And so it goes for more than 300 pages. Writing in the nail-biting present tense, Mr. Huddy reconstructs Mr. Vigoa’s crime spree minute by minute, dwelling with particular fascination on weapons, of which there are many, and plucking obscure details from the record.

Image John Huddy Credit... John Huddy/Ballantine Books

“On Friday, March 3, Prestidge is up by 6,” Mr. Huddy writes of an armored car employee who will later be gunned down by Mr. Vigoa. “He brushes his teeth in the shower, runs in his Hanes underwear to the dryer to grab a fresh sky blue shirt, and eats a bowl of Cap’n Crunch cereal on the run.” Mr. Huddy takes the reader close to the subatomic level at times, but the sheer accretion of minutiae casts a tabloid spell.

Mr. Huddy lucked out with his main character. Truly a man of mystery, Mr. Vigoa, who talked to the author at great length (and drew elaborate diagrams of his heists), claims to have been selected as a 13-year-old by the Cuban military to train in the Soviet Union as a special-forces officer. He later served, he said, in Angola, Afghanistan and “other places I cannot talk about.” An intelligence expert interviewed by Mr. Huddy theorizes that Mr. Vigoa might well have been a Cuban agent who saw the bright lights of Las Vegas and went bad.

Whatever his background, Mr. Vigoa adopted the persona of an urban guerrilla commander waging war against the capitalist banks and casinos. This, after a brief career as a drug dealer and a stretch in the penitentiary. His self-image was grandiose, and Mr. Huddy nurtures it. “What Vigoa called the Fiery Demon was stirring now; it would soon be awake,” he writes at one dramatic juncture. “Vigoa could feel its raw power and white heat gathering strength throughout his body.”

The record makes it clear, however, that a certain amount of self-delusion and fantasy lay behind Mr. Vigoa’s vision of leading a taut, disciplined unit in military-style raids. His sidekicks are bumbling idiots. Things constantly go wrong. On his first heist the driver forgets to leave the getaway car in park. Closing in on the loot, Mr. Vigoa sees his transportation cruising away, driverless. Mission aborted.