It was 1961 and Trejo recalls that Manson looked to him and his crew for protection whilst in jail and despite him being so poor, how they came to an agreement.
He said, “I felt sorry for him. It was clear the only shower the man was ever going to have was the one he was going to get in jail.”
“There were three in our cell – Johnny Ronnie, Tacho and me – so we told the dude he could clean up for us and we’d keep an eye out for him. He couldn’t sleep in our cell, but we let him sleep just outside so people knew he had eyes on him.”
Looking back in hindsight now, Trejo reflects on how they followed very different paths once they were released from jail. With Trejo of course becoming a Hollywood star and Manson being a failed rock musicians and becoming a cult mass murderer ringleader.
“When we first met him, it was before all that stuff, OK?” Trejo clarified.
“He was like a five foot, slick little wimp. He wasn’t a bully. Wasn’t a thug. But he had the jargon of prison and jail. He thought he was slick.”
He continued, “Charles Manson couldn’t have done what he did anywhere else. He couldn’t have gone to East Los Angeles and get some of those girls to do his bidding. He couldn’t have gone to Compton or Queens. He had to go where there were some broken girls… and pluck them from there.”
Trejo also interestingly recalls the one time that Manson convinced him and his crew that he could hypontise them. Trejo recalls, “It was like a guided meditation,” also writing that Manson told them they would have the “sensation of smoking marijuana, then heroin.”
