Danny Trejo recalls being hypnotized by Charles Manson while the two were in jail 60 years ago in his biography, Trejo, according to Page Six.

The meeting took place in 1968, a year before the Manson Family killings, according to Trejo.

Danny Trejo was locked up in the Los Angeles County Jail in 1961 alongside someone he described as “greasy, dirty, scrawny.” Charles Manson was “so poor, he didn’t have a belt, and instead used a piece of string to keep his pants up.” The Machete star claims he felt terrible for Manson at the time since he was so small and clearly needed protection. The famed cult leader assured Trejo and his cellies a few days after their initial encounter that he had hypnotic skills and “could get us high.”

Trejo was only 17 years old at the time.

Trejo described Manson as “a slick little wimp. He wasn’t a bully. Wasn’t a thug. But he had the jargon of prison and jail.”

The Machete star, along with two other individuals in his cell—Johnny Ronnie and Tacho—promised to keep an eye out for him out of pity.

“That white boy could have been a professional hypnotist if he wasn’t a career criminal,” Trejo says, “someone who went to high schools and state fairs and got people to come onstage and act like cats and stuff.”

Trejo then reveals Manson’s name, adding: “But he was, in fact, a career criminal. He was Charles Manson.”

Manson’s strategy, according to the actor, was effective.

In his memoir, the convict-turned-actor describes it as “a guided meditation.”

Trejo was convinced into believing they were smoking cannabis and doing heroin by Manson.

“The dude sat us down and told us to close our eyes,” Trejo recalled, per Fox News. “For 15 minutes, in great detail, he walked us through the process of copping the dope, finding a place to fix, cooking the heroin in a spoon, drawing it into a needle, and sticking it in our veins. Even before I fake-fixed, I could taste it in my mouth. Any junkie knows what that is like.

“By the time he described it hitting my bloodstream, I felt the warmth flowing through my body,” Trejo remembers.

Manson was freed from jail two years before he and his “family” murdered five people, including actress Sharon Tate, at Terry Melcher’s house in 1969. Until his death in 2017, he was imprisoned.

Manson’s power of persuasion was enough to convict him of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder, despite the fact that he did not kill anybody expressly.

Danny Trejo’s story is one that begs to be told. He recalls being taken into a police station for the first time when he was ten years old. He spent the rest of his life committing illegal acts throughout the San Fernando Valley and across the state, in and out of juvenile and state prisons, never expecting to make it out alive.

Trejo got his start in the industry after visiting a film set in 1985 to assist a crew member who was struggling with addiction rehabilitation. He’d completed the task himself.

On the set that day, he was stopped by an assistant director. “You have a good look,” a crew member commented. “Can you play a convict?” Trejo stood out so prominently as an extra in Runaway Train that year that a scene was crafted around him, employing his boxing abilities he’d learnt in jail. He quickly rose to prominence as an archetypal supporting character in a variety of series and films, including Prisoner, 2nd Inmate, and Tough Prisoner No. 1.

“I didn’t know I was being stereotyped,” Trejo says. “I just knew I was working. And I think the fact that I was stereotyped for so long got a lot of people jobs, so we just opened the door.”

Trejo recalls being placed in solitary confinement during his stint in prison while speaking with NME in 2020.

“They were gonna send us to the gas chamber so I remember making a deal with God and saying, ‘if you let me die with dignity, I will say your name every day, and I will do whatever I can for my fellow man’,” he said.