On Friday, 17 May 1966, Vassilis Palaiokostas, “the Greek Robin Hood,” was born in the mountain village of Moschofito, Greece.

In the 1990s-2000s he became famous for robbing the rich and handing his takings to the poor — former comrade Kostas Samaras remembers “he and his brother Nikos would stop the car and hand robbery money to immigrants in the street.”

Palaiokostas has been linked to some of the most audacious illegalism in Greek history, including the 1992 Kalambaka robbery (the country’s biggest ever bank heist) and pioneering bossnapping with the ransoms of notorious industrialists Alexander Haitoglou in 1995 and George Mylonas in 2008.

He is even more famous however for his series of prison escapes which earned him a police nickname — The Uncatchable. The most extraordinary of these were in 2006 and 2009, when he escaped from Korydallos Prison not once but twice by helicopter, bringing him international renown.

A folk hero among the working classes of his homeland, he is still free, still on the run, with a 1.4 million Euro bounty on his head.

His autobiography was released by @freedom_news1886 in English in 2021.

THANKS TO WORKING CLASS HISTORY – https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory