when I was born, and so my mother and dad found other. My mother was pregnant. They went to their parents and parents said, you're getting married. They were in tenth grade. Sid, You're getting married. And it was a loving home, cool, loving home. The love story that I was raised in with my parents, They've loved
each other since twelve. Everyone loved them. I was raised in that love story. I was raised in the love. We went to church, and our church was our life at that time. I was raised with Bible stories. I was raised at church camps. I was raised pot lucks Man. I was raised in the church, and I was raised with a dad who wanted to be a preacher, and he had a love of language. He was he was very smart and he was devoted to learning. Everything was
cool until seven. I turned seven, by that time, we'd moved out to People Rivera and my mother got sick as always. Man, this always gets me, man. I remember my mother got a job at the Sears tower over here on the Olympic. I don't even know if the Seers buildings still there, but there's be a big Sears building there, and she got in the typing pool because she apparently she was like she was a typing folio man. But what I remember about that is my dad would
would go warm up the car. My dad would go warm up the car outside. This in the days when you weren't afraid someone was just gonna steal your car, right, you would go warm up the car, you know, turn the heater on in there cause it's cold. It was, you know, it's early morning, like three or four. Maybe it was it was four or five, who knows, but it seemed super early, dark cold. And then he would wrap us up inside and they would take us and carry us to the car. We leave you in the back,
leave sleeping. That was also in the days when you didn't need to buckle your kids in the backseat. And then he would take my mom and I remember I would get up and I would look out and there was fog over there by the by the La River when you would go over like First Street or one of those bridges in La and Uh, and I remember like, wow, this is weird. It's like when you see those old movies and like Casablanca and there's this fog going behind its dark.
It was like that.
But it was early morning, and and she was a sharp dresser, you know, I remember looking sharp. That's one of my first memories. But it's not until he's seven, right. She was already sick then, and very sick, and he didn't know, and she was just tired. She thought it was just because of her work whatever. And she had to take a physical. That's when the doctor was like, oh shit, something's wrong. And then she was in and out of the hospital like our life was just gone.
What it's just it was topsy turvy after she got sick. I remember once I visited her, and I hated that hospital. I had the smell. I hated being there. I hated her shuffling over to us and her chunk laws and her little you know, the hospital dressing they had. I hated her smell of spongebat. I hated it all the bee being all that stuff. Man, it brings back crazy feelings of helplessness. Remember when she was in junior High, she had been voted, you know, tower Queen of Griffith
Junior High. She was beautiful when she got sick. The medications that they gave her made her look like she was nine months pregnant. But she also got really skinny and gaunt everywhere else, and she lost the body in her hair. She got dark circles under her eyes, and you know, she could barely move. She kind of shuffled when she was home. She was feeble. She was so drugged up. Her back. I would scratch her back sometimes. She loved to scratch her back. And I stayed home
and I was sick of a lot. I was a sickly boy. So I got to spend time with my mom and I would scratch her back and I would go I had this. I knew the pattern of her back that I get scratched. Because I was I would scratch her back. I would come across this rough skin. I realized, Okay, I'm going into the little volcano head.
Of the boat. Bomb the boil.
Let me move around it. And I would just find the pattern and scratch her back, and she loved that on her wrists, the vein was raised on the wrist because they were constantly putting needles into it so that it almost looked like you could see you could see the blood flowing through it. It was really creepy. And then her mind left her. Periodically, it would leave her, and in dramatic ways. So one day we came home, you know, like we always did. Mothers still in the
hospital that day. So Thursday, but we're outside playing basketball, me and my brother Paul, my cart some of the other fellas, and I get called in to my grandma's Hey, man, come on up, I come on up. But I knew something was strange because there's people in the house, all dressed up, people from church, family people, and this doesn't happen during the week. A week night, Thursday night. I'm like, I don't know what's going on. I have no clue. Really,
I'm a clueless nine year old boy. This is what I was. And my dad comes in and everybody moves towards my dad and there's this like somber hugs whatever, and nobody's trying to reveal to us what's going on. Yet we're just dopey boys our life about to intersect with Chance like a motherfucker, and he comes. He gets us, He walks in the room. We sit down on my grandma's bed, and then he tells us that, you know,
my mom's you know, I see her again. She she died, she's in heaven, and yeah, it breaks it to us that she's dead and it's just us. And I remember thinking that I was gonna be strong for some reason. I felt like I need, I need to be strong for this. And I tell my dad that I'm not going to cry, So don't worry, I'm not gonna cry. I'm strong, gonna be strong. He goes, no, you know you need to cry. You know, men cry, He says,
you know, And then you went their little list. George Washington cried, Moses cried, Abram Lincoln cried like, wella shit, all right. I said, yeah, you know, King David cry, you can cry. And so after he lays down this list a bunch of cry babies, I feel like I'll cry.
So I cry and then it comes. You know, it's heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy, and then Paul's crying, my Dad's crying, And it was actually one of the best moments of my life in that the feeling you get when my dad leaned forward and pulled us into him and it was just us and we're all crying, and we just become this one spasm of anguish and pain and and there's this unity
of our grief around the same thing. And it's one of the most beautiful moments I've ever had my dad, because around this morbidity, the death of my mother is also one of the most erotic feelings that you have. But I erotic, I don't mean sexual erotic. I just mean feeling like just all this emotion and all this body chemical stuff going on. You're crying and you feel near to this people. You're literally hugging and touching and crying and shedding tears and kissing each other. It's a
moment of unity. It was like a for brief moment, all the pain that we've been struggling with is she's gone. There's relief in that moment, and we had just cried our eyes and our heart out and it's huh and he gives us to come and he says here, and we're all like he's giving It is like breaking breads. It fucking it's our thing. Right, So now we got a physical thing that we can all physically do together for a little ritual here, and he says, we're gonna
be fine. We're gonna do this. We got this, we got.
We'll be right back. Part three, Mama's gone. Do you remember the first time your dad hit you?
No? I man, I just feel like it was always hitting me. I just it was Wow. It's like asking a fish to just the properties of water, right. I don't know where he knows that. It's like I was always I was always getting hat there was a moment. For example, my mother had to have been ill at this time, and I had to memorize my multiplication tables. And my dad would do this thing where he wanted us to be the smartest kids in the class because we were scholarship kids and we were the brown kids.
He wanted us to be better and smarter than the other kids. So sometimes he would make us do things that we weren't yet learning. So like, for example, multiplication tables, I hadn't got there yet, but he wanted me to know them, and I had to memorize all one hundred and forty four you know, one timeands one, all the way to twelve times twelve one forty four, and he wanted to learn me to learn like in a day
or whatever. He comes home and uh and test me, and he tells me for everyone I miss, I'm gonna get two spankings. It's like he wanted perfection because he felt if I didn't get it right then that man I was lazy. That man I was being on discipline, which means I was also being refractory. I was just, you know, rebellious kid for not learning. I missed five you know, the five year always going to miss nine times? He a times. There's like there's someone always get me right.
I just kind of figure them out. And then he's going to hit me ten times with the belt, and my mom, you know it cries out, no, I don't hit it right. You know, he didn't do bad man. It's one hundred and forty four equations, and he does this crazy thing. Man never forget. He puts the belt in her hand and says, you hit him then, and
he bullies her in and hitting me. She's crying while she's hitting me, torturing her, sadistic and she hits me so feebly because she doesn't want to hurt me that he says, you didn't make him cry, and I was a fool not to cry out because it didn't hurt. He needed to hear me cry and the elaborate pain, and I wasn't clear he wasn't doing that with my mom saying so like, yeah, my dad would get demented.
It was about proving who's the boss and all this other kind of sadistic bullshit in there, and he would throw he would throw all that in the mix. And then yeah, stuff like that happened now. We were little, so it wasn't like he was he didn't have to do things he would later have to do, you know, kick us and use weapons on us. But when we were little, that little, he just would whack us with about you.
Know, is there the first time you remember like crossing a line like this was different. What happened just now is different than just regular stuff.
Yeah. When I when I got suspended for a week, that beating was so bad I couldn't go to school even after the period of time was up for me to go back because he found out late in the week that about it. So I was supposed to go back like the day, next day or two days later. I couldn't go back for three or four days because the welts were so bad. I mean, Brenda would not let me go to school.
Brenda, your stepmom.
She felt that they would they would send me, and that would get him in trouble. You know, I had crossed the line with him, had deceived him for almost an entire week that they were going to work. I mean, the deception had been so so bad. I think he really wanted to stop me in my tracks. But I was so far gone already. You know, that was a vicious beauting. You know, once I came home and he was I had been walking home from school and I
got in a fight with this one guy. We got an argument with this one guy, and he and his boys. They're like, hey, man, you got fight him. We gotta find her. I'll fight you. You know, that's Mexican honor, me against you. Let's do it. Let's sling our dogs. And so we got to find the right place so to do it, so nobody, you know, nobody will jump in. I say, all right, so dopey me. They're like, hey, but you got a nice sweater on, man, take it off. And it was a nice sweater. My stepmother Brenda used
to get us some great sweaters. It's kind of a little argu out thing across the front, kick ass sweater. And I'm like, you know what these are gentlemen, man, they don't want to ruin my sweat. I get it. That's actually cool.
It's very courtly.
I felt like. So I go to pull my sweater and then I'll throw them jump the shit out of me. They baby, and I like, I'm just fucked. I've got my sweater. I can't fuck up, and I can't throw any bunches they're hold either, started dragging me around, just kicking bunch. I just fall to the ground and get the ship beat out of me, and uh break my glasses right in the middle, right, crack it right in the middle. So I go walk home. I want to beat up. Oh my my sweaters over to just throw
up right and out of my glass are broken. So I walk in and my dad's staying the Bible, getting ready to you know, teach and stuff like that. And he said, what happened is I got jumped and I show my glass. He's so mad. He walks over, slaps me, says, uh, you know you gotta get it. You gotta go fight these guys. We gotta find him and you're gonna fight on one by one and essentially like you're too much of a sishy. You got to recover your manhood. This is bullshit. So he puts me in the calm, like
what the fucks Kennedy's do to that? They just tax my ass man, and they did it easy. But I have to do it man. I mean, dad's teaching me a very valuable lesson that will haunt his ass later. Just if you get sized up as being weak, you better be willing to go overboard and actually make a statement later. You cannot stay weak. That idea of me being a weak kid. He's not going to tolerate that shit. I gotta learn payback. We start driving around. He tell me,
see some kids. I'm trying to slink in my seat front seat. I can't and he says, hey, is that them there. I put my glasses together and hold them up to my face like no, and he's like he's mad. He's mad at me. I'm just I'm a walking badge of weakness to him. To him, it's like you you shame.
The Joeloya name he's not mad at the kids who beat you. He's mad at me.
Yeah, I right there next to him is all the evidence that he's a fucked up father because he's creating such a sissy boy, and he's not gonna have that. He's at least going to be able to say to the people, my son went back and tried to clean it up. And even if I get beat, at least I try to clean it up.
So you're and your dad, did you ever find the guys?
So we do fighting find them walking out of a liquor star? Is that them? And I put my glass together? No, And you know, if I gets whacked across the face and he drives home pissed, pissed, he's just so mad that if someone's a sissy And my dad had been this little gang kid who had converted to God, but he didn't know how to control his temper.
Did your dad ever apologize? Did ever say he was sorry? Said he sorry all the time, all the time.
And he would go into shame with spirals and he would cry, and oh, so we were like, we're sorry, we accepted, poety, we love you, dad, And it was all that, And I think that that's eventually what led me to like shut me down as disillusionment because you have all this hope, You're like, I'll never do it again. God, but we would all get our knees and pray, and God hear the woms of that. It's like, hmm, fucking worthless, Joe.
I mean all this just sounds awful. I mean, you're a kid. How did he not just like fold?
Yeah, this is what people don't understand. When you go inward like that, you go into darkness, gets real dark down there. That's where you get your most power. So as my dad was beating me and I was taking each blow, there's a different power. There's a different energy in the shadows that builds up inside of you, the animosity, the negativity, that stuff. It crackles differently, It changes the molecules differently. Yeah, rearranges you and gives you power. And
I was getting stronger. I was not getting weaker. I was getting demented with a very powerful rage. And that's what eventually would come out.
You are listening to The Burden season four, Get the Money and Run. The Burden is produced by Orbit Media. Get the Money and Run is produced by Western Sound and a cast Studio. Next up, stay tuned for episode two, Who's Your Daddy?
Thanks for listening. Remember to hear all episodes all at once and ad free. Subscribe to True Crime Clubhouse on Apple Podcasts. It's worth it. You'll find other gripping true crime series there also ad free. If you want to hear Ben talk about this episode, check out the teaser It's in the Burden feed. Joe Loyer has agreed to answer our questions, so please send yours to info at Orbitmedia dot fm, or leave them in the comments on Spotify or Apple. Thank you,