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.
John Huddy. Ballantine. 364 pages. $26.
When you think about it, the idea is pretty creepy: Why are otherwise law-abiding, peaceable people so interested in violence and criminality? Solid citizens who would never dream of squishing a palmetto bug seem inextricably attracted to bloody murder mysteries and overly detailed true crime accounts.
There's no obvious answer to the question, but I'd guess it's because these acts present a crystallized, concentrated dose of extreme human behavior and emotion. In the hands of a smart writer, they become more than just a recitation of facts from a police blotter. The visceral aspects of the violence are often less sensationalized and vulgar in this context, too.
Veteran TV producer and former Miami Herald writer John Huddy, while visiting Las Vegas, caught a whiff of a tale about a Cuban refugee -- a Marielito, in fact -- in custody after leading a succession of ultra-violent robberies at some of the city's best-known casinos. Having started his career as a cops-and-courts reporter, Huddy knew that law enforcement personnel are usually fairly circumspect about their cases, preferring not to blab too much. But there was something about this case that piqued Huddy's interest.
Miami Herald readers in the mid-to-late 1970s and early '80s should remember Huddy, a writer -- like Edna Buchanan and Carl Hiaasen -- who made the newspaper a legend. Steve Martin recently gave props to Huddy in his memoir Born Standing Up, crediting the writer as the first to recognize his unique brand of post-modern comedy at a time when Martin considered giving up.
Huddy's skill is apparent in Storming Las Vegas, an amazing and absorbing story. The leader of the gang, Jose Vigoa, was a Cuban national trained by the Soviet military who fought in Afghanistan and Angola as a Special Forces officer. He arrived in the United States during the Mariel boatlift and quickly joined a relative in Las Vegas. After several menial jobs, he dealt drugs, got caught and went to prison. Upon release, he formed a gang and in a 16-month period, hit five high-profile casinos: the MGM, the Desert Inn, New York, New York, the Mandalay Bay and the Bellagio, netting millions of dollars. Though the crimes were meticulously planned, and Vigoa claimed to have planned to avoid violence, two security guards were killed during a shootout at one robbery.
Huddy had the cooperation of almost all of the major players in the story, including Vigoa and the Las Vegas police detective who led the investigation, so the story is well told and suspenseful. Huddy's father ran Guantanamo Bay's telephone system, and he grew up on the base, speaks Spanish and visited the island to interview Vigoa's mother to try to gain insight into his subject's psyche, to little avail. Huddy also floats a theory that Vigoa might have been sent to the United States under the auspices of Cuban or Soviet Intelligence, but substantiating this supposition is not possible, since Cuba won't confirm the details of Vigoa's service.
Storming Las Vegas may not provide answers to the question of why crime fascinates non-criminals. But Huddy's vivid, visceral prose and lean narrative makes reading about this episode of extreme criminal violence much more than a guilty pleasure.
Richard Pachter is a writer in Boca Raton.
