The Botched Assassination of Garrett Warren: Hollywood is Horrible

Human beings are curiously tribal. This aspect of our culture drives almost everything about our lives. For instance, most normal folk love their children and will go to great lengths to do good things for them. The inimitable bond among soldiers has to be experienced to be truly appreciated. Whether it is a high school football team, a college sorority, or an infantry squad, social intimacy invariably breeds a sense of familial loyalty. And then sometimes the simple social dynamic around a pizza joint can morph into something fairly extraordinary.

By all accounts, Miguel Quiroz was a pretty bad guy. He was an entrepreneur who owned B&J’s Pizza in Rancho Cucamonga, California. He also did a little drug dealing on the side. The fellowship he enjoyed with one of his workers, a young man named Manuel Haro, ultimately led him into the sordid world of contract killing as well. The catalyst was that Manuel Haro’s sister was a sociopath.

Sociopath—noun

        A person with a psychopathic personality whose behavior is antisocial, often criminal, and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.

Manuel’s sister Claudia Haro was an actress. She was apparently fairly good at it. She contracted the killing of her ex-husband and then successfully deflected her involvement through a series of police interviews for years after the attempt. At that point, her life went epically pear-shaped. As acting goes, that seems a pretty competent performance to me.

This tale has a lot of bizarre twists and turns. Claudia was previously married to the Oscar-winning actor Joe Pesci. After they divorced the two remained close. She lived in his guest house intermittently after their 1991 split.

The world of Hollywood is arguably the most dysfunctional on the planet. The profession selects gorgeous, vain, narcissistic people who are accustomed to going to extremes to achieve their personal goals. For some that is exchanging sexual favors for that first big break into the business. For others, it is slaving away at menial jobs in hopes of someday being discovered. In Claudia Haro’s case, that all-or-nothing worldview took her to a terribly dark place.

The Mark

Garrett Warren was the consummate professional. An accomplished martial artist and stuntman with work on such titles as Avatar and Mission Impossible III under his belt, Garrett served as Mickey Rourke’s stunt double in the Marvel epic Iron Man II. As a result of his curious day job, Garrett ran in some fairly rarefied circles. He enjoyed the company and friendship of the Hollywood elite. He met Claudia Haro, Joe Pesci’s hot ex-wife, through friends at a function at the Lake Sherwood country club. Claudia’s film credits included With Honors, Jimmy Hollywood, New Nightmare, Casino, and Gone Fishin’. Most of her movie success seems to have been tied to her famous ex-husband. 

Garrett and Claudia began dating and were subsequently married in 1998. Soon thereafter they had a daughter. However, the frenetic Hollywood lifestyle is reliably toxic to a family. In 2000 the two filed for divorce. Warren was granted joint custody of the pair’s young daughter. Claudia did not care for this.

The Hit

On Saturday evening, May 20, 2000, Garrett Warren was at his rented home with his mom when someone began persistently ringing his doorbell. Warren spoke through the door with a man who inquired about his Volvo automobile. The man then began veritably beating on the door. After half a dozen obnoxious iterations of this Warren opened the door to find an agitated man outside. He would later claim he thought the man was either Italian or Israeli.

With minimal fanfare, the man raised a .32-caliber automatic handgun and opened fire. Garrett Warren was an experienced stuntman and martial artist. He twisted instinctively in an attempt at avoiding the barrage of gunfire. He was nonetheless struck in the chest, neck, and left hip. After he fell to the floor his assailant fired one more round into his right eye. Garrett’s mom ran toward the gunfire, and the man loosed two rounds at her as well, both of which missed their mark. The shooter then fled into the night.

Garrett was grievously wounded but survived. The .32ACP is a notoriously poor stopper, and this fact combined with Warren’s physical conditioning and agility conspired to save his life. However, those four rounds that did connect still nonetheless rightly tore him up. After multiple surgeries, Garrett recovered, but he is now permanently blind in his right eye. Nowadays he does rock an epic eye patch, so there’s at least that.

The Cartridge

Despite a fair amount of looking, I was unable to determine the specific weapon used in the Garrett Warren hit. However, the cartridge was definitively identified as the .32ACP. This petite little round has had an interesting run.

The .32 Automatic Colt Pistol round is a semi-rimmed, straight-walled pistol cartridge designed by John Moses Browning back in 1899. Browning crafted the round to feed the FN M1900 pocket pistol he had designed for Fabrique Nationale at the time. The .32ACP headspaces on the rim and was Browning’s first successful pistol cartridge.

The .32ACP has already had its day in the sun over on this side of the pond, but its popularity in Europe in the early 20th century cannot be overstated. The Internet claims that the .32ACP has been chambered for more individual handgun types than any other round. In the context of the modern breathtaking success of the 9mm Parabellum I struggle to believe that. However, in the decade beginning in 1899 FN produced half a million pistols chambered for this curious little cartridge. 

While John Pedersen’s Remington Model 51 featured a locked breech design, the majority of .32ACP guns were simple unlocked blowback. These included the Colt Model 1903 Hammerless, the Savage Model 1907, the Browning Model 1910 and 1922, and a wide variety of German pistols such as the Mauser HSc, the Sauer 38H, the Mauser 1914, and the entire family of Walther PP and PPK pistols. The .32ACP even saw use with the Czech Vz61 Skorpion submachine gun.

Ian Fleming described the downrange performance of the .32ACP as being akin to, “a brick through a plate glass window.”  That’s not the way I would have described it, but Ian Fleming was an objectively better writer than am I. Despite Mr. Fleming’s crafting the most successful spy narrative of all time, he really wasn’t much of a gun guy. Much of James Bond’s gun stuff came from Fleming’s gun-nerd friend Geoffrey Boothroyd. We’ll likely explore his story in this venue eventually. It is indeed fascinating.

Pistols chambered for the .32ACP are easy to carry and fun to shoot. However, they don’t project a great deal of downrange horsepower. This is the reason Garrett Warren is alive today.

The Plot Thickens

Claudia Haro was the obvious suspect at the time of the hit, but she successfully talked her way out of trouble at the time. Years later the cops pulled Miguel Quiroz’s Mercedes over for something else and searched his car. Underneath his spare tire, they found papers describing Warren’s daily routine along with his photograph and a few other suspicious pieces of information. Under questioning, Quiroz incriminated part-time hitman Jorge Hernandez, an acquaintance of Manuel Haro’s. At that point, Manuel connected Hernandez to his sister, and the whole story fell into place nicely.

In December 2005, Claudia Haro was arrested and charged with attempted murder. As the details came to light the shooter Jorge Hernandez had allegedly explained, “I apologize, dude. I’m not a good shot … We’ll finish it off if that’s what you need.” During subsequent discussions between Claudia and Jorge, the woman asked, “If it was guaranteed, will there be some kind of warranty, and if the job wasn’t done, would they finish it later?” Apparently, Claudia Haro had not enjoyed a great deal of experience with the dark world of contracted assassination.

Throughout it all Joe Pesci remained at Claudia’s side, insisting upon her innocence. The actor even went so far as to hire a private investigator to prove that she was clean. The PI, a gumshoe named John Perry, later sued the smitten thespian for $100,000 claiming he was stiffed for his fees for the work. Pesci was never implicated in the case despite likely having provided the money to cover the hitman’s original fee of $10,000. Ever the movie star, Claudia made her court appearances dressed to the nines and accompanied by both Pesci and a nun in a white habit. 

Claudia Haro ultimately did not contest the charges and was sentenced to twelve years and four months in prison. She was released in 2019 after serving seven. Jorge Hernandez was sentenced to 77 years in prison and, as near as I can tell, is still there today.

The Rest of the Story

By all accounts, Garrett Warren has had a good life since recovering from the shooting. He remarried and fathered three more children. He has become an in-demand stuntman and personal trainer for the likes of Chris Evans, Jessica Alba, Zoe Saldana, Hugh Jackman, Kate Hudson, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Idris Elba, and Dwayne Johnson. He has since worked in stunts and as a fight coordinator on a wide variety of popular movies. Good for him.

In today’s cancel culture, it is tough to resurrect your show business career once you have been implicated in a murder-for-hire enterprise against your ex-husband. Garrett was granted sole custody of their daughter, and Claudia’s filmography seems to have ended abruptly about the time she tried to kill him. As we discussed at the beginning, human beings are curiously tribal, and sometimes the most extraordinary schemes flourish in some of the most innocuous places–even a pizza joint.

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