Las Vegas Profile: Jose Vigoa

by Jake Gosselin | Apr 18 2008

Jose Vigoa arrived in Las Vegas in the blistering hot July of 1980. Vigoa, who had just fled Cuba along with thousands of other refugees, was shocked by the strange new world he had found himself in. "I felt like I had walked through a time tunnel and was in another world and dimension," he remarked years later.

But not only did Vigoa learn his way around Las Vegas, he went on to become one of America's most famous criminals as he took down Vegas like none before him.

Vigoa was recently immortalized in new book receiving rave reviews by John Huddy called 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. The true crime tale vacillates between a first person account from Vigoa and Huddy's narration.

It's no wonder that the book has become so popular since Vigoa's story is the stuff of Hollywood legend.

At 13, Vigoa uprooted from his simple life that revolved around nothing more innocuous than baseball when he was recruited and sent to the Soviet Union to join the elite Spetsnaz force fighting in Angola and Afghanistan. It was there that Vigoa would be molded into an elite commando with extensive training in surveillance and the use of automatic weapons.

After his tour in Asia, Vigoa fled Cuba during the Mariel boatlift. Arriving in Vegas, he found himself unable to support his family through the paltry work he found at casinos, so he found new employment making cocaine deliveries. Eventually, he was caught, and while the FBI were giving chase, he tried to run over two agents. The drug trafficking charges along with the attack on the agents saw him sentenced to 19 years in prison.

Vigoa tried to make an honest go of it after being released on parole several years later but found it too difficult to eke out a living. He claims that a parole officer would routinely show up at his job advertising his criminal record.

Vigoa decided not only to return to a life of crime but to do it on a much larger scale using the skills he'd acquired in Angola and Afghanistan. He began by conducting detailed and methodical surveillance of the Las Vegas Brink's trucks. After careful preparation, he struck in a series of armed robberies, including hits on five Strip casinos within 16 months.

The local police force was less than prepared. Las Vegas had become a haven for police officers looking to put in time before moving to a major metropolitan force.

Combine that with the fact that this was during the time when Vegas was trying to transform into a family friendly destination, and you can imagine what kind of impact Vigoa's crime spree had on the city. Vigoa's robberies felt less like the work of a thief than they did an urban guerrilla taking his war to the gaudy wealth of corporate Vegas.

Vigoa enlisted a band of not-so-merry-men to make up his crew. By most accounts, this was a band of bumbling fools.

On their first heist, the getaway driver left the car in drive while they executed the robbery. Vigoa noticed the car rolling down the street without its driver as they were about to grab the cash. He was forced to abort the mission.

After that, he decided to take his team out to the desert for some Spetsnaz-style training. Common sense training might have been more useful, however. Their next raid on the Bellagio resulted in them leaving behind $2 million in cash on a table.

"OK, not a very good team," Vigoa says in Storming Las Vegas. "You Americans have a saying, 'Good help is hard to find.' You don't know how right you are. Ask me."

Even though his band of hoodlums never measured up to his level of skill, Vigoa successfully hit some very difficult targets including armored cars and modern casinos that made him millions of dollars.

Vigoa bugged Brink’s trucks and established patterns in their deliveries and pickups. He patiently built detailed plans that exploited the weaknesses he found.

Cautious and well prepared, Vigoa even went so far as to steal 11 cars from a rental car lot so that he could always have three getaway vehicles close to whatever location he was hitting. This gave him and his crew the ability to swap vehicles to throw the police off.

While most heists were pulled off without firing a shot, some had more tragic consequences.

Vigoa, perhaps influenced by his distaste for American capitalism, assumed that no security guard would risk their life to defend someone else’s money. This assumption proved wrong as he ended up killing two guards in a Henderson, Nev., shopping mall. To top it off, the job had only been pulled to confuse police and throw them off his casino jobs.

Vigoa justifies his actions in Storming Las Vegas by saying, "I didn't enjoy killing or crime, but if that's how I could take my family out of poverty, then that's what I would do."

Vigoa's biggest mistake came when he robbed the Bellagio wearing the flimsy disguise of sunglasses and a baseball cap. The Bellagio, which obviously has some high-tech security, managed to get extremely detailed shots of Vigoa. His image ended up being broadcast for four days on Vegas TV and finally resulted in a 100 mph car chase through the city.

Vigoa's capture, arrest and sentencing left him facing more than 500 years in prison with no possibility of parole.

Although Vigoa will never walk the streets of Vegas again, he did set a dangerous precedent. Huddy ends Storming Las Vegas by saying that Vigoa may well represent the criminal masterminds of the future, "trained either by the West or the East, by the insurgents or the occupiers, and they are coming our way."

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