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Wow, great article.

Poor guy. Some people's minds are constructed in a way that simply doesn't mesh with modern life. If only he'd discovered extreme sports; he's got the exact personality profile of a champion hang glider pilot/kiteboarder/BASE jumper.

Edit: I wrote that earlier bit about 40% of the way through the article. Now, at 75% of the way through the article, I don't think extreme sports would have scratched the itch for him, either. The level of novelty and adrenaline he trained himself to need could only be satisfied by the professions of drug addict or ancient raiding warrior.

With extreme sports you can tell people what you did, and it ain't subversive!

With a well executed, audacious bank robbery you can't tell a soul and every day there is that fear that they will catch you. Even if you ditched that small thing that uniquely connects you to the crime into the uninhabited wilds of Siberia, someone will have seen you go there. Plus you have to explain where the money is from. Even if that is just to your mum.

The thrill is two fold, in the immediate aftermath, getting away with it. And secondly of deception. You have secrets you can't tell. It is human nature to always tell, so this requires mental agility.

What makes this bank robbing special is the bike. It is the perfect getaway vehicle in a society where the police can only follow things up if they have car things to work on.

Why ancient raiding warrior? The military hasn't gone anywhere, if he's that dedicated I'm sure he could get into units that see more action than normal on top of it
Military would be too bureaucratic and disciplined for his sort, but being a mercenary might be a fit.
He tried the Légion Étrangère but it didn't work out.
> Légion Étrangère

French Foreign Legion for those of us who don’t know French

To him, robbing banks was an extreme sport.
Sounds like he may have had ADHD. I wonder how being medicated with stimulants might have impacted him.
While anecdotal, this article seems to confirm my suspicion that motivation for crime is seldomly rational. It seems more often to be driven by some form of mental or emotional trauma.

Makes you wonder if treatment rather than punishment wouldn't be a more effective remedy...

In my school A-levels, I did a study on this. It was pretty obvious then that the main requirement of the law is to make people feel like retribution has been handed out, that the criminal has been made to suffer justly for their crimes.

As you say, if the aim were to reduce crime, then alleviating poverty and providing better mental healthcare would be far more effective solutions.

Nope in my country you can get basic assistance which is €1100 per month. But when you see drug dealers driving around in BMWs...
Is that enough for food and rent?
> main requirement of the law is to make people feel like retribution has been handed out

To call such idea of supporting low emotions "medieval" would be inappropriate towards the Middle Ages.

"It seems more often to be driven by some form of mental or emotional trauma."

Maybe we are the ones with emotional trauma, staring at a screen 11 hours a day, obeying authority and aging without scratching the surface of life...

> aging without scratching the surface of life...

Speak for yourself friend.

> Every morning at the YMCA, Tom worked through the Olympic strength-training regimen to build muscle mass. Within a month, he was squatting 500 pounds.

I know he was already a category 1 cyclist and thus in great shape (particularly his cardiac health), but going from not squatting to squatting 500 lbs is not something that happens in a month no matter who you are or what you're on. Something was very likely lost/garbled between the source and writer on this point.

A sprint cyclist Olympic hopeful would have been squatting for years at this point. Maybe rusty, but

> after finally graduating in 1994, Tom moved to Los Angeles to train alongside the U.S. Olympic team

Appropriate long drink to match the long read: https://imbibemagazine.com/recipe/the-bicycle-thief-cocktail...
About the time I came back to Denmark about 20 years ago there was a bank robbery in Nørrebro (IIRC) and from what I remember of the description it was at the time of day that everyone was heading home from work and the robber escaped on bike - which of course at that time of day there are hundreds and hundreds of people biking in the same direction.

I thought that was a pretty good plan that guy had.

Sounds a lot like the guy who placed an ad on Craigslist to be his cover: https://www.cnet.com/news/bank-robber-hires-decoys-on-craigs...
Note to self: Report my bike stolen, just in case I'd ever want to rob some banks in the future...
I can't recall many stories about an actual Robin Hood. I'd expect a jury to be much more likely to cut him a break than a typical bank robber. I don't think I could vote to acquit, but I might be tempted to convict on a lesser charge if available. But I wonder if what he did with the money would even reach the jury before they decided.
Commendable for being non-violent I'll give him that, but I think it would be a leap to call him a Robin Hood. He was stealing for a narcissistic rush and he ditched the cash out of pragmatism. I doubt even he believed it was for any kind of altruism. As soon as it could get him an even bigger fix, through drugs and lifestyle, he kept the money.

I'm trying not to be cruel, he served his sentence and I don't exactly care that banks lost a few thousand here and there, I hope he's found some kind of peace now. It's just not quite the feel good story that Robin Hood was, this was more a story about unchecked narcissism and substance abuse.

He only ditched the money initially. He had more than 20 robberies and the article makes it sound like he was keeping the money from the middle onwards.
He claims he ditched the cash, but maybe he did not?
why lie? he confessed to the crime, and he confessed to becoming a crack addict, and he confessed that he stopped giving it away.
If he kept it and told the truth he kept it, he would be forced to return it.
Basically unless the police are actively chasing you, you could have a hundred warrants out for your arrest and if you didn't drive a car you'd never be found.

If you want to escape a state, get on a bike with cash and start riding on trails and back roads. The police depend so much on car stops to catch people.

Well, until the surveillance state is fully set up

I suspect swapping plates with another that match the car would get you pretty far. You might have to do it every week or so, or just steal a front plate and mount it on the rear, but it seems like you’d get a lot farther this way than on a bike and not immediately trip automated license plate readers.
Owen Ashworth's "Tom Justice, The Choir Boy Robber, Apprehended at Ace Hardware" is great for this.
Great first-person account of this story from equally great podcast: https://loveandradio.org/2014/08/choir-boy/
Damn that was entertaining. Can’t wait for the movie.
Wow, Tom is a bad guy. His MO is fascinating, his story is capturing (the first story I am reading on this site to the very end), it's a mixture of intrigue, suspense, humor, care for Tom's well-being. I love that he cried for relief from the loop he was in, he felt relieved from the matrix of problem-solving thoughts natural to anyone doing something illegal and morally wrong (especially those who know that they are doing this in their hearts). I admire the guy, not the crime. He is really a great bad guy.
Woah, I was likely at the olympic training center (for cycling as well) at the same time he was.