Crimes of Delusion : Slain Escapee Danny Vega Never Lived Up to His ‘Mafia’ Legend

Even in the brief afterglow of glory following his bold escape from the Pasadena Superior Court building last week, Danny Angel Vega was not the cunning, notorious criminal he fantasized himself to be.

He had fabricated a past as a Mafia hit man with 27 murders to his credit, a $17-million bank account and a string of beautiful actresses as lovers. Then he tried to act out that fantasy to frighten and impress the victims of his robberies and extortions, and later to interest attorneys and journalists in his court cases.

But court records and interviews with his family, attorneys and law enforcement officials provide a more mundane picture of the 26-year-old Huntington Park native who was gunned down by police April 14 as he hid in the crawl space of a Victorian home in the Mt. Washington area of northeast Los Angeles.

“Danny would have liked to be a big-time hoodlum, but he never got past the car-stealing stage,” said Tony Cota, a court-appointed investigator who had assisted Vega in one of his numerous criminal trials.

Never Fired a Gun

“For all his outward meanness, I don’t know of one instance where he ever fired a gun or actually used a weapon,” said Ray Fountain, a Pasadena attorney who defended Vega two years ago in a series of kidnaping-for-robbery cases.

Vega’s criminal life was cluttered with ingenious schemes that were bungled through stupid oversights or arrogance, court records show. His audacious, brilliantly conceived escape from the Pasadena courthouse and its tragic denouement after just 24 hours of freedom was no different.

If Vega finally lived up to his delusions by making an escape in shackles which depended on the mysterious appearance of a handgun and the perfect timing of a getaway car, what he did in the last hours of his life only confirmed his careless past.

Once free, he got only six miles away from the courthouse and was found by a security guard the next morning sleeping in a blue Toyota pickup in a residential area patrolled by the Blue Shield Protective Services.

Panicked, Stole Pistol

An all-points bulletin had been issued on the pickup, but the guard did not know it. In fact, after determining that Vega was just someone napping, the guard radioed superiors that everything was fine. But Vega, apparently thinking the guard was calling police, panicked and stole the guard’s .357-caliber Magnum handgun.

Then, instead of shooting the disarmed guard or driving away, Vega fled on foot. The guard alerted Los Angeles police, and a two-hour manhunt ensued. Vega, a one-time sheriff’s informant, was cornered and shot several times as he apparently reached for his gun.

“Anyone who could engineer that kind of escape from jail, have a gun sneaked in and a car waiting for him, you would think that person would be in South America the next day rather than sleeping in his car in a patrolled neighborhood,” said Jeffrey Semow, a deputy district attorney who was about to prosecute Vega for attempted extortion.

“An act of criminal brilliance followed by an act of incredible stupidity: That was the story of Danny’s life,” Fountain said. “I don’t know how to account for it except to say that maybe deep down Danny wanted to get caught.”

Too Meek for Role

A career criminal, Vega enjoyed terrorizing his victims but never physically harmed any of them, court records show. Several attorneys and court officers who knew Vega said he was too meek for the role he set out for himself.

Once, after stealing several thousand dollars and a car from a Montebello woman, Vega gave the crying woman taxi fare to get home.

Despite his claims of violence, Vega was basically a car thief who made the mistake of briefly detaining and threatening the owners of the expensive cars he targeted. It meant that instead of facing robbery charges, he was convicted of the much more serious crime of kidnaping for the purpose of robbery, convictions that resulted in three consecutive life sentences in 1985.

From his jail cell, Vega enjoyed manipulating the judicial system. His court file is thick with the legal motions he researched and filed in meticulous penmanship on yellow legal paper.

And although sheriff’s officials refuse to discuss it, Vega was at one time an informant who attempted to trade information for leniency.

Internal Probe

Information that Vega provided to sheriff’s investigators in late 1983 led to a lengthy internal probe of a sheriff’s deputy and a county firefighter whom Vega named as his accomplices in an auto theft ring, according to court records and Vega’s attorneys.

At the same time, Vega provided leads on suspected organized crime figures allegedly involved in the smuggling and sale of illegal arms in Los Angeles.

Robert Carney, a deputy district attorney who prosecuted Vega in Pasadena Superior Court on the three counts of kidnaping for robbery, said that although sheriff’s officials gave Vega preferential treatment as a prisoner in exchange for information, his accounts of the auto theft ring and the illegal gun operation could never be substantiated.

“Nothing of any real value ever came from any of the information he gave,” Carney said. “Danny Vega had a very active imagination.”

But Gerald Peterson, a public defender who represented Vega for a time, said Vega had “solid information” in both cases that was initially greeted with excitement by sheriff’s investigators.

‘Told Wild Stories’

“The problem with Danny was that he told so many wild stories that it was hard to separate the wheat from the chaff,” Peterson said. “But some of the information he gave was panning out.”

Peterson said he was told by sheriff’s officials that Vega’s accusations against the sheriff’s deputy and the firefighter were taken seriously enough to have search warrants obtained for their homes and a place of business. Peterson, however, was never told the final outcome of the internal probe or whether the two men were ever suspended or prosecuted.

Peterson said he was present when Vega, calling from the Crescenta Valley sheriff’s substation, contacted a crime figure and inquired about purchasing illegal arms. Peterson said the man appeared to know Vega and suggested that further dealings be conducted in person.

As Vega hung up the phone, Peterson recalled, sheriff’s investigators became giddy at the prospect of breaking up the operation.

‘On to Something’

“It was confirmed in my mind and it was confirmed in their mind that Danny was on to something,” he said. “They talked about wiring Danny for sound and letting him go undercover. But they never followed up on it. To this day, I can’t understand why.”

Sheriff’s officials at the Crescenta Valley substation would not discuss Vega. They would only acknowledge that Vega was a prisoner there for several weeks in late 1983 and early 1984.

In two interviews with The Times from County Jail in 1985, Vega leveled numerous charges against sheriff’s deputies and promised to provide evidence of the auto theft ring and a prostitution ring allegedly operated by other deputies. Later, after Vega was out on bail, he repeated the charges in a telephone conversation with a Times reporter.

Vega identified himself as the “Godfather” and said he was calling from New York City. He said video and cassette tapes of his criminal dealings with corrupt deputies would be given to the reporter through his “Fall Guy” co-star Heather Thomas, who he said was his close fried. When asked how he knew Thomas, Vega said he went to school with the actress in Venice.

But the tapes never materialized. And the personal background Vega provided was at odds with information gleaned from court records and interviews with his wife, mother and sister.

Excelled in School

Vega, the third of five children, attended grammar school, junior high and high school in Huntington Park. Natalia Vega, 49, said her son, whom she called “mi gordo” or “my chubby one,” quickly distinguished himself in school, showing an early talent for drawing.

“He was the brightest of my children. He always got A’s and B’s in school,” she said in Spanish. “That’s why we can’t believe the quick change that happened in him.”

At 16, Vega joined the Florencias, a Latino street gang that roamed Florence Street in Huntington Park. But Vega used the group more for social contacts than for troublemaking. He worked at Pep Boys and the local Farm Boys Market and graduated from high school.

But when Susan Vega met her future husband in 1980, he was 19 years old and had already begun forging checks and stealing credit cards.

‘His Life Turned Around’

“We worked together at a clothing store in downtown L.A. Danny was my first love and I was really his first girlfriend,” said Susan Vega, who lives with her mother in Monterey Park. “He was a good boy, but when he turned 20 his life just turned around.

“He was always intrigued with the Mafia, the fast life, the money, the nice cars and nice things. It was a fantasy with him. The older he got, the worse and worse it got.”

Even so, she said, she decided to marry Vega in County Jail last October after he had been sentenced to three consecutive life terms. “It’s hard to explain him. He was really two people. There were two sides to him,” she said. “Danny did a lot of wrong, but he never hurt anyone. Danny had a chance to shoot that guard and be free, but he didn’t. That’s what I think of most.”

Until the end, Natalia Vega said, her son tried to insulate the rest of the family from his criminal side.

“He always kept the bad things to himself. He never told us what he was doing and he never showed any disrespect,” she said. “I felt he could have been someone better than he was. But he was still my son, and I loved him.”

Police Criticized

Both his wife and his mother--who buried Vega Monday after an elaborate Catholic Mass at St. Martha Church in Huntington Park, a few blocks from where he grew up--criticized police for not using tear gas or some other method to flush out Vega while he was cornered.

“Danny wasn’t a killer. And that morning, he never fired a shot,” Susan Vega said. “But they fired seven times and they shot him in the head.”

But prosecutors who had come to know Vega through his many criminal cases and jury trials defended police actions.

“His crimes were motivated more out of greed than a desire to inflict physical pain,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Semow said. “But I wouldn’t characterize him as a Robin Hood just because he never chopped off anybody’s head. He was dangerous.”

Vega’s method of operation during six years of crime bears out both his potential dangerousness and the numerous blunders that resulted in repeated arrests and convictions.

In late 1983, Vega, who had just finished serving a year in prison for forging checks, began stealing expensive cars from private owners who had advertised in the classified section of the Los Angeles Times.

Pointed Gun at Head

One victim, Donna Matukas of La Crescenta, told police that shortly after she accompanied Vega on a test drive, he pulled out a gun, pointed it at her head and threatened to kill her. Matukas was so frightened that she tried to get out of the car as it approached a freeway on-ramp, but Vega stopped her.

Vega was later caught because he left his Volkswagen with vehicle identification papers in Matukas’ neighborhood.

In other cases, according to police reports, Vega told his victims that he had been hired by the mob to kill them because their employers had backed out of drug deals. While stealing a Cadillac limousine, he pressed his gun to a car salesman’s temple and remarked: “Maybe I should blow you away now and watch the blood squirt.”

“Mr. Vega was a professional car thief, and he could have stolen those cars the easy way without ever coming in contact with his victims,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Carney. “But he chose to confront them and terrorize them. He apparently got a real thrill out of it.”

In March, 1985, while Vega was awaiting sentencing in the kidnap-for-robbery cases, he was able to bail himself out of jail by posting a $100,000 bond. The district attorney’s office, mistakenly thinking that Vega was also still being held for a parole violation, failed to increase the bail to a higher amount commensurate with his crimes.

Caught Months Later

One week after his release, Vega was back on the streets of Los Angeles stealing cars and trying to extort money. He was caught five months later in Alhambra during a police stakeout of his wife’s home.

In jail, Vega tried to renew his informant relationship with police, according to his court-appointed attorneys and investigators. But his bizarre fantasy world, his delusions of being a big-time mobster courted by Hollywood and high society, had by now completely engulfed him, and police were wary.

He had begun taking old police reports, obliterating the writing on them and replacing it with his own fabrications. He wrote about attorneys telling officials at the Bank of America (where he claimed to have $17 million on account) that “Vega was the new boss of the Gambino organized crime family in New York.”

He linked himself romantically to actresses Ann Turkel, Donna Mills and Heather Thomas. He wrote that Turkel and Thomas had attended “Mafia summits” with him. He claimed that a six-month affair with Mills had ended bitterly when she discovered his love for Turkel.

Sue Sarkis, an investigator who was helping Vega defend himself against car theft charges in an April, 1985, case, said Vega claimed he was at a party the night of the incident and listed cosmetics magnate Estee Lauder and TV producer Norman Lear as people who would provide an alibi.

‘Ludicrous Rainbows’

“He had me chasing after ludicrous rainbows,” Sarkis said. “I determined pretty quickly that all of it was pure fantasy.”

Once his relationship with police was severed and he could no longer trade information for leniency, Sarkis said, Vega had nothing to lose. He vowed to Sarkis that he would escape and kill his former attorney Fountain, with whom he was displeased, and Pasadena Superior Court Judge Coleman Swart, who had sentenced him last year to 23 additional years for robbery and false imprisonment.

On the morning of April 13, Vega was in a holding cell in the basement of the Pasadena courthouse while the other prisoners were being taken by sheriff’s deputies to courtrooms upstairs. Because he was security risk, Vega was kept alone. Only one deputy was watching over him.

In leg irons and handcuffs, Vega feigned illness and asked the unarmed deputy if he could be taken to a nearby holding tank to use the bathroom. He then pulled out a small handgun, locked the deputy in the holding cell and escaped up a ramp and through two electronically controlled doors and an iron grate.

Men Waited in Pickup

A witness saw Vega hobble across Euclid Street to a municipal parking lot where two men waited in a blue pickup. Police still do not know how Vega managed to secure the gun nor do they know the identity of the two men.

Sarkis believes the breakout and the total lack of a follow-up plan revealed a death wish on the part of Vega.

“I find it very hard to believe that he would have something so well planned and not have a hide-out,” she said. “Then he ends up in a neighborhood that’s very visible in a car that has an all-points bulletin on it.

“I think Danny wanted to die. I think, in a way, he got caught up in his own stupid legend.”