They wore no coats. They just shivered there, in the crisp night air. And to the cabdriver who slowed to study the three men who'd called for a ride, this seemed strange. It was January, after all, and the temperature in Santa Ana, California, had dipped into the 50s. Yet these men had on only collared shirts. As they piled into Long Ma's warm car, the driver filed that detail away.

“Take us to Walmart,” said the man who settled into the passenger seat—and this was the second signal to Ma that something was off. Ma recognized from the man's voice that he was the one who'd called for the cab, telling Ma that he and his friends had needed a ride home.

His name was Bac Duong, and he spoke to Ma in Vietnamese—their shared native language—and wore on his thin and weary face a salt-and-pepper goatee. It was 9:30 at night, and now they wanted to go shopping? Ma thought. What happened to going home?

In the rearview mirror, Ma could see Duong's friends, quiet in the backseat: Jonathan Tieu, a pimply 20-year-old, and Hossein Nayeri, an athletic Persian with an air of insouciance.

Bac Duong Hossein Nayeri Jonathan Tieu

Ma said nothing, just plotted a course through the outlays of Orange County. He had moved here, to greater Los Angeles's Little Saigon, four years ago, after a painful divorce, taking a room at a boarding house and starting a new life as a self-employed cabbie. Ma never bothered to get his car—a worn Honda Civic—registered for commercial use. He didn't see the point. Little Saigon had always felt to him like a place that enforced its own rules, and so he lived by an old Vietnamese proverb: The king's rule ends at the village gate. He was 71, and in more ways than one, he was on his own. The work had a way of easing the loneliness he felt.

At Walmart, Ma dropped the men off at the door and was asked to wait. But soon Duong and the others wandered back to the car. They needed to go to a Target in Rosemead instead, they told Ma. As Ma began to protest—the store was 45 minutes away—Duong reassured him: “Look, we'll pay you $100 extra.”

Fine, Ma said.

Once at Target, the men were inside forever. Ma had no way of knowing what they were doing in there—that they were desperate for phones, for clothes, and for some semblance of a plan. For all their casual silence since getting picked up, the three men had been growing impatient. The night was ticking away. Outside, Ma was trying hard not to be frustrated, too. He paced to the far end of the deserted parking lot, a slim Vietnamese cigarette between his fingers. He had been asleep when Duong had called and he hadn't bothered changing out of his pajamas. This was supposed to be just a quick ride, he thought. What was going on in there?

It was after 11:30 when they emerged, and as they found their seats in the car, Duong seemed to sense the driver's agitation. “My mom's place is right around here,” he lied. “Take us there, please.”

The streets were dark and quiet, and after a few minutes, Duong motioned to a coffee shop that anchored a mangy strip mall. “Pull in here,” he said. Ma realized this was no home, but he reluctantly complied. As Ma parked, Duong twisted around and locked eyes with Tieu in the backseat. Duong spoke in English: “Give me the gun.”

Ma flinched. His eyes darted to the mirror, and he watched with panic as Tieu handed Duong a pistol. A moment later, Duong had it pointed at Ma and told the driver, calmly, in Vietnamese: “We need your help.”

If they killed the driver now, they could make a cleaner escape. Ma watched as Nayeri pointed in his direction and shouted, “boom boom, old man!”

Ma's mind raced. “Please, just take what you want,” Ma told Duong, his heart drumming in his ribs. Duong flashed him an odd look. “No, you need to come with us,” he said. “Get out of the car.”

The men patted the driver down and placed him in the backseat, where Tieu trained the gun on Ma's stomach. Nayeri jumped behind the wheel, and they set out for a nearby motel.

By the time they arrived, Ma was convinced he was going to die—he just didn't know how, or when. Inside a cramped room, he watched as his captors pulled clothes and cell phones from their shopping bags. The men were growing tired now, it was clear.

He watched as Nayeri, who he suspected was the group's ringleader, splayed out on one of the two beds. Ma was ordered to double up with Duong on the other as Tieu curled up on the floor near the door, resting the gun carefully under his pillow. For Ma, there was no escape and, with all the dread he felt, no easy way to fall asleep.

In the morning, as the sun broke through the curtains, the old man felt Duong roll over and grab for the remote. He clicked it and the TV came alive with breaking news of a daring prison escape.

“Hey,” Duong shouted, “that's us!”

Mug shots filled the screen. A massive manhunt, Ma now learned, was under way for the three guys he was watching sit up in bed. They were riveted as the broadcasters ran through the litany of alleged crimes that had put them in jail—murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, and torture. They hooted and marveled at their own images on TV, their instant fame.

The scheme that had won them their freedom had clicked into motion a day earlier, in the last moments before dawn. That was when Duong—sprawled on a bunk in the open-floor dormitory of the Orange County Jail's Module F—had watched the guard finish his 5 a.m. head count. In the months that the three men had been formulating a plan to escape, a series of factors inside the jail had been tilting the odds of success in their favor. According to a lawsuit later filed on behalf of jail guards, the facility had grown overburdened and insufficiently staffed. Duong had allegedly exploited this, tapping criminal contacts on the outside to help him acquire contraband tools that could be useful in an escape.

Gathering intel had been easier than it should have been, too. Months earlier, Nayeri had met a college instructor, a woman named Nooshafarin Ravaghi, who visited the jail to teach English. She spoke four languages and had authored a series of children's books about a girl discovering her Persian roots. When the Iranian-born Nayeri began attending her class, the two grew friendly. She seemed to respond to his persuasive charm, because one day she'd passed to him something he'd needed: a printout from Google Earth that showed a satellite image of the jail's roof, one floor above Module F.