To Rob a Bank Is an Honor

In 1981, Lucio Urtubia received a suitcase full of cash from Citibank executives, handed over the plates he’d used to forge 20 million dollars in traveler’s checks, and walked away a free man. This is the true story of the most famous Robin Hood of the twentieth century, a lifelong anarchist who robbed from the rich to give to liberation struggles the world round.

Born to a poor family in the Basque Country, Urtubia was conscripted into Franco’s army before fleeing to exile in Paris, where he worked as a mason by day and collaborated with Catalonian anarchists by night. Soon, he was planning bank heists to fund the Spanish struggle, stealing weapons, and masterminding the escape of resistance fighters. Following the uprisings of May 1968, Urtubia opened a printshop, producing political pamphlets while secretly counterfeiting passports and workers’ paychecks—until he hit on the scheme that would make him infamous. “He who robs a thief is a thousand times forgiven!” Urtubia declared. Over decades, he funneled support to such organizations as Italy's Red Brigades, the West German Baader–Meinhof group, the Black Panthers in the US, and the ETA Basque separatists.

Told with Urtubia’s free-flowing warmth and humor, To Rob a Bank Is an Honor narrates the life stories and political convictions of a larger-than-life figure at the center of an incendiary era.