Confessions of a dangerous mind

We first met in 1998, two years after his release, at Pacific News Service, where we were both working as editors. He had come to the office's attention through essayist and journalist Richard Rodriguez, with whom he'd struck up a lively correspondence while in prison. He was already a rising star, writing frequent and popular columns about life from an ex-felon's perspective. I was immediately charmed by his charisma, his scholarly horn-rimmed glasses, his love for Rilke, his intimate knowledge of the Old Testament (a product of his religious upbringing) -- and, of course, his thrilling and lurid tall tales about stupid cops, terrified bank tellers and fierce cellmates, all safely buried in his distant past. Jolly and burly, always ready with a smile, a compliment, an invitation to lunch, Joe was no more of a hustler than any other freelancer I knew.

Over the years, we stayed close, meeting up every few months to compare notes on our writing careers, our mutual friends and our shrinks. Joe Loya the ex-con became Joe Loya the literary man-about-town, with a successful and well-reviewed theatrical one-man show based on his experiences, steady work writing Op-Eds on the American prison system -- and, of course, the holy grail itself, a publisher's advance. There have been times when it was hard even to grant him credit for his obvious talent. Man, you'd think, I'd be a brilliant writer too after two years in solitary. Talk about a room of one's own. And talk about a usable past!

But, of course, Loya didn't have it easy. In the memoir he writes movingly of his childhood: At 9, he lost his mother to cancer. From age 12 on, he was molested repeatedly by a 22-year-old neighbor named Lorelei. She was troubled and passionate, and it would not occur to him until years later that the sex they shared was actually sexual abuse. The stabbing of his father, Joe Loya Sr., led to the then-teenage Loya's first stint in county custody, for eight months. The other kids there saw him as a hero of sorts, and he fell in love with the image of himself as a tough guy, above the limits of the law, unanswerable to authority.

His father recovered physically, but as an authority figure, he held no more sway over his son. Thus began Loya's descent into a rudderless and amoral criminality. He started by conning his friends and stealing from employers; he eventually stole a car. In his own mind, he'd killed God by stabbing his father, and now lived in a free-floating world in which the only thing he needed to answer to was his own greed for the Good Life. Still, after he was finally brought down on the UCLA campus (in one of the book's funniest scenes) by an agent who had already arrested him once, and then had vouched for his trustworthiness with the district attorney's office, he had no shame or regret -- just a firm desire to claw his way to the top of the prison's hierarchy. And he succeeded, through a stealth campaign of manipulation and calculated violence -- all described in chilling detail in the book.

But what's chilling is not the action itself -- particularly if you happen to know and like the guy. The most disturbing section of the book is precisely the section in which Loya pitilessly outlines the cold and cruel thought processes behind his willingness to con everyone he knew, to play whatever role was necessary to incur their trust. He convinced himself he was a criminal mastermind, a Nietzschean übermensch, even though he was really just a self-centered, angry man who stole money from his friends, cheated on his girlfriends, embezzled money from his bosses, and treated everyone who trusted him or cared for him with pure contempt.

Next Page: "If people trusted me, they deserved to get burned"

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