2 Bob and Howard
It was not love at first sight. The courtship had lasted twelve years, and they never really saw each other. In fact, in the beginning Robert Maheu did not even know that he was working for Howard Hughes.
Private-eye Maheu was sitting in his recently opened Washington office on a spring day in 1954, when his phone rang. It was a matrimonial case. Not his usual line. The sign on the door said ROBERT A. MAHEU ASSOCIATES. But there weren’t really any associates quite yet, and although the office was just a couple of blocks from the White House, it wasn’t all that grand. Desk, swivel chair, hat rack, and not much else. In fact, Maheu was sharing the space (and the telephone) with an accountant. Still, he was beginning to attract some very interesting cases. Like the guy now on the phone.
It was a local lawyer. Big firm. Had a job for Maheu on behalf of a client he wouldn’t name. Wanted all the dirt on one Stuart W. Cramer III, a real blueblood, son of a wealthy industrialist who played golf with Ike. The kid had just married a young Hollywood starlet. Name of Jean Peters. What the unnamed client wanted was a complete rundown, but mainly he wanted to know if this Cramer was mixed up with any of the intelligence agencies.
As Maheu had told the lawyer right off, he didn’t normally take matrimonial work. He was no ordinary private eye. But this case was actually right up his alley. Maheu was a very private eye—private enough to be getting a $500 monthly retainer from the CIA. Under-the-table money to handle jobs too dirty for the Agency to handle itself. Pimping for Jordan’s King Hussein. Producing a porn flick starring a look-alike of Indonesia’s President Sukarno. Odd jobs like that.
So he took the Cramer case. It was not exactly that he needed the work, but it looked like a piece of cake for a man with his connections, and a few extra bucks wouldn’t hurt. In truth, Maheu was in a bit of a bind. Nearly $100,000 worth. That Dairy Dream strike-it-rich-quick scheme had really turned into a nightmare. Which was why he had gotten into this spy-for-hire racket in the first place.
Or, at least that’s the way Maheu would later tell it. After a dazzling career with the FBI, mainly counterintelligence work in World War II, he suddenly quit the Bureau in 1947 to take advantage of a big business opportunity. Dairy Dream. Exclusive U.S. rights to a new process for canning pure cream. A great success that suddenly turned sour with the terrible discovery that the cream had a very limited shelf life. The cost of retrieving it from supermarkets across the country was ruinous. Busted, Maheu went back to work for the government as chief of security at the Small Business Administration, but his take-home hardly covered the interest on his debt. So he became Robert A. Maheu Associates.
But it is not at all clear if Maheu was a down-at-the-heels, feet-on-the-desk gumshoe trying to look big-time, or a big-time front for the CIA trying to look like a sleazy bankrupt shamus. The year he quit the FBI, 1947, was the same year the CIA got started, and Dairy Dream may have been only an unfortunate side venture. In any event, by the time he took the Cramer case Maheu was not only on the Company’s payroll, he was already deep into high-stakes international intrigue.
The Case of the Greedy Greek was a classic tragedy. At least for Aristotle Onassis. In his hubris, the tycoon had made a secret deal with the dying king of Saudi Arabia that gave him a virtual monopoly on shipping oil from the Persian Gulf. It was Maheu’s mission to scuttle that contract. Ostensibly he was working for Onassis’s blood rival Stavros Niarchos. But the CIA was definitely in on it and so was then Vice-President Richard Nixon, and while not even the players seemed to be sure who was using whom on whose behalf, Big Oil was probably pulling the strings to make the world safe for Aramco. Still, it was Maheu’s show. He bugged Onassis’s offices in New York, Paris, and London, got proof that the contract had been bought with a bribe, exposed the scandal in a Rome newspaper secretly owned by the CIA, and finally journeyed to Jidda, where he personally presented his evidence to the Saudi royal family and killed the whole deal. Not bad for a private peeper on his first big job.
And he still found time to handle the Cramer case. Turns out the kid did have some kind of ties with the CIA. Liaison for Lockheed, apparently. What else Maheu dug up is unknown, but within months Cramer III and Jean Peters had separated, Jean was back in Hollywood seeing Howard Hughes, and in 1957 the former Mrs. Cramer became the new Mrs. Hughes.
By that time Maheu had figured out that the billionaire was his unnamed client and, in fact, was getting regular assignments. Fixing a city council race. Helping a would-be blackmailer recognize his mistake. That kind of thing. Finally, the same year Hughes got married, Maheu even got to speak to him.
Hughes was in Nassau, escaping his new wife while he pondered a Caribbean real-estate coup, and he called long-distance, summoning his gumshoe down to the Bahamas. Wanted Maheu to slip $25,000 to the Bay Street Boys. On that mission, cooling his heels in a hotel lobby, Maheu also caught a quick glimpse of his mystery client—from the back, as Hughes was about to enter an elevator, berating his hapless Mormon aides for their failure to have the door open and waiting.
Maheu recognized the voice. He would come to know it all too well. But that trip to Nassau was Hughes’s last public appearance, and it was as close as Maheu would ever get to seeing him. He would, however, begin to spend a lot of time out in Los Angeles tending to Hughes’s problems, especially with women.
Like the Case of the Captive Slave Girls. In the summer of 1959, Hughes, now in complete seclusion, holed up in the Beverly Hills Hotel, seeing no one, not even his wife, suddenly decided to add seven Miss Universe contestants to his harem. For years he had been stashing mistresses in safe houses all around Los Angeles, under surveillance and under guard, and although he had never seen some of them he still had several on standby. Now he wanted more. Fast.
He awakened Maheu in the middle of the night, sent him out to Long Beach with orders to offer the beauty queens movie contracts. All seven were lured into hotel suites and kept there awaiting promised screen tests. Hughes, however, seemed to lose interest, and after weeks without contact the girls started drifting away. When the billionaire discovered his loss, he flew into a rage and assigned a dozen of his operatives to keep the last, Miss Norway, from leaving.
Maheu apparently had no role in that part of the caper, but he did claim credit for hushing it up years later when it came to the attention of a Senate committee. “The files, Howard,” Maheu later told Hughes, “contained very devastating evidence pertaining to Miss Norway, a participant for Miss Universe, who claimed that she had virtually been held a captive, and a tape which a former private investigator working for you had sold to the Committee, wherein a certain girl was talking to her boyfriend and claiming that she was being held captive, that she was under constant surveillance, etc. All of this evidence was completely destroyed in my presence, and we never had one bit of publicity.”
Maheu was becoming a valued operative, an essential part of the strange new hierarchy of nursemaids, bodyguards, and business executives Hughes was gathering around him. The billionaire was no longer content to share his gumshoe. It came to a head when Maheu tried to return to Washington to be with his wife, who was about to give birth to their fourth child. Hughes was as intent on holding onto him as he had been on keeping Miss Norway.
In a furious series of phone calls Hughes insisted that Maheu stay. Told him he had once seen a woman walking in the park with a basket on her head stop just long enough to have a baby, then walk on with the baby in the basket. Finally, pulling out all the stops, Hughes demanded that Maheu shut down his detective agency, join him full time, and become his “alter ego.”
Maheu, however, was not quite ready for complete monogamy. It was not his wife who was the real competition. It was the CIA.
The Agency had another odd job for Maheu. To set up a Mob hit of Fidel Castro. For months the CIA had been trying to eliminate the new Cuban leader with poison cigars, LSD, exploding seashells, and a powerful depilatory to make his beard fall out. Now, in the summer of 1960,
they decided to bring in some real pros. So they called in Maheu, “a tough guy who can get things done.” His mission—to make contact with the Mafia and arrange a $150,000 contract murder.
In the first week of November 1960, five men gathered in a suite at the Fountainbleu Hotel in Miami Beach. Maheu had no need to introduce his CIA case officer James O’Connell to his Mafia pal John Roselli. They had already met, at a party in Maheu’s home. Roselli, the Syndicate’s silver-haired “ambassador” to Las Vegas and Hollywood, introduced the two strangers. Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana and the Mafia’s former man in Havana Santos Trafficante. The daisy chain was almost complete, and Trafficante said he could line up a Cuban to make the hit.
But already there were problems. Just a few days before the big sit-down, Giancana got word that his girl, singer Phyllis McGuire, was two-timing him in Las Vegas with comedian Dan Rowan. To keep Giancana in Miami and on the job, Maheu had sent an operative to bug Rowan’s room, the wireman had been busted by a hotel maid, and the Las Vegas sheriff had called in the FBI. Giancana thought that was so funny he almost choked on his cigar laughing.
And now, up in the Fountainbleu, there was real discord. The CIA man O’Connell told the mobsters he wanted Castro gunned down in a “gangland-style killing.” Like in “The Untouchables.” The Mafiosi, however, wanted this hit done with the dignity befitting a patriotic enterprise. Giancana rejected the standard rub-out as “too dangerous” and suggested poison pills. Roselli also favored something “nice and clean,” no “out-and-out ambushing,” perhaps a secret poison that would disappear without a trace. Like in “Mission Impossible.”
It took the CIA’s Technical Services Division months to perfect the botulinum toxin. Ultimately—just weeks before the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion—Maheu would pass the deadly capsules to a sweating Cuban standing in the doorway of the Boom Boom Room at the Fountainbleu.
But long before the pills were passed, indeed shortly after the big sit-down adjourned, Maheu received an urgent phone call. Holed up in his hotel room, trying to put together a rush job to kill Castro, trying to mediate between the Mob and the CIA, trying to keep the jealous Giancana in Miami, trying to get his wireman out of jail in Las Vegas, trying to keep himself from being indicted for the bugging, trying to ward off the Las Vegas sheriff and a very suspicious J. Edgar Hoover, trying to keep the lid on all the leaks, trying to hold the whole damn thing together, Maheu suddenly also had to deal with Howard Hughes.
Hughes was in a jealous rage. He wanted to know just what Maheu was doing down in Miami, and he wanted him back in Los Angeles immediately. Now Maheu really had a problem. The Castro plot was the most closely held secret in CIA history, known to no more than a dozen people directly involved, perhaps not including the president of the United States. Maheu asked the CIA if he could tell Hughes. The answer from Langley—sure, go right ahead. Apparently without a second thought.
Maheu hurried down to a phone booth—not on orders from the Agency, but from Hughes, who always insisted on stringent security measures—and told the billionaire that he was on a top-secret mission to “dispose of Castro in connection with a pending invasion of Cuba.”
Hughes received the news sitting naked on a white leather chair in the “germ-free zone” of his Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow, a pink napkin on his lap for the sake of modesty, surrounded by mountains of dirty Kleenex. The thirteenth person made privy to the assassination plot. He took it all in over the phone held to his hearing-aid box, then told Maheu to fly right back to Los Angeles. Immediately. He promised to keep him there no more than forty-eight hours, then let him return to his mission in Miami.
But the Castro murder would have to be his final fling. After that, the billionaire expected absolute fidelity.
Maheu returned from the Cuban debacle just in time to take on his most critical mission for Hughes. He was now the man in charge of the most important thing in the billionaire’s life—keeping him hidden. Hughes had become the object of an intense manhunt. His battle with the bankers over TWA had exploded into an all-out war. An army of process servers was trying to slap him with a subpoena, trying to force him out of hiding and haul him into court. It was Maheu’s job to keep them at bay.
He brought all the black arts of his clandestine world into play, deploying doubles, creating false trails, renting hideaways in Mexico and Canada, making TWA think Hughes was here, there, and everywhere, while the billionaire just lay on his bed in Bel Air.
Maheu himself moved out to Los Angeles, leaving his other clients behind in Washington. Now Robert A. Maheu Associates had only one client: Howard Hughes. The one-time private eye was not only in charge of secrecy but also secret money. He emerged as the billionaire’s top bagman, a position heralded by his attendance as Hughes’s representative at the 1961 Kennedy inaugural, where he flew in with a planeload of Hollywood stars and purchased four boxes at $10,000 apiece.
It was a key role, but their relationship was still one-sided. Hughes continued to play the field, while Maheu remained monogamous. For all his new power, he was still just the house dick, a glorified gumshoe, certainly no rival to the top executives in the empire. The long courtship might never have achieved real intimacy had it not been for the billionaire’s sudden move to Las Vegas in 1966.
Robert Maheu was waiting out in the Nevada desert at four A.M. when Howard Hughes arrived. He had handled security for the big move and averted a major crisis when the train fell behind schedule, threatening to bring the recluse to his secret rendezvous point in broad daylight. Maheu commandeered a private locomotive and got Hughes into town before dawn.
But he missed his last chance to see his phantom boss.
Out in the dark silent desert, Maheu again heard the cracked, reedy voice he had come to know so well, heard it barking commands, giving detailed instructions about the delicate transfer from the train to the van, knew that any second he would finally get to see the hidden man whose bidding he had done for a dozen years, his eyes straining against the darkness to catch sight of the figure he had fleetingly glimpsed just once ten years earlier, the mystery man no one had seen since, the phantom billionaire.
But, just as Hughes was about to emerge, just as the first vague outlines of his image began to materialize at the door of the train, Maheu suddenly spotted two points of light in the distance, the headlights of a car approaching the remote railroad junction. He was so intent on shielding Hughes from strangers, he had been drawn so far into Hughes’s secret world, that he missed the one moment he could see Hughes himself.
Again, at the Desert Inn, the vigilant bodyguard turned away at a critical instant, and by the time he turned back Hughes had vanished forever into his penthouse.
All Las Vegas, all the world, thought that Maheu was dealing with Hughes personally, saw him go up the elevator to the secret ninth floor, assumed that he was seeing its sole occupant, but in fact they never had and never would meet face-to-face. Maheu never got closer to Hughes than the adjoining room and had no more idea of what he looked like or how he lived than the rest of the world outside. Hughes, for his part, had never seen Maheu at all.
Yet, within months, the two men would exchange solemn vows and enter into a bizarre marriage.
It was Moe Dalitz who finally brought them together. The hatchet-faced proprietor of the Desert Inn, a senior member of organized crime, was running a gambling emporium, not a retreat. He wanted to rent the penthouse to high rollers, and he wanted Hughes out by Christmas. When the recluse failed to budge, Dalitz threatened to march upstairs and drag him out into the street if he was not gone by New Year’s Eve.
Once more Maheu came to the rescue. He persuaded one of his former clients, Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, to call Dalitz, a key recipient of union pension-fund loans, and prevail upon the mobster to grant Hughes a reprieve. That bold move only bought a few weeks, however. Dalitz was adamant. Hughes had to go.
Faced with eviction, the billionaire decided to become his own landlord: he would buy the
hotel.
Again, Maheu’s connections proved handy. He arranged the big deal through his erstwhile partner in the Castro plot, the Mafia’s ambassador to Las Vegas, John Roselli. Dalitz and his three principal partners from the Cleveland Mob were ready, indeed eager to sell. All of them were in hot water with the Feds. Everything seemed set, but neither Maheu nor the mobsters was prepared for Hughes’s favorite pastime, negotiating endlessly at odd hours, haggling like a hostile pawnbroker over every nickel and dime. The deal changed daily, the bargaining dragged on for months.
Maheu went up and down the Desert Inn elevator like a yo-yo, meeting with the Dalitz group downstairs, winning another concession, only to be presented with new demands from the penthouse. Five times the mobsters cut their price before Hughes finally gave his approval and Maheu shook hands on the deal.
Then Hughes suddenly spotted an item that displeased him: a fifteen-thousand-dollar quibble on a thirteen-and-a-quarter-million-dollar deal.
Maheu went back up to the penthouse, sat down in the adjoining room, and furiously scrawled a letter of resignation.
“Howard,” he wrote, “you have finally succeeded in insulting my intelligence. You have also compromised so many of my friends and contacts that I find it impossible to continue working for you.
“I am leaving for Los Angeles in the morning.
“As I have told you repeatedly, you have nothing to fear from me except that I intend to charge you my going rate through March 14, 1967.
“I wish you a lot of luck, including the very remote possibility that you may be lucky enough to select a successor who will have equal loyalty.
“In sincere friendship, Bob.”
Within minutes Hughes sent word from his lair. He would go ahead with the deal as agreed, without the fifteen-thousand-dollar discount. And he begged Maheu to stay in Las Vegas at least long enough to receive a phone call the next morning.
Citizen Hughes Page 9
