Citizen Hughes

by Michael Drosnin

  “It’s clear that Busch and Davis believed they were really doing something big for national security,” recalled a prosecutor who became privy to the details. “But for the guys actually handling the investigation it was a disaster. Nobody knew what was up. The Hughes people were so goddamn mysterious, we couldn’t get a thing out of them, then the FBI steps in and starts playing cat-and-mouse—saying it’s your case, but don’t ask what’s going on—and lurking behind everything there’s the CIA.”

  Indeed, some local law-enforcement officials wondered if the CIA had invented the “national security” claim to sabotage their investigation, to keep them from finding Hughes’s secrets.

  Meanwhile, back in Washington, a hastily formed CIA task force noted that “the burglars may well have been hired by the Corporation itself” and wondered if the Glomar document was really missing at all.

  Perhaps the entire Glomar scare was merely a ploy to cover up Hughes’s theft of his own files and at the same time bring the CIA into his battle against Maheu. “Hughes may attempt to place the blame for the burglary on Maheu,” reported the task force, “simultaneously attempting to ascertain how strongly the Agency feels about the loss of the sensitive document, and hope that the Agency may offer to intercede in the Maheu trial.”

  But the CIA had to assume that the Glomar memo was in fact stolen, had to recognize that even the Russians might have it, and William Colby had to tell that to the president.

  It must have been an odd meeting. In less than a month Richard Nixon would be forced out of office; his dealings with Hughes were under heavy scrutiny; and Colby knew that the president had reason beyond the Glomar to worry about the Romaine heist: the missing secret papers might contain a whole brace of “smoking guns.”

  Indeed, the CIA suspected that the White House itself might be behind the break-in. In its first list of “possible culprits,” the Agency suggested that the burglary was “politically motivated to aid or deter Watergate investigation,” and among “possible customers” the CIA included “anti-impeachment forces if documents are embarrassing.”

  But Colby claimed to recall no mention of Watergate in his meeting with Nixon, and very little talk of Romaine. “Obviously it was a major difficulty, obviously I was responsible to the president and kept him advised as to what was going on. I’m sure we discussed the potential exposure of the Glomar project. But I can’t remember any particular discussion of the break-in. I’m just saying it would be quite normal for me to keep him advised of something like that.”

  And if Nixon had more than the Glomar on his mind, Colby too had other worries. Not only was the Castro assassination plot threatening to blow, but the Hughes organization also had a virtual monopoly on highly classified spy satellites and provided cover for CIA agents working abroad.

  “Obviously we had other contracts with elements of the Hughes empire—research things and technology, and things like that—and to the extent that any of those …” Colby’s voice trailed off. “But I don’t know what was stolen,” he continued. “I’m not sure anybody knows precisely what was taken. So I certainly can’t say that any other project was compromised. I just don’t know.”

  Only one thing was certain: the missing secret papers had to be recovered.

  While the Glomar lowered its giant claw, and Colby huddled with Nixon, and the entire Hughes-CIA-FBI intelligence network went on red alert, two unlikely new characters joined the show. Leo Gordon, a sometime actor and screenwriter, and Donald Ray Woolbright, a sometime used-car salesman known to police as a petty thief.

  Their alleged meeting late in July turned the Great Hughes Heist into an “Upstairs, Downstairs” melodrama, with Woolbright and Gordon playing the lowlife subplot in the running saga of powerful men in desperate pursuit of great secrets. Before it was over, Woolbright would be indicted by a grand jury that heard Gordon as its star witness. The following account of their meeting is based on Gordon’s testimony.

  “I don’t know whether I should tell you this,” Woolbright began hesitantly, pacing the actor’s living room. “But I’ve been beating it around in my head for days, and I’ve been walking the walls with it. I have something that’s very big and I don’t know quite how to handle it.”

  The car salesman was agitated. He couldn’t sit still.

  “Who is the most important man you can think of in the world today?” he suddenly asked.

  “Kissinger,” replied Gordon.

  “How about Howard Hughes?” suggested Woolbright. “What would you say if I told you I had two boxes of Howard Hughes’s personal documents?”

  Gordon, who had seen newspaper accounts of the break-in, guessed that the documents must have come from Romaine. Woolbright, he claimed, simply nodded.

  It was fitting that the Romaine mystery should take its next odd B-movie twist in Leo Gordon’s living room. An aging Hollywood veteran, Gordon had played the second-level heavy in a long string of third-rate movies with titles like The Restless Breed, Gun Fury, and Kitten with a Whip; appropriately, he had also appeared in The Man Who Knew Too Much. His was one of those nameless leathery faces that had flickered through every TV action series from “Gun-smoke” to “The Untouchables.” As an actor, he almost always played the bad guy. His specialty was death scenes; spliced together they would run at least three hours.

  Woolbright also had a tough-guy image. But his was not manufactured in Hollywood. A product of the north St. Louis slums, the car salesman had run up a hometown police record almost as long as Gordon’s list of screen credits. He had twenty-six arrests, on charges ranging from burglary and fencing to assault and carrying a concealed weapon. But for all his arrests, Woolbright had never done any time, and his only conviction was for a petty misdemeanor. Back in St. Louis, police called him a “nickel-and-dimer,” a street hustler with no real stature in the criminal community. And they could not believe that Woolbright was even remotely involved in the Hughes heist.

  “If he did it,” said one officer, “it would be the equivalent of a sandlot ballplayer going to the major leagues and hitting a home run in the World Series his first time at bat.”

  Then how did the used-car salesman come to have the billionaire’s secret papers? He said he got them from “Bennie.”

  According to Gordon, Woolbright told him this strange tale. Woolbright said he was just sitting home one night when he got a call from a St. Louis man named Bennie. And that Bennie—whom he had met at a friend’s funeral two years earlier and never seen again—said he represented four other men from St. Louis who had pulled the Romaine job “on commission.” Now Bennie wanted Woolbright to ransom the purloined papers back to Hughes.

  It was, by Gordon’s account of Woolbright’s odd tale, quite a haul. “There was stuff about political payoffs—Nixon, I think—and references to Hubert Humphrey as ‘our boy Hubert,’ ” claimed the actor. “Files on Air West and TWA. A complete rundown on everything happening in Las Vegas. And a hell of a lot about the CIA.” All of it handwritten by Hughes himself.

  But the ransom attempt had fallen through. The would-be bagman was out of a job. Then Woolbright allegedly began thinking about Clifford Irving and figured that if Irving wangled $750,000 for a bogus autobiography, the real goods should be worth at least as much.

  “That’s why he came to see me,” explained Gordon. “He thought that because I’m a professional writer, I’d be able to help him peddle the papers.”

  Still, Gordon was a very odd choice. Although he often played the villain as an actor, Gordon was in fact quite close to the forces of law and order. A familiar face around police headquarters, he had written more than twenty scripts for “Adam 12,” a TV series glorifying two fictional squad-car cops. The license plates on Gordon’s own car read ADM-12, he had an honorary police badge, and his best friend was an investigator for the district attorney’s office.

  Why would a bagman for the hottest burglars since Watergate risk spilling the beans to an ersatz cop? Why would the burglars entru
st their valuable booty to Woolbright, a man their supposed contact had met only once? It made no sense.

  Yet Gordon’s account would soon become central to the entire Romaine case, and new characters drawn into the drama did confirm the Woolbright connection.

  The actor first took his new partner to see a Hollywood business manager, Joanna Hayes, but she told them nobody would buy hot Hughes papers from a used-car salesman. So they went instead to see a lawyer Gordon had heard was “well connected.”

  Woolbright showed the lawyer, Maynard Davis, a memo supposedly written by Hughes, and Davis placed a call to his “Uncle Sidney”—Sidney Korshak, reputed to be one of the most powerful organized crime leaders in the country.

  As it happened, Los Angeles police believed that Korshak may have played a role in the Romaine heist. According to an LAPD report, Hughes security chief Ralph Winte said he had “received information that there were possibly two attorneys involved, Sidney Korshak and Morris Shenker … if a sale [of the papers] was made, it would be through these attorneys.”

  But Davis claimed his Uncle Sidney was out of town when he called, and swore he never discussed the Hughes papers with him.

  Gordon said he and a dispirited Woolbright left the lawyer’s office and went to a nearby coffee shop. “Well, we tried our best shot and I guess we’re too lightweight to handle it,” the car salesman reportedly said. “It’s too big for us. I’ll just have to give this stuff back to the people and forget it.”

  If Woolbright was discouraged, a large team of FBI men, CIA agents, and LAPD detectives was equally disheartened. Two months had passed since the burglary without a breakthrough, and the Glomar was completing its top-secret mission under threat of sudden exposure.

  Finally, “Adam 12” Gordon tipped off the police. When his weird tale of the Woolbright connection flashed through law-enforcement circles, the reaction was immediate and seemingly decisive. The FBI told the LAPD to have Gordon reestablish contact with Woolbright and sent word to Chief Davis that there was a million dollars in CIA funds available to buy back Hughes’s dangerous secrets.

  “Payoff: This option unquestionably rankles,” noted a CIA report, “but must be considered a mere pittance when weighed against the time, effort, and monies expended to date on Glomar.”

  With the million in hand, the FBI and CIA prepared an elaborate scheme: “Informant being operated by LAPD would meet with chief suspect Woolbright within the next couple of days for the sole purpose of indicating that the informant has a possible interested eastern buyer. LAPD informant will introduce seller to Los Angeles attorney, who would then give name of New York attorney who had client interested in stolen merchandise. Bureau agent from Los Angeles division would be identified as assistant to New York attorney, and would be available to fly to Los Angeles with $100,000 with which to negotiate a buy. Stipulation would be not to buy package unseen, but rather to examine individual pieces of merchandise. It is believed that this procedure would enable undercover agent to examine all merchandise. $100,000 to be placed in safety-deposit box in Los Angeles bank as ‘show money’ to be utilized by undercover agent in buy transaction.”

  That was the plan. Yet despite the trappings of high-level intrigue and high finance, what followed was low comedy.

  On police orders, Gordon met with Woolbright at an all-night restaurant near his home. But the actor had not been given any lines. His instructions were simply to renew contact. No one had told him what to say. Left to improvise, Gordon concocted an odd story. He told Woolbright that movie star Robert Mitchum would put up the money for the stolen papers. The meeting ended indecisively.

  Detectives hurriedly arranged for Gordon to confer with federal officials, but hours before the scheduled strategy meeting, Woolbright called and demanded an immediate rendezvous. The Mitchum story had not gone over. “All right, I’ll level with you,” said Gordon. “The police are onto it. The Feds are onto it. They know about me, and they know about you, and all they’re interested in right now is recovering those documents because national security is involved.”

  Woolbright, according to Gordon, took the news quietly but issued a warning: “The people I’m dealing with are not the nicest people in the world. If this goes wrong, it might take a few years, but we’ll pay the piper.”

  Gordon claims they then struck a deal: Woolbright would get one folder to verify that he had the documents; Gordon would supply $3,500 front money. “He told me he was leaving immediately, then added, ‘But my God, don’t tell the police—if I show up with a tail I’m a dead man.’ ”

  Later that evening, Gordon met for the first time with a government representative. The official said his name was Don Castle, but never showed any identification and refused to say which federal agency he represented. He told Gordon to get word to him through the police when Woolbright called back.

  The call came two weeks later. Woolbright said he was “still working on it.” Gordon was taken for a second meeting with Castle at a North Hollywood hotel. “When this goes down I want a controlled situation,” said the mysterious agent. Then he added with a laugh, “Maybe we’ll get the right folder and solve this whole thing for three or four thousand dollars.”

  It was not to be. Gordon said he never saw or heard from Woolbright again. Nor did he ever have further contact with the mysterious Don Castle.

  “They dropped me like a hot potato after that last meeting,” complained Gordon. “It was really strange. It was like I had the Hope diamond, and zap, all of a sudden it was glass.”

  The great search for the stolen Hughes secrets had come to an abrupt end.

  Why, after gearing up so intense a recovery effort, after bringing in the heads of the CIA, the FBI, and the LAPD, even alerting the president of the United States, why, after pledging a million dollars to the quest, did everyone simply give up after entrusting the entire mission to a second-string movie actor?

  Apparently because Hughes’s secrets were thought to be so dangerous that finally nobody wanted to find them.

  In the weeks that followed the failure of Operation Gordon, the FBI and CIA met to plot a new investigation of the Romaine heist, starting from scratch—and instead quietly decided to drop the whole case.

  An FBI report classified “secret” spelled it all out:

  “Bureau agents met October 31, 1974, with representatives of sister federal agency regarding status of instant case and ramifications of contemplated investigation.

  “Conference at Los Angeles included discussion of possibilities of embarrassment to sister federal agency in the event of direct and full field investigation of theft by FBI.”

  But it was not only the CIA that might be embarrassed.

  “In view of the possibilities of direct investigation and inquiry with some of the nationally known personalities involved with Howard Hughes interests, which might lead to disclosure, it is recommended that no further investigation be conducted by the FBI unless the other interested federal agency is in agreement with the above-mentioned interviews.”

  It was not. Although the Glomar secret remained at risk, top officials of the CIA decided to abandon the investigation. The Agency had learned from a “fairly reliable source” what was stolen from Romaine and passed the unsettling information along to the FBI:

  “Property taken included cash, personal notes, and handwritten memoranda by Howard Hughes; correspondence between Hughes and prominent political figures, etc. The personal papers are said to be sufficient in volume to fill two footlockers and are filed in manilatype folders and catalogued in some fashion. The contents are said to be highly explosive from a political view and, thus, considered both important and valuable to Hughes and others.”

  Political dynamite. Already a president had been driven from office amid speculation that Watergate was triggered by his dealings with Hughes. God only knew what else might be revealed in those stolen documents, what other powers might be implicated in which dirty deals. Neither the FBI nor the CIA wanted an
y part of it.

  Top officials met at Langley late in November to close out the case: “It was finally decided that the Agency would do nothing but monitor the case and request nothing from the FBI except what the FBI is doing: i.e., the FBI is monitoring the Los Angeles Police Department. At the current time the Los Angeles Police Department is not conducting a current investigation, so in effect they are doing nothing at this time.”

  And that’s how the official investigation ended. With the CIA watching the FBI do nothing, and the FBI watching the Los Angeles police do nothing, all of them now afraid to find Howard Hughes’s dangerous secrets, fearing to embarrass “prominent political figures” and “nationally known personalities,” fearing to find secrets best left untold.

  It was like the final scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. No one wanted to find the Romaine raiders, much less open the lost Hughes ark.

  It was almost two years later when I entered the case, looking only for the answers to a few questions about the Glomar.

  Woolbright was about to come to trial, and I assumed that the Romaine break-in had been solved, the burglars arrested, the loot recovered. But I had not made more than a few phone calls before I realized that something was terribly wrong: obvious leads had never been followed; obvious questions had never been asked; the Hughes organization had never come clean with the cops or the FBI; the CIA had tampered with the grand jury. Even the prosecutor handling the case was not at all sure the lone defendant was guilty, had no idea who actually staged the break-in, much less who was ultimately behind it, and indeed was not at all certain that there had even really been a break-in.*

  And, of course, the stolen secret papers had never been found. I was determined to get them. It was clear that everyone else had abandoned the quest.

  I cannot tell here how I cracked the Romaine case, how the trail finally led to the Pro, how I tracked down the man with the stolen Hughes secrets, because I promised to protect him as a confidential source.