John Kiriamiti: Kenya’s most notorious robber who became a bestselling author

Jack Zollo

And a lesser-known name—Batista Wanjohi.

For anyone who grew up in Kenya in the 1980s and 1990s, those first two names were almost folklore—etched in the pages of My Life in Crime, Kenya’s best-selling book, written by none other than one of the country’s most notorious criminals turned author.

Kiriamiti’s story begins in the 1960s, where he orchestrated daring robberies in Nairobi’s CBD. 

He once recalled how robbing the Bank of Baroda was as easy as walking in and walking out.

There were no security barriers, no glass panels separating tellers from customers—just money piled up in plain sight.

A six-minute operation, he boasted, was enough to empty the vaults.

But times changed. Bank heists lost their 'glory' as security systems grew tighter and the risks grew deadlier.

'The price of crime is always your life,' Kiriamiti later reflected.

And yet, regret is not something he admits to. “Being Zollo built me into the man I am today,” he once said.

 To him, that criminal life was not a detour but the very foundation of his existence. Without it, he insists, there would have been no John Kiriamiti as the world knows him.

Still, his stories came with haunting moments. He vividly remembered the first gunshot he ever heard, describing it as 'the sound of death.'

On another day, he was nearly undone when two bank tellers recognized him on the street and almost fled in panic—an instant that reminded him just how quickly his life could end.

Ironically, these same experiences became the backbone of his writing career.

His books—My Life in Crime, My Life with a Criminal, among others—were devoured by schoolchildren under desks and passed around in hushed secrecy. 

They glamorized crime in a way that stirred young imaginations.

But what many readers never saw in the pages was the price Kiriamiti eventually paid: a 20-year prison sentence, reduced to 16.

Behind the walls of Naivasha Maximum Prison, he reinvented himself.

 He taught fellow inmates—many of them cattle rustlers and morans who couldn’t write their own names—how to read and write.

He read voraciously, sharpened his craft, and even ventured into journalism.

Upon release, he contributed to leading newspapers and later founded his own, The Sharpener.

Then came the most unexpected twist of all: marriage to a Catholic nun, Julian.

 She left the convent to be with him, unaware that her husband was the infamous 'John Kiriamiti' until she stumbled upon letters from his publisher eight months into their marriage. 

Shocked but moved by his kindness, she chose to stay. “He was so good to me, I couldn’t leave,” she once told a local magazine.

Even as a husband, Kiriamiti wrestled with old habits. Guns still lay under his bed, shadows of his past life. But love, he admitted, made him choose differently. 

“If you don’t have control over your life, think twice,” he said, reflecting on his eventual break from crime.

Critics often accused him of glorifying crime in his writing. His answer was unapologetic: 

“Why not glorify something that buys your food? What they don’t know is, there is imprisonment that can never be glorified.” 

For him, the thrill was only half the story. The punishment—the lost years, the confinement—was the bitter reality.

Kiriamiti’s legacy is strikingly paradoxical.

His books glamorize the chaos of his past, yet his life warns against it.

He insists crime may look profitable, but the consequences always outweigh the gains.

And so, what’s the lesson?

As Kiriamiti himself would put it: crime doesn’t pay.