Citizen Hughes

by Michael Drosnin

  “The building is taped and wired for an electrical alarm system, but it had not been operative for one year. Without knowledge of this fact, it appears the alarm is operative.”

  “The physical layout of this building and the type of material kept in each office is not general knowledge, even within the organization.”

  “Although only one large Mosler walk-in vault was torched, there are 18 additional vaults on the same floor which were not attacked.”

  “Three of the offices were entered with keys. One of the most important was that of Kay Glenn. Investigating officers tried to shim this door and others and found it was not possible.”

  Even more troubling were the results of polygraph examinations administered to the Hughes employees. Mike Davis, the lone security guard on duty the night of the break-in, failed to appear three times and finally refused to take a lie-detector test. “I just don’t believe in it,” he explained. “A man should be trusted on his word.” Davis was fired. The only witness to the burglary was now himself a suspect.

  His boss, Vince Kelley, Summa’s West Coast security chief, did take a polygraph—but failed. He “displayed guilty knowledge to all four examiners who reviewed the tape,” according to the police report. A later FBI report on Kelley’s test was more explicit: “He was asked about prior knowledge, where the stolen property was located, and if he was present during the robbery. He ‘failed miserably’ when answering all these questions.”

  To clear himself, Kelley arranged a second polygraph test through a private eye, who found him “clean.” What Kelley didn’t mention was that the same private eye and two of their mutual friends had been involved in one of the five earlier Hughes break-ins, the Encino job, and had actually ended up with the stolen scrambler.

  Yet although he had failed to report the earlier theft, failed to install a burglar alarm at Romaine, failed his lie-detector test, and then chose a pal connected with one Hughes burglary to clear him of complicity in another, Kelley was not dismissed. He remained West Coast security chief.

  Adding to this strange puzzle, Kelley’s boss, Ralph Winte, the man in charge of security for the entire Hughes empire, had himself been involved in plotting the theft of another cache of secret Hughes papers. E. Howard Hunt had just recently revealed in sworn Senate testimony that he had plotted with Winte to seize a stash of Hughes’s memos by busting open the safe of Las Vegas newspaper publisher Hank Greenspun, in a joint venture between the Hughes and Nixon forces, approved by Attorney General Mitchell.

  An FBI report on Romaine, noting Winte’s role in that aborted break-in, mentioned that when called before a Watergate grand jury Winte “became so nervous and nauseated that he did not testify.” Yet Winte, like Kelley, not only kept his job but also worked closely with the Los Angeles police in its Romaine probe.

  Still, the police could not help but note that the entire Hughes security apparatus—from the Romaine guard to the top command—was now suspect. The LAPD report on the break-in concluded that “someone within the corporation set up or supplied information for this burglary.” The conclusion seemed both obvious and inevitable: the Great Hughes Heist had been an “inside job.”

  But who was the inside man, who were the burglars, who was behind them, and who had the stolen secret papers?

  The police remained baffled. The FBI was soon drawn into the case, and a top-secret task force was set up at the CIA. The directors of both agencies huddled with each other in Washington, sent emissaries to the chief of police in Los Angeles, finally even briefed the president of the United States and pledged a million dollars to the quest—all in a desperate effort to track down the burglars and recover, if need be buy back, Howard Hughes’s dangerous secrets.

  But the break-in was never solved, and none of the stolen papers were ever found. The papers were still missing, and the mystery still remained, when I began my own investigation years later.

  What follows is the true story of the Great Hughes Heist and of how I found the secret papers of the world’s most secretive man.

  “Got a guy that tells me he can put us right into Howard Hughes’s stash,” said the Jiggler to the Pro.

  That’s how it all began. Early in May, over lunch in a Los Angeles drugstore. Sitting in the booth across the table, the Pro just smiled.

  Funny little guy, the Jiggler. Always had some “big deal” going. He’d come by, talking out of the side of his mouth, acting tough, telling the Pro about his latest scores. But the Pro knew he was small change, the lowest order of thief, just a key-jiggler who hung around parking lots at public swimming pools and private country clubs, breaking into empty cars, snatching wallets and watches from the glove compartments.

  And here he was talking about taking Howard Hughes. Sitting in some damn drugstore, talking about the all-time fucking ultimate Big Score.

  “Okey-dokey,” said the Pro. “We’ll hit Hughes first, then knock over J. Paul Getty. Maybe take the Rockefellers too.”

  The Jiggler didn’t laugh. He knew that this Hughes job was for real. He could just feel it.

  “Look,” he told the Pro. “Look, I’ve stumbled into one hell of a thing. This red-headed guy says he can put us right into Hughes’s stash. He wants to meet. He wants to talk right now.”

  The Pro was intrigued. Not buying, but definitely intrigued. “No names,” he told the Jiggler, looking hard across the table, letting him feel the stare.

  “No names,” the Jiggler assured him. “Red, he don’t know your name. I ain’t told him nothing.”

  So they took the freeway to Red’s place, and the Pro was impressed. It was on the better side of Hollywood, an expensive apartment with lots of good jewelry lying around and closets full of hot suits, Red being a fence. But Red himself was a real sleaze, and the Pro saw scam, not score.

  Red asked him about opening vaults, big walk-in jobs, asked if he could handle it. The Pro said he could bust anything. They talked for an hour, but no one mentioned Hughes.

  A couple of weeks later, the Jiggler was back. Told the Pro that Red was ready to show him something.

  “What do ya know about 7000 Romaine?” asked Red. The Pro said he’d never heard of it. “That’s Howard Hughes’s stash,” said Red. “I got an inside man who can put us in the place.”

  “I thought you were going to show me something,” said the Pro.

  “I am,” said Red. “I’m gonna show you the inside of Hughes’s stash.”

  The three of them—Red, the Jiggler, and the Pro—drove over to Romaine late that evening, pulled into the parking lot out back. An impatient guy was waiting nervously outside the building, motioning them to come over, not openly waving his arm but making a surreptitious little gesture with his hand held close to his side.

  Mr. Inside opened the door without ceremony. Red and the Jiggler slid in. The Pro couldn’t believe what was going down. He’d had more trouble breaking into a vending machine. Something smelled wrong. He remained outside.

  Red came back to the door, said, “Come on, come in.”

  “I don’t have my tools,” said the Pro.

  Red said, “No, just come in and look around.”

  Mr. Inside joined them. “Just make yourself at home,” he told the Pro, inviting him in. “Don’t worry. There’s no one else here.”

  The Pro couldn’t resist. He went in and right away came face-to-face with a solid wall of Mosler walk-in vaults. A block-long hallway lined with nineteen massive old steel-doored floor-to-ceiling safes. The Pro figured he must be dreaming. Or maybe he’d died and gone to heaven.

  “What do you think this joint will go for?” he asked Mr. Inside.

  “At least a million,” said the inside man. “Millions. No telling how much. Some of those vaults are filled to the ceiling with silver dollars. There’s cash everywhere.”

  The Pro looked around at Red and the Jiggler. He felt like one of the Beagle Boys inside Scrooge McDuck’s money bin.

  It was only later, after he left, that the Pro
began to wonder who was really behind this job and what they were really after. And one other thing. Was he being called in as a professional or set up as a fall guy?

  But a week later the Pro was back at Romaine, casing the joint, taking it apart.

  Again, he was there just to look, get the layout, size up the safes, open everything that was unlocked—the offices, the desks, the filing cabinets—light-finger everything, see what Hughes had hidden away in his fabled fortress.

  The place was a maze, dark and eerie. A concrete hallway ran the full length of the building, leading off into numerous side corridors with sudden turns and hidden passageways, all studded with vaults and lined with doors, all of them unmarked, with no hint of what lay on the other side.

  The Pro began to check out the vaults. One was unlocked, but it had not been entered for so many years that it was still hard to pull open the heavy steel door. It creaked and grated with a noise that echoed throughout the vast empty building, and when he was finally able to peer inside, the Pro was more than disappointed. The big vault was filled with cans of film, hundreds of them, the prints and negatives of Hughes’s old movies. Nothing else. Not a single silver dollar.

  But in an office next door, in the first drawer of the first filing cabinet he opened, the Pro spotted the tip of a red money wrapper. He slid it out, saw that it was marked “$10,000,” and pushed it back in. Bingo! Right then and there, the Pro was committed.

  This might be the come-on for a setup, but he had to go ahead. And in a desk drawer in the same office he found keys to the rest of the building.

  Starting down the hallway he tried one door after another, excited now, like a kid on a treasure hunt. First he entered a conference room, empty except for two glass-walled cubby-hole offices, both of them filled with model airplanes. Nothing else. Just model airplanes.

  Across the hall he fumbled with the mess of keys and finally opened the door to another room. Inside were three cases of liquor, old bottles of whiskey and wine that had belonged to Hughes’s father, dead half a century, and at least a hundred gift-wrapped packages, none of them ever opened, the ribbons still tied, most with cards still attached, birthday and Christmas presents sent over the years to the indifferent billionaire.

  Leaning against one wall were eight or ten pictures of Jane Russell, oil paintings on wood, four feet tall, one depicting the buxom actress nearly nude, all of them scenes from her first movie, a 1941 Hughes production, The Outlaw.

  It went on like that as the Pro reeled from one bizarre room to the next, only to discover discarded furniture, rolls of carpet, parts of old movie sets, odd cartons filled with cheap watches or cigarettes or bars of soap, scores of aviation trophies, plaques, and medals, motion-picture equipment, and finally in one room down at the far end of the hall some valuable antiques—Tiffany lamps, marble statues, bronze figurines, ceramic quails—side by side with cartons of junk: more soap, rolls of paper towels, and dozens of scrapbooks filled with old newspaper clippings about Hughes’s public exploits dating back to the 1930s.

  Nothing made any sense. The Pro had burglarized every kind of company in creation, but he had never before encountered anything remotely like this. Romaine was not a corporate headquarters but a warehouse of Hughes memorabilia. The Pro was dismayed. There was obviously cash here, even some valuables, and he did not know what was hidden in the other eighteen locked vaults, but what was out in the open made it look less like a money bin than his grandmother’s attic. It was like Hughes had stored away his life in this cavernous old place.

  The Pro started back down the hall, and between the antiques room and a row of computer banks unlocked another door. It led into a small dark room cluttered with cartons, several bulky humidifiers, a cot, and a rollaway bed. As the Pro shone his flashlight over to the far wall he saw an open closet, looked inside, and nearly fell over in a dead faint.

  For one horrible moment he felt the presence of Howard Hughes. Actually thought he saw him standing there in the closet. In fact, it was just his old clothes, eight or nine double-breasted suits hanging there, along with one white sports coat and an old leather flight jacket, the clothes not merely hanging but sagging from the hangers, rotting on them, obviously untouched for decades.

  On a shelf above lay an assortment of brown glass medicine bottles and several hats, snap-brim Stetsons and a couple of white yachting caps. On the floor below was a pair of old tennis shoes and a half-dozen pairs of aged wingtip brown oxfords with the toes curled all the way up. The Pro couldn’t tear his eyes away from that closet. It was the curled-up shoes that really got to him.

  He spent at least twenty minutes standing in that haunted room, staring at that decaying wardrobe, feeling about as frightened as he had ever felt in his life but unable to leave, repeatedly looking over his shoulder, expecting Hughes to materialize at any moment, to walk out of the shadows of that closet, or worse yet, to reach out and pull him in there.

  Suddenly he felt less like a burglar than a grave robber, opening up a pharaoh’s tomb, fearing the mummy’s curse.

  Now completely drawn into the Hughes mystique and the madness of this place, the Pro made his way up a flight of metal stairs leading to the second floor, half afraid to find out what was there but compelled to look. At a landing halfway up, there was a safe built into the wall. It seemed like an odd place to have one, and although the building was filled with larger, more imposing vaults, he noted it as a prime target. For now, however, he continued upstairs.

  He entered another block-long hallway running the full length of the second floor, also lined with unmarked doors. Most of the offices were empty, but the Pro spotted loose cash, perhaps a thousand in twenties, fifties, and hundreds, inside a desk of an office he knew belonged to the Romaine paymaster; saw a couple of other rooms that looked promising; and then opened a set of heavy walnut double doors with big brass knobs.

  Inside was a reception room with four wall safes, beyond that a large plush office, and beyond that a thirty-foot-long beige-carpeted conference room rich with dark wood paneling and lined with leather-bound law books.

  In the center of that room stood a twelve-foot-long mahogany table, and on that table in very neat rows were ten piles of white paper with typewritten memos and ten piles of yellow legal-pad pages with handwritten messages. All the yellow papers were signed “Howard.”

  His heart pounding, the Pro leafed through them. He saw numbers in the millions, talk of dealings with mobsters and politicians, names like Nixon, Humphrey, Kennedy, Johnson. He felt not only Hughes’s presence now, but also his power.

  And he knew that whatever else was hidden away at Romaine, whatever lay behind the steel doors of those locked vaults, these secret papers were the real prize.

  June 5, 1974. The night of the break-in.

  The Pro knew something was wrong the instant he arrived. There was a stranger leaning against the wall, just inside the door. A man he’d never seen before.

  “Who the fuck is that?” he demanded. Mr. Inside, standing next to the stranger, said, “That’s my partner.”

  The Pro looked around to his own partners, the Jiggler and another man he had brought in for the big job, a professional safecracker he had worked with before. This wasn’t the plan. He had been expecting to find Red waiting there with Mr. Inside. Now, instead, this mystery man.

  Was he a cop? A Hughes operative? Some secret agent? Was he going to bust the Pro right now or blow him away the minute he walked out the door? Whoever this guy was, whoever was really behind this job, the Pro was now certain there was a lot more to it than he had been told.

  But it was too late to back out now, and he wanted to go ahead. He’d never have another chance to take off Howard Hughes.

  He sent the mystery man upstairs with the Jiggler, supposedly to stand guard outside the one occupied room, to make sure that the switchboard operator didn’t walk in on the break-in, but really to have the Jiggler keep watch over this stranger. The two of them, both wearing handkerchief
masks, stood there nervously shoulder to shoulder all night.

  Meanwhile, the Pro and his partner went to work.

  They went straight to the office where the Pro had spotted the $10,000 bank wrapper the night he cased the joint, laid a four-drawer filing cabinet on its back, peeled open a fire safe in the top drawer with a wedge and a hammer and a crowbar—and immediately hit paydirt. Six bundles of hundred-dollar bills, $10,000 in each, eight bundles of fifties each worth $1,000, and perhaps $500 more in small bills.

  The Pro dumped it all into his tool satchel, a dark blue gym bag with white plastic handles, and also threw in two gold Juvenia watches each worth a grand. Not a bad haul. More than seventy big ones from the first safe they popped.

  They left behind several hundred thousand dollars in series-E bonds—worthless paper, all nonnegotiable—and headed across the hall to a row of six walk-in vaults.

  Mr. Inside pointed to one of the old Mosler safes, said it was stuffed with silver dollars, hundreds of bags, thousands in each, all of them old coins worth five bucks apiece. Dragging the two-tank acetylene torch over to the vault, the Pro lowered his goggles and went to work, burning through the ten-foot-high double steel doors until he had cut a hole big enough, and then clambered right in.

  The vault was stacked wall to wall, practically floor to ceiling, all the way back ten feet deep. But not with silver dollars. Climbing over boxes and trunks and assorted debris, the Pro rummaged through the dark safe, shining his flashlight in every direction in an increasingly frantic search for the treasure, only to find another bizarre collection of Hughes’s personal effects: hundreds of hearing aids stashed in several wooden fruit crates; boxes upon boxes of old correspondence, letters and Christmas cards sent to him in decades past; numerous footlockers filled with old screenplays; another trunk of scrapbooks and several crammed with pilot logs; scores of silver-cup flying trophies and a gold cup from a golf tournament; more hearing aids; and a large ceremonial plate from William Randolph Hearst.