A Normal Life
by Vassilis Palaiokostas
Freedom Press £15

“HOW can you slow down when you’re driving a Lada Niva on a wet highway, and there’s a deadly roadblock in front of you?” writes Greek bank robber and fugitive Vassilis Palaiokostas, describing how he raced towards the cops at full throttle in the rain.

“Obviously, the Bolsheviks had never imagined car chases in Parga, Epirus [north-west Greece] when they revolted. The Lada, communist feat that it was, was not made for such dangerous missions.”

After zooming past the roadblock at 75mph, soaking the cops in the processes, Palaiokostas saw four police officers take off after him in an Alfa Romeo.

“Weaving between cars they joined the rally with the self-assurance of men in possession of superior technology. There’s no way the Lada could outdrive them,” he writes.

“Yet communism, apart from the Lada, also manufactured the Kalashnikov and the Scorpion to balance the gross injustice of Western imperialism’s technological leadership. I always had one on me, along with many magazines and a handful of bullets.”

Palaiokostas convinced his friend in the passenger’s seat to fire one of those feats of Soviet engineering in the cops’ direction. It worked. They gave up the chase.

This is just one of the exciting misadventures Palaiokostas writes about in his excellent autobiographical account of his extraordinary life of rebellion, published in English for the first time by Freedom Press.

Refusing to submit to capitalist laws, Palaiokostas instead robbed banks, kidnapped greedy business magnates, and escaped from prison three times — twice in a helicopter.

But Palaiokostas is no mere crook. There’s a philosophy behind his actions, which he explains throughout the book, interspered between his various madcap adventures. In his own eyes he was an outlaw, a social bandit, an “illegalist.”

He never killed anyone, though he was ready to do so to any authority figure who stood in his way. He returned many of the cars he jacked to their owners, and even gave away millions of stolen Euros/Drachmas to the public — though I wish he elaborated more on this in the book.

Palaiokostas is a brilliant writer, and whether you agree with his actions or not, you will not be able to put the story of his far-from-normal life down for long.

Ben Cowles