‘Juggling taxi driver’ held at gunpoint in Las Vegas

An Uber driver who juggles for his customers was held at gunpoint while waiting for a fare early Tuesday in downtown Las Vegas.

Daniel Mann, the “juggling taxi driver,” was waiting to pick up a woman behind an apartment building at 98 S. Martin Luther King Blvd. shortly after 2 a.m. when a man walked up to his window and pointed a handgun.

The man banged on the window with the gun and told Mann, 55, to get out of the car, he said Tuesday in a phone interview.

“I thought he was going to shoot me,” Mann said.

Mann floored the gas pedal, escaped uninjured, then called police about 2:15 a.m., he said.

Officers met him at a nearby furniture store parking lot, Metropolitan Police Department spokesman Larry Hadfield said. Police had not made an arrest as of Tuesday afternoon, he said.

Mann has been entertaining his customers with juggling, dancing and jokes in Las Vegas for 11 years. In 2015, he appeared on “America’s Got Talent” to perform his juggling and comedic act.

He has a large following in Ethiopia, Mann said, due in part to his use of Ethiopian musician Teddy Afro’s songs in YouTube videos Mann posts of himself.

After speaking with police about the attempted robbery Tuesday morning, Mann went to Fremont Street to pick up his next fare. Mann still had bills to pay, he said. He told his next customer what had happened, and he juggled in an attempt to make them laugh. But Mann was shaken up, he said.

“You could tell I was still emotional,” said Mann, who also drives for Lyft and used to drive a taxi.

No one had attempted to rob him before, Mann said, and he hopes police will find the person responsible.

“I don’t want this to happen to somebody else,” he said. “I want this person off the street.”

Contact Mike Shoro at mshoro@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5290. Follow @mike_shoro on Twitter.