Danny Trejo is an actor known for the macho roles he takes in movies like Machete and Con Air. His life has been as action-packed as the movies he acts in. Trejo, now 80, recently revealed to The Post that his past included a shocking encounter with Charles Manson while he was serving time in prison.
Before his rise to Hollywood fame, Trejo spent much of 1956-1969 in California prisons, including San Quentin and Folsom, for crimes such as armed robbery and drug dealing. During one of his stints behind bars in the early 1960s, Trejo met Manson, who was incarcerated for theft long before his infamous crimes.
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly about his new History Channel series, Mysteries Unearthed With Danny Trejo, the actor described his takeaways from the infamous cult leader. “The Charles Manson I met was not the guy you saw on the news. He was small, about 5’4″, and didn’t seem threatening,” Trejo remembered.
However, Manson had an unusual talent that impressed Trejo and other inmates: hypnosis. “He could hypnotize people. We joked around and told him to make us feel high on marijuana, and he did. It was wild,” Trejo recalled.
When I saw him in the news years later, I thought, ‘How did that guy do all of that?’ He was no mastermind criminal. He was just a twerp,” Trejo said, referring to Manson’s later crimes. Manson was sentenced to life in 1971 for orchestrating several murders in 1969. That included the slaying of actress Sharon Tate, one of his many victims, along with a man. Manson died in prison in 2017.
This lesser-known chapter in the career of Trejo, for this reason, gives additional insight into his rather fabulous history.
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