Citizen Hughes

by Michael Drosnin

  It was less Sherlock Holmes than a lot of legwork, and a bit of luck, following up leads the police had failed to, going down several blind alleys, playing one hunch and then another, just pulling at all the loose threads until the whole strange mystery finally unraveled. And when I had put it all together, when the evidence seemed absolute, I went looking for the man who had the secrets that the FBI and the CIA had been afraid to find.

  “I can prove that you did it,” I told the Pro.

  We were sitting alone in the back of a bar. It was the first time we had met. I could see a gun stuck into the waistband of his pants. It wasn’t well concealed.

  “I’m going to write a book,” I continued. “It’s either going to be about you and the break-in or it’s going to be about Howard Hughes. It’s your choice. But if it’s going to be a book about Hughes, I’ll need your help. I’ll need the papers.”

  The Pro said nothing. Not a word. He just threw me a hard look and waited for me to go on. I confronted him with the evidence. He listened without comment.

  I hadn’t scared him. I got the feeling no one ever had. Except Howard Hughes. I tried to keep the conversation going, to ease the tension, and as we talked I began to realize that this thief was totally obsessed with Hughes, that the obsession had nearly destroyed him, and that the secret papers he wouldn’t admit to having had become a curse.

  That was my way in. He actually wanted to unload those dread documents. But how could I get him to give them to me? One thing I knew about people with secrets: deep down they all really wanted to tell. What good was it to have pulled off this great caper if no one knew he had done it?

  I had to get him to trust me. We spent the next two days together. We talked for fourteen hours straight the first day, in the bar, in a hotel lobby, walking the streets, sitting in a park. We slept five hours and met again the next day for breakfast. Again, we talked nonstop all day and into the night.

  He wanted to talk about Hughes. For two years he had been wanting to talk about Hughes, wanting to tell what he alone knew. But first he wanted to know more about me, why I’d come after him.

  I told him who I was. A former reporter for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, now a free lance on assignment from New Times magazine. I told him how I had gotten into the Romaine story, searching for the answer to another unsolved mystery, a top-secret military project that supposedly involved the Glomar and a fantastic plot to deploy missiles at the bottom of the ocean.

  None of that got to him. What got to him first was the discovery that I had been in jail. That I had done more time than he had.

  “What were you in for?” asked the Pro.

  “Protecting a source,” I said. “Refusing to give up a guy to a grand jury.”

  He liked that. We began to talk about his crime. He still wasn’t admitting anything, but I talked about the break-in as if he had done it, I talked about the papers as if he had them, and gradually he began to talk about it that way too. I told him I didn’t think he had done anything wrong, that in fact I admired what he had done, thought that he had pulled off one of the great capers of all time, and that he had gotten hold of something truly important, secrets the American people had a right to know.

  “What does that make me?” asked the Pro. “An investigative thief?”

  “Precisely,” I told him. “And the real criminal is Hughes. He tried to steal our entire country.”

  “I don’t know,” said the Pro, taking exception. “I like the guy. You know, I really liked him.”

  He sounded a bit wistful. Howard Hughes was dead. He had died just a few months earlier. Without ever exactly saying he had committed the break-in, without ever exactly admitting he had the secret papers, the Pro began to tell me his fantasy—his long-nurtured plan to play pair poker with Hughes.

  “In my own mind I saw myself actually sitting there in the penthouse playing cards with Hughes,” he said. “I was suddenly his equal for that moment. Maybe I’d be blown away the minute I walked out the door, but there I was, a guy from total nowhere, playing a winning game with Howard Hughes.”

  For two years he had sat on those hot stolen secrets, waiting to see who would come after him, waiting for Hughes to ante up for the big game. But no one had come. And now Hughes was dead. So was the fantasy.

  I had to give him a new fantasy. And suddenly I realized that the Pro himself had already come up with it. Instead of playing pair poker, he could play investigative thief.

  I mentioned Daniel Ellsberg. The Pro wasn’t at all sure he approved of what Ellsberg had done. Like most criminals, he was a hard-line patriot. Still, he began to warm to the role, to feel important, perhaps even noble.

  “If you had the papers, where would you stash them?” he asked me. Before I could answer, he tore a piece of paper from my notepad, crumpled it up into a little ball, and, holding it in front of me, asked, “Where would you hide this? It’s not so easy to hide something so that no one could ever find it. Not even something as small as this. Where would you hide three steamer trunks?”

  “Where did you hide them?” I asked in reply.

  “Sealed in a wall,” said the Pro, openly admitting for the first time that he had the stolen papers. “Built right into the wall of a house, and the people that’re living there don’t even know it. Been in that wall for almost two years.”

  “Are you sure they’re still there?” I asked, not because I doubted it but because I wanted him to. As long as those papers were safely immured, they would remain beyond my reach.

  “Pretty interesting that the FBI and the CIA and Hughes all stopped looking, that nobody ever came after you,” I observed. “Have you ever wondered why?”

  “Sure,” said the Pro. “What’re you getting at?”

  “I was just wondering if they found what they were really after. I mean, you haven’t actually seen the papers for a couple of years. Maybe they’re not in that wall anymore.”

  The Pro shrugged it off, but he was clearly disturbed. I had to make him wonder if the papers were gone, if he had already lost his treasure without even knowing it. I had to play on his paranoia until he could no longer live with the doubt, until he just had to go into that wall and get those papers back out.

  Several times over the next few hours he asked me if I really thought they might be gone. “Who knows?” I replied. “It would sure explain an awful lot.”

  It was late into the evening of the second day when the Pro suddenly said, “Okay, I’m gonna get them out. I’ll show them to you.”

  Just like that. It was hard to believe. It had been much too easy. I began to wonder if he really had the Hughes papers, if this was all a scam, if I had been playing him or if he had been playing me, if I had followed another false trail. Or, even if he really did have them, if he was simply trying to keep me from unmasking him by making a promise he never intended to keep.

  I didn’t yet understand how desperately he wanted to get rid of the curse. I never really would. Not until I had the papers myself.

  I returned from that trip to write my story about the break-in, uncertain now if I had actually solved it. Several times over the next few months I talked to the Pro, pay phone to pay phone, and each time he said he would show me the papers. But not quite yet.

  Finally, I went ahead with the magazine article, presenting the case as unsolved, raising questions about who was behind it, never mentioning the Pro, not quite sure how he really fit into it all, also not wanting to put an X on the treasure map.

  But there was a hidden message in that story, one that made clear I knew far more, and to make sure that the Pro didn’t miss it, I delivered a copy of the magazine to him personally.

  He read the story all the way through, turned back to an illustration up front, a picture of a safecracker opening a Pandora’s box, a vault spewing out all manner of strange and terrible secrets, and, pointing to the burglar, he said, “Hey, that’s me.”

  That’s what got him. Not my story. Not my h
idden message. That picture. It had memorialized the break-in, had finally given him some recognition, had made his adventure seem meaningful again. He kept looking at that picture all day.

  The next day we went hunting together.

  He was testing me, seeing whether I would go out into the woods alone with him, a shotgun in his hand, whether I would risk that after threatening to nail him, and as we walked through the trees toward a river he asked me if I had told anyone what I knew. I said I had not.

  “Don’t you think it’s pretty dangerous to tell me that?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I replied. “Who else are you going to find to take those damn papers off your hands?”

  I had never gone hunting before, had never shot anything but a tin can, but I was lucky now and shot down a duck, and while the recoil nearly broke both my jaw and my shoulder, I knew I had passed some important rite, had successfully entered his territory.

  As we were walking, we talked politics, and the Pro told me he had received a letter from Richard Nixon thanking him for his support of the president’s Vietnam policy. It was dated June 5, 1974.

  We got to talking about Watergate. “Square Johns,” said the Pro. He said it with real contempt. “You don’t get a bunch of retired spies and FBI agents to do a break-in,” he added. “If you want to do a break-in, you get yourself some burglars.”

  And all the while I kept wondering if this Nixon supporter, this Hughes admirer, this oddly vulnerable professional thief with right-wing ideas and left-wing instincts was really going to give me his stolen secret papers.

  While we were sitting by the river, he told me he would. And this time I knew that he meant it.

  I told him that I also had to know the full story of the break-in, that I would protect him, keep his name out of it, go to jail myself if necessary rather than give him up, but that I had to know who was really behind the heist.

  “I don’t know,” said the Pro.

  He told me how it all came down, about the Jiggler and Red and Mr. Inside, and about the mystery man who suddenly appeared the night of the break-in. He told me details only one of the burglars could know, but there was one detail he could not tell me: who was ultimately behind it.

  “I never knew,” he said. “I wasn’t supposed to end up with the papers. I always figured that whoever was behind it would come after me. No one ever did.

  “Except you.”

  My instructions were to go directly from the airport to a massage parlor. That’s what the Pro told me a few weeks later, when he called to say he was ready to show me the papers.

  “Just ask for Honey,” he said. “She’ll take good care of you.”

  The parlor was on the outskirts of town, along a seedy commercial strip, and inside it was decorated with oil paintings of nude women, all painted with real passion by a convict whose fantasies had clearly run wild while he was locked up in prison. The artist was a friend of the Pro’s, and the Pro owned a piece of the parlor.

  I asked for Honey. She smiled invitingly and took me through a beaded curtain to a back room. “Aren’t you going to take off your clothes?” she asked. I hesitated, wondering first if she had mistaken me for a regular customer, then wondering if this was the punch line of a practical joke, if the Pro had lured me into coming for his papers only to leave me naked in his whorehouse. On the other hand, this could be merely a prudent security measure. What better way to make sure I wasn’t wired or armed?

  I stripped down to my shorts. “Don’t be shy,” said Honey, and I took them off too. She checked me out, went through my clothes, and when I was dressed again she led me out a back door. We got into a car parked behind the parlor and drove to a garden apartment a few miles away. It was empty, and without explanation Honey drove off, leaving me there alone.

  At first I just sat anxiously on the edge of an armchair, waiting to see who would appear, what would happen next. I waited ten minutes, fifteen, half an hour. Nothing happened. A clock in the kitchen showed a different hour than my watch, so I picked up the phone to call for the right time. The line was dead.

  Tired and tense, I stretched out on a couch, but as soon as I lay down I felt something hard sticking into my back. Reaching between the cushions, searching for the source of my discomfort, I pulled out a gun. A black nine-millimeter Browning semiautomatic. It was loaded.

  Hurriedly, I stuffed the pistol back between the cushions, sat upright at the other end of the couch, then realized that my fingerprints were all over that gun. Alarmed by the thought, I wiped the gun clean with my shirttail and again shoved it back where I had found it, all my senses now on full alert.

  At that instant, I heard the door open. In walked the Pro. He had been parked out front all along, waiting to see if I had been tailed. He said he was going to take me to see the papers.

  We drove quite a distance, and while I wasn’t familiar with the area, it seemed that he doubled back several times, always with an eye on the rearview mirror. Finally, we made a few quick turns, drove through a shopping center, and pulled into a motel. The room was empty. No secret papers. We stayed there an hour or so, watching TV, then left.

  “You didn’t really think I was going to give them to you, did you?” asked the Pro as we got back into his car. I just looked at him, full of anger. He laughed.

  “Well, I am,” he said. “I don’t know why, but I am. Either you’re the most sincere guy I ever met or the best con man in the world. Anyway, I’m gonna give them to you. I wouldn’t if Hughes was still alive. If you had come while he was alive, I wouldn’t of even talked to you. I wouldn’t of talked to Colby or Hoover. I wouldn’t of talked to Nixon. Only Hughes.”

  We drove for a while in silence and finally pulled into another cheap motel out in the middle of nowhere. As soon as we walked in the door, I saw three padlocked steamer trunks.

  The Pro opened them without ceremony. It was the end of his adventure, and the beginning of mine, his escape from the hold that Hughes had kept over him for more than two years, and my heedless rush into that same harrowing embrace.

  Two of the trunks were crammed with white typewritten documents, and the third was filled with thousands of yellow legal-pad pages, handwritten memos signed “Howard.” It was Hughes’s “in” box and “out” box for an entire era, virtually everything his henchmen had sent him, virtually everything Hughes himself had ever dared to put down in his own hand, a complete documentary record of his dealings stolen from his fortress and then sealed in a wall, unseen and untouched by any outsider except the Pro, until now.

  All that night, all through the next day, and all through the next night I sat up in that motel room reading those documents, at first afraid to stop, not knowing whether I’d ever get to see them again, then unable to stop, completely drawn into the stark power of the story revealed in these strange secret papers.

  It was “political dynamite,” all right. But hardly what the FBI or the CIA could have feared or even imagined. The memos were at once a cold-blooded tale of an entire nation’s corruption and an intimate journal of one man’s descent into madness. The great secret that Howard Hughes had kept hidden was not this or that scandal, not this payoff or that shady deal, but something far more sweeping and far more frightening—the true nature of power in America.

  *Eventually, after two trials and two deadlocked juries, all charges against Woolbright were dismissed. No one else has ever been charged with any aspect of the burglary.

  1 Mr. Big

  Remote control.

  There was no need to venture out, not even to stand up. The little silver-gray box had invisible power, and its four oblong buttons controlled everything. At the slightest touch it sent out a special high-frequency signal, silent to the human ear, but capable of activating an immense circuitry that reached almost everywhere.

  Howard Hughes gripped the rectangular instrument.

  Alone in the darkened bedroom of his Las Vegas penthouse hideaway, lying naked on a double bed, propped up by two pill
ows, and insulated by a layer of paper towels from the disheveled sheets that had not been changed for several months, Hughes pushed one button. Again. And again.

  The television channels flipped by in rapid succession.

  Hughes checked out the full gamut of stations on the color TV that flickered at his feet. Then, satisfied, he set aside his Zenith Space Commander.

  It was just after two A.M. on Thursday, June 6, 1968. ABC was dark. NBC had also signed off for the night. Only channel 8, the local CBS affiliate that Hughes himself owned, was still on the air to broadcast the grim news.

  Robert F. Kennedy was dead.

  Hughes had been awake for two nights, gripped by the video spectacle. He had watched Kennedy claim victory in the California presidential primary, smiling, joking, earnest, vibrantly alive. He had heard the shots just minutes later, muffled at first by the noise of the still cheering crowd, then distinct and unmistakable. He had seen Bobby lie bleeding on the cold cement floor.

  It was a shared national experience. The shock and horror—the agonized moans of disbelief, the panic, the hysteria, the tears—spread in waves through the throng of stunned campaign workers and was instantly transmitted to millions across the country. Everywhere people watched television and waited, listening to hospital bulletins, reliving the immediate tragedy in endless replays that also revived painful memories of Dallas.

  Through it all, for almost twenty-six hours, Hughes had kept his TV vigil, and now he watched a red-eyed Frank Mankiewicz walk slump-shouldered into the floodlit hospital lobby to confirm everybody’s worst fears. Biting his lip to hold back the tears, the press secretary bowed his head for a moment, then read a brief statement: “Senator Robert Francis Kennedy died at 1:44 A.M. today. He was forty-two years old.”

  Mankiewicz spoke softly, but the fateful announcement blared from Hughes’s television, its volume turned to the highest level to accommodate the partially deaf billionaire. News of the tragedy continued to reverberate in his room.