When Lucio Urtubia was arrested at Paris’s café Les Deux Magots in 1980, French police could not believe that this humble bricklayer was the mastermind behind the international plot to bleed Citibank dry. In recent months, Urtubia had been distributing thousands of forged travelers’ checks to revolutionary groups across Europe, from the Red Brigades in Italy to ETA in the Basque Country. Citibank’s response only deepened its losses as it placed a Europe-wide ban on all travelers’ checks above $10 — thus cutting off the revenue it normally generated through commissions.

As Urtubia’s checks spread to South America after his arrest, Citibank became desperate. Deciding to sue for peace, the world’s largest bank had little option but to meet its blackmailer’s demands: drop all charges and hand over a suitcase full of cash (which Urtubia would later use to fund social movements in Latin America). As the two sides met to finalize the agreement, the head of security for Citibank refused to shake his hand — leading Urtubia to tell the financiers: “You are the real criminals. You don’t know how to do anything but make wars and spread death.”

An anarchist, anti-fascist, bank robber and construction worker, Lucio Urtubia died in Paris on Saturday July 18, aged eighty-nine. Upon his passing, Spain’s deputy prime minister Pablo Iglesias remembered the Basque exile as “a revolutionary bricklayer that fought all his life for a better world with the joy of someone who knows he is sowing the seeds of the future.” Considered a latter-day Robin Hood by the French and Spanish left, Urtubia refused to characterize his actions as theft but instead, like other “social bandits” that came before him, talked of expropriation — claiming “he who robs a thief, is a thousand times forgiven.”