Credit, COURTESY OF EDITORIAL TXALAPARTA
caption,
Lucio Urtubia (19312020)
Item Information
- Author, Paula Rosas
- Scroll BBC News World
- Twitter, @melibea20
- March 11, 2023
Updated 2 hours ago
“I expropriated the banks, I didn’t rob them. Stealing is robbing the poor. Whoever robs a thief has a 100year reprieve. It’s an honor to rob a bank.”
So thought Lucio Urtubia, who one day cornered the largest bank in the world.
Her weapon: a printer. For him, theft is a “revolutionary gesture as long as it serves the common good and not an individual”.
For the Spanish anarchist, the line of debate between what is legal and what is moral was very thin.
A bricklayer by day and forger by night, Lucio Urtubia was semieducated and posed as a thief, suspected kidnapper and smuggler. A rebel and revolutionary to the end of his days, he was one of the most wanted men of the 1980s.
His biggest scam was to forge a huge amount of travelers checks from First National City Bank (now Citibank) then one of the largest banks in the world along with a network of dozens of people he managed.
It is not known for certain how much money Urtubia embezzled. According to him, it was at least 20 million US dollars (approx. 104 million R$ at current values).
He claimed the money was used to fund guerrilla groups in Europe and Latin America, such as the Tupamaros in Uruguay and the Montoneros in Argentina.
According to legend, his forgers helped Eldridge Cleaver, leader of the Black Panthers in the United States, escape and participated in the attempted kidnapping of Nazi officer Klaus Barbie in Bolivia. And he himself said he even discussed strategy with Che Guevara.
Between person and character, myth and story, Lucio Urtubia’s life seems to have sprung from a script.
movie life
In fact, the extraordinary story of this anarchist Robin Hood became a book El Tesoro de Lucio (“Lucio’s Treasure”, in free translation) by Mikel Santos Belatz and hit the screens twice. The first in the documentary Lucio (2007) by directors Aitor Arregi and Jose Mari Goenaga; and more recently in the feature film Um Homem de Ação (2022).
Paradoxically for a man who has fought against capitalism his entire life, the most recent film was produced by a major American company, Netflix.
“When we showed the film, people asked us if it was a fake documentary. They couldn’t believe it,” recalls Aitor Arregi, one of Lucio’s directors.
“Disguise, fakery and the spirit of survival are at the heart of his story,” the filmmaker told BBC News Mundo, the BBC’s Spanish service.
“It’s fascinating how a man with little formal education, but immensely intelligent and very instinctive, has managed to get involved in so many stories almost without ending up in prison.”
Lucio Urtubia Jiménez was born in 1931 in the town of Cascante in Navarra (Spain) into a very humble family.
In his autobiography Mi Utopía Vivida (“My Lived Utopia”, freely translated), he recalls that since childhood I “had no respect for the forbidden. When I wanted and needed something, I would do whatever it took to get it.”
caption,
Lucio Urtubia had a very poor childhood in Navarra, Spain.
For example, with other children, Urtubia stole the coins donated by the wealthy faithful to Saint Anthony in the city’s church by rubbing clay on a stick that was inserted through the slot in the alms box to keep the coins together. He stole fruit, olives and whatever else was needed to survive.
From robbery, Urtubia turned to smuggling on the border between France and Spain. He and his brother smuggled tobacco, Martell brandy and medicines into Spain across the Luzaide River (which separates the two countries) and sent liquor and pigeons to France to serve in restaurants.
During his military service, Urtubia had access to the barracks storage room. A new dimension opened up for him: boots, shirts, watches and precision instruments were hidden in garbage cans.
One day the military discovered that they had been looted. Urtubia was on leave and fled to France to avoid arrest or execution. He arrived in Paris without speaking a word of French.
“I didn’t know anything, not even washing my hands,” he said. “So I arrived in Paris in 1954 with one hand in front and the other behind.”
Urtubia soon began working in a construction company and the mason’s profession accompanied him for the rest of his life.
“Man is what he is because of what he does. So my salvation has always been work. Without them we are nobody,” he said.
Work was also the best cover for his secret life. After all, who would imagine that a humble untrained mason could be behind these sophisticated forgeries?
caption,
Many anarchists who had defended the Spanish Republic during the civil war fled after the triumph of Francisco Franco’s troops.
Paris was then the refuge of thousands of communists, anarchists, socialists and Spanish dissidents. But Urtubia could hardly read and had no political training.
He tells in his memoirs that one day a companion asked him: “But what is your policy? What are you?” He replied that he was a communist because he thought that everyone who opposed fascism followed that ideology.
The companions started laughing and said: “What a communist, what the hell you are an anarchist!”
political awakening
Urtubia had heard the word “anarchist” only once from his father. Once he said, very irritated, “If I were born again, I would be an anarchist”.
The word came into his life and stayed with him forever: “The true school, the true freedom, began there for me”.
He enrolled in French courses offered by the Libertarian Youth and began attending the headquarters of France’s National Trade Union Confederation (CNT) on rue SainteMarthe in Paris. Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus (“great friend of the Spanish anarchists”) and the founder of surrealism, André Breton, passed through there.
At CNT, Urtubia was also able to listen to writers Georges Brassens and Jacques Brel. And the education that the Francoist schools denied him, he believes, was opened at the hands of theater groups performing works by Federico García Lorca and reciting poems by Spanish writers Antonio Machado and Miguel Hernández.
Until the day came when the secretary of the CNT, Germinal García, asked for a favor.
“We know you have a small apartment and a friend walked in,” he said. “[Queria saber] if you can help us for a while until we find something for him and sort through his paperwork.”
The friend was Quico Sabaté, the leading representative of the urban guerrillas against the dictator Francisco Franco in Catalonia (Spain) perhaps one of the most soughtafter Spaniards at the time.
Urtubia was fascinated by Sabaté, according to Bernard Thomas contra in the book Lucio, El Anarquista Irreductible (“Lucio, the irreducible anarchist”, in free translation): “his god, his master of anarchism”.
Credit, COURTESY OF EDITORIAL TXALAPARTA
caption,
For Urtubia, stealing is “a revolutionary gesture as long as it serves the collective good”
Urtubia didn’t just hide the “Quico”. When he went to prison to serve a sixmonth sentence, Sabaté asked him to keep some “tools”: a Thompson submachine gun and a handgun.
He said that with these “tools” and two merchant’s coats, he and a friend robbed their first bank on Boulevard Magenta in Paris. The duo would call the robbery “expropriation.”
The Spaniard then earned 50 francs (less than 8.50 US dollars or 44 R$ at daily values) per week in the laborious construction work. And in 16 minutes he had millions.
After that first robbery there were many others, but he never stopped working in construction. The money, he said, was used for revolutionary purposes.
The “expropriations” were easy at a time when security cameras didn’t exist, but he didn’t like them for fear someone might get hurt.
“When I went out to expropriate a bank, I wet my pants,” he says in numerous interviews without a trace of shame.
So he traded Thompson for a printing press, which was the anarchists’ great weapon.
With the help of several printer friends, they began to forge Spanish identity documents, passports and driver’s licenses. The documents served to help exiles and dissidents.
“Thanks to them it was possible to rent cars, returned or not, apartments, open bank accounts, travel, pay, not pay … With them the doors of places that were closed to us were opened”, he said in his autobiography.
After the documents, the next step was to counterfeit money. Once upon a time Urtubia’s counterfeit American dollar bills were of very good quality.
“The dollar was easier to counterfeit than some of the jobs we had already done. The hardest thing when it comes to money is the paper,” he admitted in the documentary Lucio.
But if they had no way of accessing the material, what country would be better than a counterfeit country?
caption,
Ernesto “Che” Guevara was Cuba’s Minister of Economy
Urtubia said he had an absurd idea. He managed to be introduced to the Cuban Ambassador in Paris, who arranged for him to meet Che Guevara at Paris Orly Airport, where he made a scheduled stopover.
Myth or Reality?
As with other episodes in Urtubia’s life, it’s difficult to prove the alleged meeting with Che Guevara, which the Spanish anarchist has recounted in several interviews although it has been corroborated by former Cuban guerrilla fighter Dariel “Benigno” Alarcón, who fought under him the command of Guevara.
For anarchists, communists and other anticapitalists, the Cuban Revolution was an inspiration.
The historian Óscar Freán Hernández is Professor of Contemporary Spanish History at the University of Lyon 2 in France, specializing in Spanish anarchosyndicalism.
For him it seems possible that the organizations and secret movements that existed at the time were in contact with Cuban diplomacy. After all, the revolutionary center of gravity was in Cuba at the time.
But “whether he actually met Che or not… we don’t know,” the professor admits.
Urtubia was excited and his plan, he said, was simple: have Cuba print millions of dollars to flood the market and devalue the US currency. He would deliver the plates himself.
According to him, Ernesto “Che” Guevara was Cuba’s economy minister at the time and allegedly didn’t think it was a good idea.
Urtubia was disappointed, but he didn’t want to risk counterfeit money alone. The prison sentences for this offense were very high and could reach up to 20 years in prison.
“As is well known, the insurance company died of old age,” he confessed in his autobiography. “That’s why we decided to issue traveler’s cheques. The penalty was much less: five years.”
The anarchist took a train to Brussels, Belgium, to buy 30,000 francs (roughly $5,100 or R$26,400 in today’s value) of First National City Bank traveler’s checks at a local bank.
caption,
First National City Bank (now Citibank) was one of the largest banks in the world.
It wasn’t easy, but they managed to forge the checks and produce 8,000 booklets of 25 checks of $100 each, according to Urtubia. Total: US$20 million (approx. R$104 million, at current values).
Several teams exchanged these checks for real cash at bank branches. Thirty cells of two people each were coordinated to present controls simultaneously in different European cities. In this way, they ensured that document numbers were not included in the list of stolen or suspicious checks.
“That’s one of the big questions: how much money was moved and where did this money go,” asks historian Óscar Freán Hernández. He rules out that the money was used for personal enrichment.
Urtubia and his colleagues reported that the money received funded a long list of guerrillas and armed groups considered leftwing in Latin America and Europe. These included the Tupamaros (National Liberation Movement) in Uruguay, the Ação Direta movement in France and the Basque separatist group ETA in Spain.
But there are few documents to support Urtubia’s words about the destination of the funds. This is due to the very secretive nature of the operation and the lack of police sources (many of which are still inaccessible to historians), as well as the lack of written documents, “logically for security reasons, since they committed illegal acts and could not leave clues,” explains Freán Hernández.
Although he affirmed that he hates violence and that he no longer carries out “expropriations” because of the risk of someone being injured or killed, Urtubia raised no moral objection to the fact that part of this money would allegedly go to ETA, for example.
Urtubia reasoned with his aversion to Spain because of the injustices he had experienced and witnessed in his childhood and youth.
“I hated Spain and Navarre because I had been through so many horrors. And that made me sympathize with the people who were fighting,” he explained in a 2015 interview with the Spanish TV show Salvados.
Credit, COURTESY OF EDITORIAL TXALAPARTA
caption,
For the historian Óscar Freán Hernández, Lucio Urtubia became “a sort of mystified hero”
But there came a time when the goose that laid the golden eggs faltered.
Counterfeit traveler’s checks were popping up everywhere. The First National City Bank stopped accepting them, causing chaos and turmoil among people who had bought checks and now couldn’t get their money back.
The bricklayer then received an offer from a friend. He had found a buyer who would pay 30% of the value of the checks. In this way, they avoided the risk of having to exchange them at bank branches.
But it was a trap. Lucio Urtubia was arrested by the police in June 1980 in the famous Parisian café Les Deux Magots and put in prison.
One of his defenders was Roland Dumas, later French foreign minister.
“It was then that I understood that money wasn’t his thing, that making and circulating traveler’s checks to destabilize the regime was a political endeavor a little crazy, you might say,” Dumas says in the documentary Lucio.
caption,
When he was arrested, Lucio Urtubia was defended by Roland Dumas, the famous lawyer of Pablo Picasso, who would later become French foreign minister in the government of François Mitterrand
At the time, Dumas was maintaining diplomatic ties with Spain and asked Urtubia for help in contacting ETA, which had kidnapped Spanish MP Javier Rupérez. The deputy was released after 31 days.
When the armed organization kidnapped the consuls of Austria, El Salvador and Uruguay in Spain in 1981, Dumas turned to Urtubia again.
What about the First National City Bank?
Lucio Urtubia spent almost six months in prison during the trial.
But the police could not find the printing plates. And as long as they remained in the hands of counterfeiters, the checks would continue to be printed and the problem would persist.
According to the lawyers, the bank was desperate and decided to negotiate.
Thierry Fagart, another lawyer for the anarchist, says that the renowned progressive judge Louis Joinet, then an adviser to the French prime minister, knew about Urtubia and convinced the bank’s lawyers to negotiate.
“He told lawyers at First National City Bank that he believed that from a French perspective it was a pernicious problem that had to be stopped, that it couldn’t go on like this even if you put a lot of people in jail, traffic [de cheques] continued and that perhaps the solution would come out through negotiations between Citibank and Lucio Urtubia’s lawyer, whom everyone believed to be the boss of this whole affair,” reports Fagart in Lucio.
Thus, according to Fagart, the same organization from which Urtubia and his group stole millions of dollars agreed to drop the charges against him in exchange for the number plates hidden in a locker at the Austerlitz train station in Paris.
The lawyer reports in the documentary that the exchange took place in a hotel room on the ChampsElysées in the French capital, where he had arranged to meet a bank employee. “It was incredible, like something out of a crime novel,” he says.
Fagart says the bank, when reviewing the footage, delivered a suitcase containing “a significant amount of money” which was part of the deal.
caption,
According to Lucio Urtubia’s lawyer, the meeting with Citibank took place in a hotel on the ChampsElysées in Paris
Urtubia claims it was around 40 million francs (more than 6 million US dollars, about 31 million R$ in current values). He was later released and always insisted he did not keep the money.
The bank did not respond to the BBC’s attempts to get its version of events.
Urtubia was then almost 50 years old. It was time to retire from the secret life and devote himself to his family and his neverending work as a mason in the Belleville district of Paris, where he lived.
“There are things that we will never know and that we have to accept,” admits Freán Hernández.
“But perhaps the most interesting thing would be to know at what moment this figure of an immigrant without a political conscience, who arrives in France and begins to learn about anarchist ideology, becomes an activist and carries out a series of actions what moment does this person become a kind of mystified hero,” explains the historian.
Lucio Urtubia died in 2020. He assured in several interviews that in fact he never stopped being a criminal.
“I don’t even believe what I’ve lived.”