Hi, Steve Fishman here with a bonus episode. So usually we drop bonus episodes at the end of a show. Today it's a little different. Today's bonus episode is to introduce our next series, which is called Get the Money and Run. It's the fourth season in our Burden Feed and it's a fantastic story. It's about one of the most daring bank robbers of his era. This bank robber did it all disguises, body doubles, leaping counters, card chases, captain mass games with the FBI. For me, it's a
kind of perfect show. It's entertaining, its illuminating and also incredibly moving. It drops on the Burden Feed April twenty ninth, and as always for subscribers, it's available early. It drops April twenty second. Subscribers get all episodes all at once and ad free to subscribe. Go to True Crime Clubhouse on Apple Podcasts. To introduce the show, we're going to talk with its creator, Ben Adair. Ben is one of
the pod versus most accomplished producers. You've probably listened to one of his shows, among them Lost Hills, Strange Land, Ripple and Pulse. The Untold Story and that's just a few of them. Ben's going to take us through some of the high points of the series, but I just wanted to start with one of my favorite lines from the podcast, and I guess one of the scariest. It's from our bank robber slash star. Ben had just asked him what got him started in the bank robbing business?
This was the thing that put me on the path trying to murder my father.
Are we rolling? We're going there we go?
So how do you end up getting to Joe? Yeah?
So I was doing a podcast and this was before podcasting was even really a thing, but I was doing a podcast called first Time, Last Time, where I was interviewing various people about the first times they do different things and the last time they do that same thing. And so I was just thinking to myself, one of the hardest things to do for the first time must be rob a bank, Right, how do you psyche yourself up? How do you do how do you do that for
the first time? So I started poking around, you know, doing my research, and at the time that I wanted to do this interview, there were essentially like three people who were out about being bank robbers. One of them was in Oklahoma, and he was a comedian who made us stay end up routines about his life as a bank robber with lots of jokes that were not very funny.
The second guy was a guy in Texas, and I talked to that guy and I got the distinct feeling as I was talking to him that he wasn't quite done being a bank robber yet, and so the whole idea of doing it for the first time you're doing it for the last time didn't really work with him. And then I found Joe's memoir and so I just wrote him on Facebook and I was like, hey, I would love to interview you. We met app in Oakland and I interviewed him and the story was better than I could have hoped for.
You must have thought when you heard him talk and tell stories, you was that, oh my god, this guy is amazing. What a gift.
Yeah.
Absolutely, I mean as a storyteller myself, Like you know, we see each other and it's like, hey, I recognize. I recognize how unique you are for sure. And I had that from the moment I met Joe. Yeah, he's an extremely unique guy.
Joe is definitely a uniquely talented storyteller, the kind who can take us inside inside a bank robbery and inside his mind, and that mind ranges far and wide. In this podcast, I will say that my experience of it is, Yeah, there's overwhelming violence, sadness, tragedy. There's also a lot of hilarity. There's a lot of fun in this podcast. Here's one example. In this one, Joe is out on bail for one
set of robberies. He's not going to stop robbing, though, but he wants to be careful, so he decides to recruit someone to rob banks for him.
I go to this guy and say, hey, listen, I'll teach you how to do this and we'll split the money. He says, really, I said yeah, but you have to do it exactly as I say. He's like sure, because he's, like I said, he had seen the loads of cash I had, so to him, he's thinking thirty forty fifty thousand dollars he could be his. So I take him to this mall where they have a bank in the mall my park. He goes inside. Whatever lame thing he's
putting out, people are picking it up. Apparently he was good enough to at least get some money from them, because as soon as he hits that door, he's still holding the money in his hands, and he's holding it to his chest. And when he pushes that door open, an eddie of air catches that money. The money goes flying everywhere, whirling in the air, and there's him trying to catch it out of mid air, and I look at him, I'm thinking, what a fucking idiot.
I think Joe has made a I mean, Joe has made a whole life of laughing at himself, you know. And it comes from the fact that he did so many terrible things over the course of his life that he just can't take himself seriously anymore, because to do so would almost be tragic.
So let's go back to Ben's initial interest. How does a person like Joe Layer, a person who had an honest job at a restaurant, start robbing banks.
He describes really well sort of what went into it for him, and how he would have to psych himself up by remembering all these traumas that occurred over the course of his life, at the hands of his dad, at the hands of people who went to school with, at the hands of other criminals. And it was those traumas that he would pull out, he says, like religious medallions and just rub them as he's walking to these banks.
And he raged would come inside of him. And that's how he had the presence to really get people to do what he wanted to get them to hand over money. I mean, it's all fun and games and the retelling. And Joe is a he's a great storyteller. I mean, that's just his career now, he's a storyteller.
This is Joe's first bank robbery.
And as I walk up there, I slide the note, or she puts it. I put it down on the table and slided to her. She looks down at it, and she reads it and reads it and reads, 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 moved 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 little bullshit tug of war. Now I'm just fucking pissed. So I leaned 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.
One of the things that's really interesting for me about this is the interiority of this bank robber, the person of this bank Robert, his kind of internal journey.
I mean, look, I've made a lot of true crime podcasts in my career from a lot of different angles, and to me, I'm always most interested in sort of the why of the crimes, even more so than the who or the you know, who's the victim, who's the perpetrator, It's the why do these things happen, and to me getting into Joe's story, you know, there are some good guys, there are some bad guys. Joe's definitely like a very
compelling anti hero. His dad is also a bad guy, and so the nature of Joe's relationship to the story, I think, changes flip flops in a few different ways. And one of the things as I was making it that I wanted to be very clear with the audience about was that there's a lot of ambiguity, you know, And so we structured it so that in some episodes, you're feeling really great about Joe, and you're feeling that he's a victim, and your feeling that he deserves all of your sympathy.
One of the points at which Joe deserves our sympathy is when he looks on as his father beats his younger brother. Joe is fifteen in this story.
It is the worst memory of my life, and I remember that night thinking I want to die. I just want to die one because I had always been this brave kid who protected my brother, and that day I could not do. And I was haunted by my brother's face of water coming out of his nose and his eyes a supplication, looking at me like just terrified, and I wanted to die. I wanted it was seriously like suicides. Take me, Jesus christ Man. I don't want to even
be here. I cannot live with my cowardice. I confronted cowardice that day. And here's the thing. I was smart. I was intense. I had this aggression, and I felt my heart was big and muscular, and even though I was getting beat down, I felt like I was made to be bigger than this.
And in other episodes, you really hear him as a perpetrator, as somebody who's victimizing, as somebody who is not anyone that you would ever want to spend any time with. And so playing with that idea of is Joe a good guy? Is he a bad guy? Let's really get into the complicated reasons for how somebody becomes a bank robber, an evil person, how somebody becomes a monster.
A monster who can commit murder when you kill somebody, And for a moment I thought my dad was dead.
I killed him. That was a different power. When you do that, and you talk to me, you prison talk to people who kill people. And I had friends whould say, you know the the only thing stopping that man from being dead right now, and I say no one they would say, my decision. And to be a man who that's true to like, you know, the only thing that I'm like sitting here looking here and say, you have no clue, but the reason your life is because right now I choose to not kill you. That's a powerful
way to move in the world. For a moment, I could feel that, Oh man, I'm the kind of guy who now can just say you you're done. You I let you live longer you you're done.
You know that kind of thing.
What do you think he would have been like to meet back in his bank robbing days?
You know, I've thought about that a lot. It's it's an interesting question because Joe is not like thugged out Jolo from East Los Angeles. He was a nerdy kid. He ran track, He dressed in like golf clothes a lot. He played a lot of golf when he was robbing banks. So he's not the kind of guy who you would meet on the street and you know, be intimidated or not make eye contact with or go to the other side of the street. You would walk right by him.
I think he looked like a normal person, but he did have those two modes, right, He had his normal guy mode and then he had his his rage mode. And I think Joe when he was raging, when he was able to become Joe the bank robber, and I think Joe in prison very similarly. I think would be very, very scary to meet on the street.
Talking about that rage I found. I found that persona of Joe just captivating. Uh. In part it's the actual thing of it. In part it's the way he talked about it. It brought out in him a kind of poetry, spoken word poetry that I found irresistible.
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.
That's a wild image. It's like some kind of superhero, the Hulk, or somebody who's kind of shedding one persona one shell and suddenly becomes this using the word demented, give me your reaction to that, because trying to murder his father, unbelievably dramatic thing to say, dramatic thing to do. And my read of him is that it changes his life, oh at that moment one hundred percent.
And I think Joe even when he was doing it, but when he describes it, it's very Shakespearean in the storytelling, and I think even as he was doing it, he realized that this was the stuff of Shakespeare. But it's a pivotal moment in the story because it's the moment where Joe goes from being a victim to being a victimizer.
And we had numerous conversations as we were recording this podcast together, and I will say the one the one category of people that Joe has ultimate I don't know if respects the right word, but certainly strong feelings about are murderers he would encounter, murderers in prison, and murderers people who have taken another person's life are now capable of taking anyone's life. And so they have this ultimate power because everyone around them is still alive, because they're
allowing them to still be alive. And so when Joe for those hours that you know, after he was arrested, there were several hours where he thought that he was a murderer, and that changed everything for him. A switch had been flipped in his head so that he was no longer somebody who would take being a victim. Now
he was the bully. He was the victimizer. He was the one who was going to be able to go out, and he was the one who was going to be able to go out and express his will in any way that he wanted.
And he liked that.
It felt good, it felt powerful, Yeah, it felt like it felt like he was his life was on a different trajectory. There are lots of people who become victims and completely knuckle under and they just kind of collapse under the tragedies that are happening to them. Joe, I think, is a different kind of person. Joe is somebody who would have feelings about what was happening to them, and those feelings would propel him right, so he wouldn't feel
like he couldn't do anything. He would feel as though there was an anger building inside of him that would eventually be, for lack of a better word, be useful.
Yeah. Yeah, all right, So a couple more things to cover. Just a word about bank robberies. You having immersed yourself in this storyline and in Joe. It just strikes me that the nineteen eighties were a pretty good error to be a bank robber. You go in, you write a note on a deposit slip, and you walk out with five thousand dollars.
Really, maybe what you're cottoning to a little bit is in the eighties and nineties there was this like the technology hadn't quite caught up, but the amounts of cash that were going in and out of the banks had risen dramatically since previous eras, Like, you know, people didn't go in wanting five ten thousand dollars in cash up until probably the late eighties early nineties, right, and the
technology was still what it was. There wasn't a lot of high tech surveillance, There wasn't a lot of like GPS tracking all that sort of stuff. So yeah, I think there was kind of maybe a I don't know if it's a golden age, maybe a plastic age of bank robbing that was happening in the eighties and nineties.
You know. The thing one of the things that really like amazed me as I was talking with Joe, you know, he talks about how he was a petty criminal, and now he was going to become a bank robber, and that meant that all the other criminals, you know people are he was finally going to get some respect being a criminal.
Did you have a favorite bank robbery story that he told, because he tells a lot.
My favorite one, like the first one, is an amazing story where he actually goes and tries, you know, he works all day to get his nerve up to rob this bank.
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 rubbery, and I wrote a bank robber note. And then I'm like, ah, fuck it, I don't want to do this year. For some reason, this doesn't feel right. I start walking away, and as I walked away, there's like three cameras that me at the door, and I realized,
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. I just wrote 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'd like, nah
that I don't got a feel for this. I'd walk in, I'd see, you know, guard some nah. 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, Okay, I'm gonna do it.
I'm gonna do it.
And the next thing, we'd see me drinking coffee at McDonald's. You see me, Okay, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna be all fucking nervy in there. The next scene, I'm.
Biting the whopper at.
Work, Like it would just be okay, let's do it, let's do.
It, Taco Bella do it, let's do it. It was like it was fucking hilarious.
And he finally does it, and he doesn't even get that much money. He thinks there's a lot of money at the time, but you know, in the scheme of things, it's not all that much money. I love that story.
I also love the disguise story where he puts on I don't know how many sweatshirts, it's really burly, and the discards discards the costume. He seems kind of so slick and quick witted, and it has all those elements of you know, high jinks and caper and you find yourself just rooting for the bad guy.
Well, and that one too, that does feel that one does feel a little bit like a relic of an earlier time, the idea that you could just like wear a disguise and get away with it, and then it works in a weird way. It's just like, yeah, it's amazing.
The one of the things that I noticed, and I think it's true, is that as we kind of go along with Joe and he develops into bank robbery kind of in front of our eyes or ears, is there's a change in him and his personality. He knows that Cortis the FBI agent, is closing in on him. He's actually already been arrested, he's out on bail, and he goes on us a robbing spree. So what I believe is that there was something kind of taking over Joe.
He was getting manic, he was getting obsessed, he was kind of getting out of control and maybe even self destructive in that way.
I think he had become so twisted by his actions at that point that he had become untethered from everyone else around him, and even more untethered from a morality that kind of had governed his regular life, even while he would have this double life as a bank robber. And so when he gets or when he has arrested for robbing banks, his aunt puts her house up to get him out of jail, and he says very clearly that he was going to burn her and she was going to lose her home, and he didn't care.
I figure out, you know what, I'm not going to go to prison, and this is where me. I was already in an asshole. I was just really bad. I was a bad boyfriend, I was a bad person in society. It was just a thief. It was kind of shit. And I decided, like up my shit game by putting my aunt's house in jeopardy because my aunt putor house up for me to go on bayl my aunt and she loved me and I was willing to risk it all.
I didn't care, so he did it. It was quite a spree, you know. He puts it as thirty or thirty plus banks. He doesn't even remember how many banks, but he puts it at thirty plus over I want to say, eleven or fifteen months. Something like that. Wouldn't surprise me if it was, you know, a quarter million dollars.
There was a lot. Joe's father huge figure in his life, as is his brother. But Joe's father, it's not giving too much away to say that his father is a violent man, and for me, in this story, that forms and deforms Joe.
I mean, Joe would not have been who he was without losing his mother and then relying on his father. I think after Joe's mom died, his dad became unhinged. It gets to the point where a confrontation is just absolutely inevitable. Was somebody was going to get very badly
hurt or killed, I have no doubt about that. And the reason that it went down the way that it did has only to do with the fact that I think, like his dad, Joe is very strong willed and is a survivor, and so when faced with what he thought was a life threatening circumstance. He was not going to knuckle under. He was going to fight back. And what that what that ultimately revealed to Joe was a new sense of power, a new sense of what he was
capable of. Joe changed irrevocably, and his life was sent on an entirely new path.
I stand up and I look at him, and he's like, oh shit, and then he like puts the weight down, and you know, I'm holding a steak knife, but I'm only holding and then he like starts walking to me slowly, so he put it down, put it out, or give me the knife, give me a knife. I'm like, fuck that, I'm not going to just do the knife. I know I have wanted this move right here. I run him, charging him, put the armor, go to attack.
Him, and I believe I'm trying to kill him and he's gonna die, and I'm fucking a beast in this moment.
M Yeah, tell me about Paul. Paul is Joe's younger brother by about eighteen months. They're very close. Well, I'll let you tell about the relationship, but the other thing to tell about it is how incredibly candid Paul is and to me how heartbreaking he is in his candor.
I mean, the dynamic between Paul and Joe, as they both tell it when they were growing up, is that Joe protected Paul. Paul was weaker. Paul was more of a victim, and Paul never stood up to whatever was going to happen to him.
Here's a moment where Paul is a victim. It plays out brutally for Paul, and it also reveals something about Joe.
And he punched my brother in the rib in the back of the ribs, grabs my brother, but pounces on him, grabs by the back of the herd, starts dunking his head in the soapy dishwater.
He stuck my head under the hot water, the scalding water, and Joe was sitting there rinsing the dishes, and he was just a Paul at what it was a kreem.
And I'm paralyzed with fear, holding the plate, looking at him, scared to death, right.
Because my dad started putting my face into the water. And what I did was just automatically turned my head. And when I turned my head, I think I turned my head to Joe, so our eyes met and for a split second there, Joe could see the fear, and it was one of those just one of those really poignant times in my life where I just had eye contact with Joe and Joe knew that I was afraid and Joe couldn't protect me.
What's amazing to me about Joe's journey is how at the end it is a story of hope. And I think he's an amazing protagonist in his own story because he has been able to have a kind of philosophical distance from what's happened to him and a very unique ability to look at his life and change it. You know, there are multiple times in this story where he changes the trajectory of his life, he changes the path that he's on, and that is something that is extremely unique.
I have not met many, many people at all who have the kind of will to do that. One of the things that's great about this story, and that I'm grateful for you, Steve, for giving the platform for it. Get the Money and Run is a much tighter, much more compact, much more clear distillation of Joe's story, so that it goes from hopelessness to hope a lot more quickly. So I think listeners will have a much more enjoyable time listening to it. If it's if it does get
it's too sad, just hold on a few minutes. It'll get really fun.
All right then, thanks so much.
Yeah, thank you Steve.
Now hopefully I have recorded this on my hand.
Yeah, it's still running, all right,