Trejo approached the woman, who saw his ponytail, pit-bull body and blanket of tattoos. She raised her hands and begged him in Spanish not to harm her.
Trejo said nothing. He took the bins from her, carried them to the kerb and walked off.
"That's when I realised I had to show people I had really changed," Trejo says. "I had to change the way people saw me."
To that end, Trejo has only partly succeeded. Many people still see him as a thug. Except now, he's paid handsomely for it.
And after nearly 200 film and TV appearances, Trejo (66) is anchoring his first big-studio film in Machete.
If Trejo is nervous about the pressures of being what director Robert Rodriguez calls the "first Latino superhero," he shows no signs of jangled nerves.
"Man, look where I could have been," he says over breakfast. "I could still be in prison. Hell, for all I did, I could be headed to the gas chamber. This is all icing."
Few would have pictured a film career for Trejo. Born in Los Angeles' rough Echo Park neighbourhood, Trejo became known in the streets as "The Mayor," a reference to his gregarious nature and iron-fisted rule.
"I was so lazy and self-centred back then," Trejo says.
"Back then, I'd rather rob someone than make my own way."
But when he sold sugar masked as cocaine to an undercover federal agent, being a criminal wasn't so easy. He spent 11 years in San Quentin and Soledad state prisons on drug and robbery charges.
"I knew I was on my last chance," he says.
"I said, 'God, if you're out there, I'm listening. If you're not, I'm screwed'."
Trejo says he heard his mission loud and clear in that cell: To teach. Trejo completed a 12-step rehab programme and was released in 1972. He became a drug counsellor at his local intervention clinic.
He works there still.
In 1984, Trejo got a call from a drug addict he was sponsoring. The man, who was working on a movie crew, told Trejo he was tempted by the cocaine at hand.
Trejo walked to the set in Los Angeles' warehouse district. A casting agent spotted his crinkled-roadmap face and asked if he'd like $50 to be an extra.
When Runaway Train screenwriter Eddie Bunker, a former Folsom Prison, California, inmate recognised Trejo as San Quentin's lightweight and middleweight boxing champ, he suggested Trejo take a job as a boxing trainer for one of the actors.
Trejo trained young star Eric Roberts and, when he earned a best supporting actor Oscar nomination, Trejo became hot property.
Years later, Trejo was in the middle of an autograph session in London, in 2007, with director Robert Rodriguez to promote the release of Grindhouse when he encountered an unusually devoted fan.
"This guy came up to me and lifted his shirt, and he had a huge tattoo of [me as] Machete on his back," recalls Trejo, who usually plays villains who get blown away by the hero.
"He asked me to autograph it and then said he was going to have my signature permanently tattooed. That's when I turned to Robert and said 'You better make this movie, and you better make it good'."
At that time, Machete - the story of a Mexican federale who fights corruption and drug dealers with the eponymous blade - wasn't a real film.
Rodriguez had directed a fake trailer for the movie that was shown during the three-hour Grindhouse, an epic homage to 1970s exploitation pictures.
The Machete clip - replete with preposterous action, gratuitous nudity, tongue-in-cheek acting and a groovy vibe - made such an impression on audiences they began clamouring for a real movie.
As it turns out, Machete is a cheerfully gory, hyper-violent and grandly funny satire in which the taciturn hero must avenge the bloody murder of his family by a drug kingpin (Steven Seagal) and bring down a corrupt senator (Robert De Niro) who wants to build an electrified fence along the US-Mexico border.
The 15-year gestation of Machete has paid off in an unexpected way. The film's pointed satire of US immigration policy suddenly seems insanely timely - and not all that far-fetched - after the passing of a controversial Arizona law that allows police officers to question people they suspect of having crossed the border illegally.
"Whenever we screen the movie, everybody looks at each other and thinks 'this is real'," Rodriguez says.
