Danny Trejo has lived a colorful life, and that’s putting it mildly.
via: Complex
Trejo said a “greasy, dirty, scrawny” Manson walked up to him in Los Angeles County Jail in 1961 seeking protection. “He was so poor, he didn’t have a belt, and instead used a piece of string to keep his pants up,” Trejo shared. Out of sympathy, the Machete star, along with two other people in his cell—Johnny Ronnie and Tacho—promised to look out for him.
A few days later, Manson told Trejo and his crew that he had hypnotic powers that could be used to get them high. Through “guided meditation,” Manson was able to convince Trejo into believing that they were smoking weed and using heroin.
“The dude sat us down and told us to close our eyes,” Trejo recalled, per Fox News. “For 15 minutes, in great detail, he walked us through the process of copping the dope, finding a place to fix, cooking the heroin in a spoon, drawing it into a needle, and sticking it in our veins. Even before I fake-fixed, I could taste it in my mouth. Any junkie knows what that is like. By the time he described it hitting my bloodstream, I felt the warmth flowing through my body.”
Manson was released from jail in 1967. Soon after, he started to lure people, specifically young women, to what would become known as the Manson Family. In August 1969, the group carried out the gruesome murder of nearly nine-months pregnant actress Sharon Tate and four others, including the baby she was carrying, inside a Beverly Hills home.
While he didn’t explicitly kill anyone, Manson’s power of persuasion was adequate enough grounds to convict him of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Manson was sentenced to life in prison after the death penalty was ruled unconstitutional in California. He died in 2017 at the age of 83.
While Trejo couldn’t see Manson becoming a leader behind bars or the “career criminal” he eventually became, he believes he could’ve been “a professional hypnotist.”
Trejo is on sale now. Manson, meanwhile, appears in a new novel version of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, written by Trejo’s occasional collaborator Quentin Tarantino.
