Speaker 1: Joe Loya has agreed to answer our questions, so please
Speaker 1: send yours to info at Orbitmedia dot fm or leave
Speaker 1: them in the comments on Spotify or Apple.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Hire there Steve Fishman from Orbit Media. And this is
Speaker 1: Get the Money and Run. A warning, today's episode gets dark.
Speaker 1: If Joe has made crimes seem like a lot of fun,
Speaker 1: well that's about to change over to Ben.
Speaker 3: You are listening to The Burden season four, Get the
Speaker 3: Money and Run. I'm Benadair and this is episode six,
Speaker 3: Life on the Inside.
Speaker 4: Okay, Joe, I have a question. We had talked about
Speaker 4: how you took your friend to go rob for you.
Speaker 4: Your friend who it turns out, looks a lot like you,
Speaker 4: and he got iddas you. But it turns out when
Speaker 4: they went to check the cameras, he was four inches shorter,
Speaker 4: and that made the FBI think that you had this
Speaker 4: double out there, and I assume it through the eyewitness
Speaker 4: identification under suspicion.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it was actually when I called courters
Speaker 2: because I I had explained to my dad and courtus
Speaker 2: I had not been in that bank. I swore in
Speaker 2: my mother's grave I had not been in that bank.
Speaker 2: So when courtis went to especially in quarters that is,
Speaker 2: went to go look at the film. I called him
Speaker 2: and he says, okay, Joe, I'm going to tell you
Speaker 2: something right now, and you need to pay attention. These
Speaker 2: women were robbed and within a couple hours they both
Speaker 2: falsely identified you and they had just been robbed. The
Speaker 2: women we've been going to you robbed thirteen months ago,
Speaker 2: ten months ago, nine months ago, eight months ago. That
Speaker 2: makes all of those suspect too, because of these two
Speaker 2: women who had just been robbed by you could be
Speaker 2: so wrong right now, all of those are suspect. He's
Speaker 2: basically saying, this is your argument with your lawyer. You
Speaker 2: need to tell him you got to double.
Speaker 4: So suddenly you're not going to jail for sixteen or
Speaker 4: even thirty banks Banks.
Speaker 2: I'm going for three for three. So they say, listen,
Speaker 2: we got you in these three. That's you in the photo,
Speaker 2: and not only that, you're the right height in this one.
Speaker 2: These three we got you on. We believe we could
Speaker 2: take it to trial and we win. We want to
Speaker 2: risk trial or do you want to just plead out?
Speaker 2: And I was like, where do I sign? Going down?
Speaker 2: For what I was looking at is possibly thirty years.
Speaker 2: When they were talking about it in the beginning to
Speaker 2: eight years, I'm like, hell, yeah, let's do this right now,
Speaker 2: easy choice.
Speaker 5: Easy call, Part one falling in.
Speaker 2: And so I'm in a holding cell and then I
Speaker 2: hear a helicopter outside and my body freeze. What the fuck?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: And then I realized, Oh, I'm already cott. I'm already cott.
Speaker 2: I don't have to wait. And then one thing I
Speaker 2: think you remember was like, Oh, thank fucking God, for
Speaker 2: the next age two years, I don't have to worry
Speaker 2: about a helicopter. Like my body was like I could
Speaker 2: let go of fear of a helicopter. And I also
Speaker 2: chuckled because in that moment, I realized, Oh, that's where
Speaker 2: that phrase you were rescued, you weren't arrested comes from,
Speaker 2: because I was like, I felt like I was more
Speaker 2: rescued in that moment from the fear and anxiety of
Speaker 2: being a fugitive, and like, oh, I I could sell.
Speaker 3: Joe.
Speaker 4: Let me ask you, it sounds like you're getting in
Speaker 4: pretty deep. Did you really know, like really understand what
Speaker 4: you were getting into.
Speaker 2: No, federal prison. I didn't know what I was getting into.
Speaker 2: I wasn't prepared for it in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2: I wasn't prepared for the kind of crimes I could
Speaker 2: get away with behind bars there and you basic things
Speaker 2: like you know, you can make weapons, you can get
Speaker 2: drugs smuggled in in the FEDS. Everything was a hustle everything.
Speaker 2: It was an economy man. I saw things I didn't
Speaker 2: expect to see. I mean stuff that you would see
Speaker 2: on TV and things like that's impossible. Like I saw
Speaker 2: a guy get lit on fire in his cell. I
Speaker 2: could see it from my window. It is late at night,
Speaker 2: and he just went up. His hair went up and
Speaker 2: he was screaming in his cell. And then the cell
Speaker 2: next to him it went up. But the guy wasn't
Speaker 2: on fire. It was just parts of his bed were
Speaker 2: on fire. And then the third sound next, some guy
Speaker 2: had been in there screwtin acidtne in the sounds the
Speaker 2: night when they were sleeping, and the guy was walking
Speaker 2: down the tier and he just lit them on fire.
Speaker 2: I remember watching that and thinking, shit, that could happen
Speaker 2: here too, Like I know staff, he's gonna have it.
Speaker 2: I know you get choked out. I know somebody could
Speaker 2: come and strangle you with a with a with a sheet,
Speaker 2: turn it into a rope. I know, a bunch of
Speaker 2: things should happen here in there, and I'm finding watching
Speaker 2: them like shit, they could like to on fire too, goddamn.
Speaker 2: But it was and it was dark and it was
Speaker 2: beautiful night out. It was clear, and that sound just
Speaker 2: lit up. Prisons are chaos. It just really is total chaos.
Speaker 2: I mean, guys would squirt ship on guards when they
Speaker 2: would come to feed them if they are mad at them.
Speaker 2: They got their shampoo bottle and they put some of
Speaker 2: their ship in there, stirred it up and just and
Speaker 2: there would be this long stream of ship chasing a
Speaker 2: guard off the tier. Like it was. It was madness.
Speaker 2: It was crazy at that level. Guys just in care.
Speaker 2: I didn't like a guy, he didn't like me. We
Speaker 2: were talking ship to each other, and so I was
Speaker 2: under impression when we were like, okay, let's meet out
Speaker 2: in the reckyard. So I had a sawmide, He had
Speaker 2: a saw meade. And what they would do is the
Speaker 2: guards would come in. They would open all this the
Speaker 2: food trap doors and all the sale. All the guys
Speaker 2: who were going to come out to wreck. He and
Speaker 2: I were going to go down there and then we
Speaker 2: were going to have it out well. They open up
Speaker 2: the food traps and all the doors. The guys who
Speaker 2: are going to go out to wreck. You stand there
Speaker 2: with your hands behind your back. A guard comes and
Speaker 2: he handcuffs you through this little slot. He handcuffs you.
Speaker 2: He opens your door, he opens twelve. The door opens,
Speaker 2: you step out, and you go wait towards the front
Speaker 2: of the tier, and there's guards moving out there doing this,
Speaker 2: and then they close the tier and they go to
Speaker 2: the next south. They know nobody's walking you over there.
Speaker 2: So there's for a minute, there's a guys just moving
Speaker 2: around the south. We're all handcuffed behind our back. And
Speaker 2: so I saw him get out of his cell, walk
Speaker 2: over to another cell with his hands behind his back,
Speaker 2: and that door was open, and I saw a guy
Speaker 2: slide a knife into his back with his hand, so
Speaker 2: I knew he was gonna stab me. Wow. The difference
Speaker 2: between me and him is I did the same move
Speaker 2: to a friend of mine, But a friend of mine
Speaker 2: didn't just put a knife in my hand. He unhandcuffed me.
Speaker 2: So this guy's walking over all cool, hiding the knife under,
Speaker 2: you know, in his clothing. As he's walking back, hands
Speaker 2: behind his back and he's thinking we're gonna get unhandcuffed,
Speaker 2: and then he's gonna make a move on me. I
Speaker 2: don't wait for that. I now have a weapon. I
Speaker 2: have no handcuffs on me, and so I go over
Speaker 2: them where he's standing. I think he's all come on.
Speaker 2: Walking up to him, I kick him in the balls.
Speaker 2: He bends over and boom boop. I just gab him
Speaker 2: real quick. I get taken the solitary confinement. I don't
Speaker 2: just get taken a solitary confinement. I get taken to
Speaker 2: the basement of solitary confinement. Everyone down there was hardcore.
Speaker 2: It was guys had killed other men in the prison.
Speaker 2: There's fourteen cels. That was terrible. That was terrible.
Speaker 3: We'll be right back part two.
Speaker 2: The whole. Because you're in solitary and because you're by
Speaker 2: yourself and you're so fucking erotic, you start breaking on
Speaker 2: the conversation. Wait, what do you mean by that? Well,
Speaker 2: that motherfucker thinks I'm a punk. Oh, I got some differens.
Speaker 2: Ask I'll fuck that. Next time I get loose, I'll
Speaker 2: go it like. You can just be, you can let
Speaker 2: your mind go crazy and you can concoct all sorts
Speaker 2: of plots and intrigues against you, and you can ascribe
Speaker 2: all certain manner of disrespect coming from that man's heart
Speaker 2: towards you, and plot the fucking end of his days.
Speaker 2: That's the group of men I was in. There was
Speaker 2: killers there. There was just so much. My brain took
Speaker 2: in all that crazy and violence and menace, and now
Speaker 2: I couldn't get it anyone. Like, if you've ever gone
Speaker 2: out of your handcuffs, they don't ever give me a
Speaker 2: chance to get out of your handcuffs again. They're not
Speaker 2: only a handcuff you. They put a big black box
Speaker 2: around this handcuff and they locked that underneath. And I
Speaker 2: was just like, it's terrible. You can't move, you can
Speaker 2: barely barely move. See. I was starting to get all
Speaker 2: this rage just building up in me like it usually did,
Speaker 2: but I would always be able to find a victim.
Speaker 2: And now I'm like it just cannibalized me and went inward.
Speaker 2: You know. I just was hating myself, hating life, and
Speaker 2: I just had And then I was this is the
Speaker 2: most tense place I've ever been. That tier was the
Speaker 2: most tense place I've ever been. And everybody was imaginations
Speaker 2: were completely fucked I mean everyone was fucked it. Just
Speaker 2: I had a clear mind of like, I fucking hate it,
Speaker 2: I hate life, I hate myself, fuck everything, you know,
Speaker 2: like and it just went inward. So first thing that
Speaker 2: started happening was, you know, writing. I was up. I
Speaker 2: couldn't sleep right, chatty as fuck with myself, like writing
Speaker 2: all the time, obsessively between words and man, what's going on?
Speaker 2: Like almost like if you saw me in there, you
Speaker 2: would hear me like not talking to myself. But there
Speaker 2: was a voice in my head. There was a racing mind,
Speaker 2: racing right, I'd be that guy if I was outside.
Speaker 2: I had a bunch of notebooks and I explaining the
Speaker 2: whole universe kind of thing. And then I started hearing
Speaker 2: the voices in my head. First wasn't voices. First was
Speaker 2: like I felt like there's somebody's going wrong with my hearing.
Speaker 2: Like it was at a party and I was in
Speaker 2: the bathroom and I could hear outside the door, oh,
Speaker 2: like of a party going on, right, no noise, no voice, nothing.
Speaker 2: And then one day I heard Joe And I'm lying
Speaker 2: down in bed and I get up and I go
Speaker 2: look out there, and I'm like, what the fuck was that?
Speaker 2: Nothing nobody like, hey, Joe, man, you got a book,
Speaker 2: And nobody called. A couple of days there Joe, like
Speaker 2: a voice was coming above the den. Was the den
Speaker 2: always there? I was always there. I was always there,
Speaker 2: stayed there. I was like, oh, one day I was
Speaker 2: at my desk and I hear Joe and I turned around. Joe.
Speaker 2: The first time, I thought maybe a homeboy was fucking
Speaker 2: with me or something. I didn't have a home book.
Speaker 2: I mean, I thought maybe someone was sucking me. And
Speaker 2: then so I used to play concentration games where I
Speaker 2: would look at one spot on the wall and if
Speaker 2: you look at one spot on the wall on you know, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's hard on your eyes. I just want to move.
Speaker 2: And it was challenging five minutes the first time. I
Speaker 2: eventually got up to an hour and like psychedelic shit
Speaker 2: starts happening around that one spot. And eventually, because the
Speaker 2: world is moving and your eyes are moving, nothing is
Speaker 2: steal and your eyes moved, and so that spot will
Speaker 2: start moving. And so it was like, oh shit, it's
Speaker 2: moving and I'm watching it move. And then it became
Speaker 2: a horse galloping, and then it became I was like,
Speaker 2: oh fuck, something's happening. It's kind of cool. But what
Speaker 2: ended up happening? One day I'm looking at that spot
Speaker 2: and then all of a sudden, it was a face
Speaker 2: and it morphed into another face. It's like, oh fuck,
Speaker 2: that's crazy. It wasn't where I was looking at, ended
Speaker 2: up migrating over here to where I looked over here.
Speaker 2: It was in my vision. Now to go my vision.
Speaker 2: It's like, wow, that's crazy. So next day I do
Speaker 2: it again, except this time when I pull away, it's
Speaker 2: showing it again. I close my eyes and it's in
Speaker 2: It's in the darkness in my head, in my eyes.
Speaker 2: I was like, oh fuck, the dean is getting louder.
Speaker 2: And now it kind of it feels like there's voices
Speaker 2: but you can't make them out. But now instead of
Speaker 2: like it's like I get more animated. Right John, Well,
Speaker 2: one day I hear something. I turn around and there's
Speaker 2: a little bald boy standing in the corner of my
Speaker 2: cell and I'm totally shocked and I'm totally scared. I
Speaker 2: feel like I'm going mad. I'm going mad. I'm going mad.
Speaker 2: I'm going mad.
Speaker 3: We'll be right back Part three. Dig your way out.
Speaker 4: So Joe, you see this bald boy in your cell
Speaker 4: and you feel like you're going mad. What happens next?
Speaker 2: Memories started coming from that period of time with my
Speaker 2: mother still alive, and all it just stories of my
Speaker 2: innocence came.
Speaker 4: How did you like, how did the memory of your
Speaker 4: mom and the memory of your dad kind of play
Speaker 4: in that story being created?
Speaker 2: Well, the thing was that all of a sudden, my
Speaker 2: mother's alive again in my memory. Right as I've I've
Speaker 2: been thinking of my mother's dead. I never really thought
Speaker 2: that much about her was life, And in this memory
Speaker 2: my mother was still healthy. So I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: this is real innocence. My mother's healthy. And then I
Speaker 2: started having memories and my mother healthy at that time
Speaker 2: when I was seven on de Land Street, Man, I
Speaker 2: remembered all sorts of stuff. What it was mostly about
Speaker 2: was that we were happy in those days. That was
Speaker 2: a happy time. My mom and dad. I remember they
Speaker 2: laughed because on that street I used to go down
Speaker 2: the block. There was a guy who did repairs on
Speaker 2: bikes and I would go there to get free air
Speaker 2: on my tires and stuff. And then my mom and
Speaker 2: dad went there once and the guy was like, hey,
Speaker 2: you know your son been coming here, I've been fixing
Speaker 2: his bike and doing these things. So you guys owe
Speaker 2: me a little bit of money. And my dad came
Speaker 2: home and he wasn't mad, and neither was my mom. Like, hey,
Speaker 2: you can't just got that guy, I said, But he
Speaker 2: gave me free air that yeah, he said, yeah, but
Speaker 2: all that other stuff stuff free. You can't just do that.
Speaker 2: But they weren't mad. They weren't mad. I was just
Speaker 2: a little seven year old boy, and I loved and
Speaker 2: that guy loved me down there, and everyone in the
Speaker 2: neighborhood knew me like it was like that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: So I was remembering a pristine period of time in
Speaker 2: which I was loved and nurtured and safe and everyone
Speaker 2: was healthy and I was innocent. And there I am
Speaker 2: contrasting where I am not fucking going mad and solitary
Speaker 2: confinement all those years later, with all the terrible things
Speaker 2: I'd done, all my conscience. I earned that place in
Speaker 2: that dungeon, but that, you know, all the terrible things
Speaker 2: were going on, all the things i'd become cheering on,
Speaker 2: the shit on the guards and the burning, the fires
Speaker 2: and whatever, the stabbings and other man like, all that
Speaker 2: stuff that I was, and now there's a time for
Speaker 2: me to remember how was a sweet kid. I was like, wait,
Speaker 2: what the fuck? Like this memory came up. It was
Speaker 2: like the dirtiest fucking ground in the dirtiest fucking neighborhood
Speaker 2: in the United States, and there's this beautiful little flower
Speaker 2: coming out of the concrete. That's what it felt like. Man,
Speaker 2: I'm like, what the fuck, there's some beauty under here somewhere,
Speaker 2: like to be reintroduced to myself in that story. And
Speaker 2: then it started happening, and I started saying, wait, this
Speaker 2: wasn't this wasn't determined that I would be this guy.
Speaker 2: There's all this other evidence. I'm a kind of a
Speaker 2: sweet guy, a nice guy. I could have been something else.
Speaker 2: And so I just started writing stories from my past.
Speaker 2: That's it felt good and terrible. I feel shitty to
Speaker 2: write out things that happened to me. We had all
Speaker 2: these talks growing up. Well, God break me, God break
Speaker 2: guess what. I fucking just got humbled fucking all day
Speaker 2: long with that thing. It was. It was humbling, Jody.
Speaker 4: You feel like if you hadn't been in solitary, that
Speaker 4: any of this would have happened.
Speaker 2: In the Bible, the book that I knew, the piece
Speaker 2: of literature I knew the most of the stories. I knew.
Speaker 2: Most about Found Redemption was that all the men who
Speaker 2: did something great all went to the desert, and they
Speaker 2: all had to grapple with the hell of themselves. Jesus
Speaker 2: forty days and forty nights, Moses in the desert, Saint Paul,
Speaker 2: he becomes a Christian. He spends nine years studying the
Speaker 2: scriptures before he becomes the greatest missionary ever. David wrote
Speaker 2: the Psalms and the Caves. You know what he was
Speaker 2: hiding from Saul. You saw. So now what I'm doing
Speaker 2: is I'm in solitary confinement. And after this happens, it
Speaker 2: fits right into my thinking that oh this is my
Speaker 2: trial alone. I have to confront myself. Everyone had to
Speaker 2: deal with their solitude. Everyone you want to make great
Speaker 2: change in your life, and all the great changes of
Speaker 2: the men that I had studied growing up, it happened
Speaker 2: in solitude. Terrible solitude, anguish want to kill themselves, solitude.
Speaker 2: And now I was in it, and I was like, well,
Speaker 2: maybe this is actually what I'm supposed to do. This
Speaker 2: is it? And when I was a boy and they
Speaker 2: said plan we have a plan for you. God has
Speaker 2: a plan for you. Maybe this is it. To get
Speaker 2: right here like everyone else did, oh the great men
Speaker 2: that I had admired and the mystics, this is it.
Speaker 2: I'm in my solitude. I gotta better figure out how
Speaker 2: to do something with a solitude. I better figure out
Speaker 2: how to let a higher harmony assert itself in here
Speaker 2: than the madness. And that's what I work to try
Speaker 2: and do, to try and earn that mantle. Solitary, worst
Speaker 2: experience of my life. Guess what, paradoxically, because I believe
Speaker 2: in paradox one of the best experiences of my life,
Speaker 2: because it created the occasion for me to observe something
Speaker 2: about myself, to experience something so deeply, this humility, that
Speaker 2: it created this propulsion another way in a very dramatic fashion. Right.
Speaker 2: So I'm broken, I'm fractured. I'm not as strong anymore.
Speaker 2: Now I gotta be careful because if I want to
Speaker 2: even think about changing, how the fuck is I'm setting
Speaker 2: myself up? That was scary, super fucking scary.
Speaker 3: You are listening to The Burden season four Got The
Speaker 3: Money and Run. The Burden is produced by Orbit Media.
Speaker 3: That The Money and Run is produced by Western Sound
Speaker 3: and Acast Studios. Next up season finale, episode seven, Fatal Peril.
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Speaker 1: It's in the Burden feed