Vigoa Perez Jose Manuel - Storming Las Vegas: how a Cuban-born, Soviet-trained commando took down the Strip to the tune of five world-class hotels, three armored cars, and millions of dollars

CONTENTS

To my parents, Norman Walter and Anna May Huddy,
and the spirited, colorful, and multitalented tribe they
left behind, including Colonel Norman W. Huddy, Jr., USMC,
wife, Margaret, Anne, Virginia, Erica, John Trevor, Juliet,
Brentt, Kathleen, John Norman, Terri, and Bernadette

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

W e called him the Angry Man, the victim of a random shooting in traffic when gang members sprayed his car, wife, and two young daughters with 9 mm submachine gun fire. It was the summer of 2001 in Las Vegas, the temperature was 100 degrees at midnight, and the powerfully built young father tore at his shirt as he walked in circles in the street. My babies, my babies, the motherfuckers tried to kill my babies, tried to kill my babies! he raged in the glow of flashing police lights, referring to the children who had been showered with glass shards but survived the unprovoked attack. Then the Angry Man, by this time bare chested and drenched in sweat, slumped to the pavement on his knees, wiped away a trickle of blood from his forehead, and began to sob.

I was directing and producing a documentary called Vegas Cops for the Discovery Channel and the Travel Channel. I turned to my cameraman. Did you get that? He shrugged. Some of it.

What?

Sorry, we ran out of tape.

You ran out of tape?

I was about to have my own moment of spontaneous combustion, when my cell phone rang. I would soon forget the Angry Man and the great shot we just missed and the insanity of directing a film in the middle of the summer in the brutal heat of Las Vegas, and the fact that some numb-nuts assistant forgot to load tape in the truck. Detective Sergeant Timothy Shalhoob of the police departments tourist safety unit was calling with a tip. Tim was about to open a door to a journalistic pursuit that would begin in a small village in western Cuba, move to the stark mountains of Afghanistan, then the historic Mariel boatlift, and finally the neon-lit Strip of Las Vegas.

You gotta talk to John Alamshaw in the robbery section, Sergeant Shalhoob said. Forget the gangbangers, pickpockets, hookers, and hustlers. John has got the goddamnedest story youll ever hearif hell talk to you. I thought I detected something in the sergeants voice that you dont normally hear when macho cops talk about crime sprees and bad guys and major investigations. Was it awe? Fear? Anxiety? Or maybe the sense that even the modernized, computerized, and proper-copper Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department had encountered something unexpectedly dark, disturbing, and perhaps, as one senior commander later suggested, a dangerous new threat almost out of its league.

Lieutenant Alamshaw did agree to see me. During the next three years, he told his remarkable story with patience and self-deprecating humor. The eerie rumors about an alarming new threat to the peace and order of Las Vegas, gleaned not only from Shalhoob but from a police captain at the training academy, various detectives, and the sheriff himself, turned out to be largely true. Thank you, Lieutenant.

Likewise, Jose Manuel Vigoa, the lieutenants antagonist, cooperated fully and beyond my expectations. Vigoa consented not only to multiple in-person interviews, but later wrote detailed reports, complete with color sketches and blueprints, chronicling his life story, foreign adventures, arrival in the U.S., family life, and the eventual (and literal) storming of Las Vegas. Vigoa also permitted me to interview his former wife and three daughters, and authorized me, without restrictions, to view his legal records.

I am also grateful to Sheriff Bill Young and his successor, Sheriff Doug Gillespie (who originally approved the project while under sheriff ), for green-lighting Metros approval; and to Carla Alston, the departments head of public information, for her professional follow-through. Thanks as well to FBI Special Agent Brett W. Shields and his colleagues, including the legendary undercover agent Larry Brito in El Paso, Texas; Angela Bell, the FBI public information officer at headquarters; then-lieutenant Jutta Chambers of the Henderson Police Department; Al Cabrales and his crack crime scene analysis crew; Captain Leroy Kirkegard and the correctional officers at the Clark County Detention Center; Pedro Durazo of the U.S. Probation Office; Clark County Coroner P. Michael Murphy; and the firefighters and paramedics of the Henderson Fire Department.

David Roger, the Clark County district attorney, was the first senior official I met at the outset of the project. At breakfast, Roger promised his assistance. He proved to be a man of his word. The DA and his staff were unfailingly helpful and courteous. Jay Angelo, who prosecuted Vigoa during the Tony Montana era, went above and beyond in helping me re-create the drug lord phase in the 1980s, when, as the saying went at the time, it was snowing all year long in Sin City.

I owe much to Drew Christensen, the attorney who introduced me to Vigoa. Christensen gave me fascinating and nuanced insights during our long drives to meet his client. Certainly the attorneys cache of confidential files fleshed out the reporting of Storming Las Vegas. Thanks, too, to E. K. McDaniel, a Nevada state official who must have winced when I first appeared on his doorstep asking for the impossible. In the end, I could not have proceeded without his help, and for that I am grateful. Vegas hotel executives are loath to talk about casino crime, especially successful robberies accompanied by gunfire. However, Yvette Monet of the MGM Mirage public relations staff, and Stephen G. Koenig, the chains security chief, cooperated fully. Koenig and Bellagio security supervisor Brian Zinke not only consented to interviews but gave me tours of the Bellagios gaming surveillance room and a replay of what happened the morning of June 3, 2000.

I am also grateful to the families of the victims, Gary Dean Prestidge and Richard Sosa, and to the guards who were shot but survived during one of the hotel gunfights. Thanks to Gary Prestidge Sr., Shala Premack, Norma Sosa and her children, Donald Bowman, and Chuck Fichter. Thanks also to the management of Brinks Incorporated in Las Vegas for permitting the wounded guards to talk to me.

Peggy Noonan once described an authors first book as an exciting trauma. It is. But I had many wonderfully bright and loyal supporters to turn to during the more challenging moments, when a big story seemed almost too sprawling, and they kept me on course. Thanks to my bride of thirty-three years, Erica Trevor Huddy, who told me twenty years ago that I would someday write a book (but first I had to clean up my room). Also, thanks to Roger Ailes, William Shine, Christina Bertuca, Van Gordon Sauter, John Burrud (my original partner in the Vegas Cops series), Sandy Spooner, the late Gene Miller of the Miami Herald, other Herald reporters, the management of KVVU-TV, the Fox affiliate in Las Vegas, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and a whos who of former CIA agents, including Peter Brookes, Brian Latell, and Robert Baer, who helped me analyze Vigoas professed military background in the absence of official Cuban confirmation. Wayne Smith, the former U.S. Mission chief in Havana, provided keen insight into Cuban affairs and the plausibility of Vigoas claims. Also, I appreciate the help given by Captain Ted Rose, a veteran Oxnard, California, charter boat owner; attorney Anson Whitfield; Range Master Raymond Witham Jr. of the American Shooters Gun Club in Las Vegas (who checked me out in an AK-47); and Jules Harding, the actress and motivational therapist.