10 lessons I learned from a former bank robber
Daniel Rojo was the most famous bank robber in Barcelona (Spain) in the 1980s. He robbed more than 300 bank branches in a 15-year criminal career. He stole his first bank when he was 16 years old. In the most successful robbery, he took almost 1 million euros. The police nicknamed him ‘the millionaire’. Before he was last imprisoned in 1991, he assaults four bank benches a month to keep up with his life: using hard drugs, sleeping with whores and flaunting expensive clothes, motorcycles and cars. “I’ve never been bad or psycho”, he says to me. “I did it because I was an addict, and I was good as a thief”.
Daniel Rojo looks like a giant oak wardrobe in his fifties: he is huge (6,3 feet tall), he has a voice that reverberates in his bear’s thorax, and grey-haired sideburns. There would be no other body capable of resisting what Daniel’s did: he contracted AIDS through infected blood, suffered liver cancer, maintained a daily use of cocaine for decades, was stabbed in the side and crashed on the road at 200 km / h. He survived everything, even loneliness during fourteen years of reclusion, but he got married and has two children. He downed his last 8 grams heroin spike (€ 48) in 1997 and was released from prison a year later. That was his big blow.
I spent a month with him in 2016 gathering info to write a longform, sharing breakfast, dinner, walks, book presentations, taxis and talks at a club for marihuana smokers. These are the ten lessons I learned from my time with him and his books.
1. Adrenaline is a well-accepted drug
Daniel Rojo stole a newsstand at the age of seven. Unnecessarily. He did it out of excitement. Later he knew that it was the symptoms of adrenaline. It was the first drug injection of his life, and he searched for it for the next 23 years. Many people get addicted to adrenalin. For example, those who practice extreme sports (bungee jumping or skydiving) or some infidelity (have an affair) say they feel alive. Who wouldn’t want to feel this way?
As Daniel Rojo mentioned, the problem with adrenaline (and with any drug) always asks for more, but he was less and less satisfied. It can be dangerous to try to feel alive to hide an existential void.
2. Money does not bring happiness
Daniel was a millionaire. Surrounded by luxury, he wondered why he was not happy. He remembers when he felt that money did not fill him up: He lived in a very cool house with a brutal living room with two Afghan rugs, one million each. The table was Murano glass with elephant hoof legs. “There were a lot of millions spent on shit”, he says. “When the whores left, I began to think. Something was wrong”.
Daniel Rojo was very addicted to heroin and cocaine, and he loved robbing banks. He felt the emptiness. “I didn’t like that life anymore, but I needed it,” he says to me.
3. Be careful with influencers you choose
In the 1980s, heroin users were rock stars. Young people believed that winners took drugs. Now it’s hard to see because a junkie doesn’t inspire anyone. But at that time, kids like Daniel Rojo were looking for cultural influencers and wanted to imitate the exciting life of fashionable rockers.
Today more teenagers want to be famous before astronauts. You and I can fall into drugs, but also by choosing who we admire.
4. Uncertainty is orgasmic
Daniel Rojo had controlled the entire robbery, except when he left the bank with the spoil in a bag. At that moment, in broad daylight, the success of the theft was at stake. That excitement (the adrenaline) excited him, as well as the ego boost of being more intelligent than the police.
Although banks stimulate fear of the future with ads about stability, certainties, security, humans are attracted to the unknown. We need not know sometimes. We need to be lost. Not knowing what will come avoids the routine because it is a challenge. “If you also go home with the money after the robbery,” says Rojo, “it’s like ejaculating with a great fuck.” Facing the void is scary, but jumping inside is a pleasure (if you go out).
5. Drug addicts need understanding, not rejection
When we say that everyone can be wrong, we do not believe it. We forgive crimes like robbing a bank, but we don’t tolerate some mistakes like being a drug addict. Daniel Rojo is stigmatized, despite spending more than 20 years without crime and drugs. Drug addicts never stop being drug addicts to the rest of society.
Most criminals act under the anxiety of drugs. In the 1980s in Spain, 97% of the inmates of the Barcelona Modelo prison were drug addicts. Crime did not drop in the city until psychologists and social instructors sneaked into the dungeons. Rojo likes a quote: “whoever judges my path, I’ll lend him my shoes.” If we empathized with drug addicts, we would understand them.
6. Love doesn’t have to search. It has to find
Daniel Rojo spent a fortune for loveless loves. He lived with whores. He loved them and rejected them. None of those paid loves fulfilled him, although he sought fulfilment among them. Daniel was alive by a miracle, with a year of life under the best medical guess, and he fell in love with his doctor, Eva.
Eva and Daniel Rojo met by chance. He especially remembers that she touched him without gloves. “Officers had been touching me with gloves for 14 years,” he says. “Imagine: a hot doctor touching my whole body without gloves. I spent 14 years being touched by officers with gloves. Of course, she made me horny. Besides, it meant a lot”.
7. Pain and suffering are different
Daniel Rojo’s brother died of leukaemia while he was detoxing. He was “the good brother,” Daniel says. “I have everything in my body, and nothing has hurt like my brother’s death.” He had hard times: every time he closed his eyes, he saw his brother dead.
His suffering ended when Daniel Rojo told himself that if that trauma had not returned him to drugs, he would never use them again. “It made me stronger, but it could be my downfall,” he says. With his new attitude, he did not avoid pain, but he did avoid suffering.
8. Gangsters are scared too
We think that professional criminals do not suffer. Daniel Rojo was as vulnerable as any of us. He still wears a large black raincoat and maintains the appearance of the king of the underworld because it helps him sell books, but he is a fragile and empathetic man.
He says he is not afraid of death, but he is fearful of losing his children. “When I close my eyes and get scared, it’s because I think something is going to happen to my children, like a bus hitting them when we are crossing. Hard stuff,” he says. “That scares me.”
9. You have to learn from the past
Daniel Rojo does not regret anything. He revives his story, and a genuine romanticism still emerges when he talks about crime: sidekicks as brothers and an outlaw life. He does not want it for his children, but he does not deny his past. Daniel believes that his failure would have been not to have made mistakes.
10. You have to get out of hell to find happiness
To Daniel Rojo happiness is the result of a comparison. Except for the minutes the drug lasted, everything else was suffering, anxiety and lack of control in his life. He separated from his parents, his friends abandoned him, and sometimes he still hates himself. He’s already out of hell, but he still feels the heat. It is easier for him to value what he has because he lost everything.
Here is our video interview with Daniel Rojo (Spanish):
And the longform article:
