Citizen Hughes

by Michael Drosnin

  My description of 7000 Romaine is based on personal observation, and my later description of its interior on accounts from several Hughes employees, one of the burglars, and police reports.

  Its mythic security system was described in a typical account by Albert Gerber in Bashful Billionaire (Lyle Stuart, 1967, p. 319): “The Romaine Street headquarters is a treasure house of the finest and most sophisticated forms of electronic gadgetry in the counterespionage field. Various warning devices can be triggered by almost anything trespassing in the area. There is a device which will sound an alarm if anyone tried to get information about documents inside the headquarters by use of x-ray outside the headquarters! There are lead-lined safes and burglar-proof vaults. There is electronic equipment to repel radio waves and to neutralize snooping devices.” The myth was so powerful that even Hughes’s right-hand man Robert Maheu accepted it. “I always heard it was the most impregnable thing,” he said in an interview. “It would have been easier to break into J. Edgar’s office, that’s the way it was described to me.”

  Mike Davis’s account of the break-in is quoted from LAPD reports, grand jury transcripts, and two interviews. Harry Watson’s account is from grand jury testimony and an interview.

  All descriptions of the police investigation are based on official reports of the LAPD, on interviews with detectives involved in the case, and on information from other law enforcement authorities.

  The SEC’s Air West probe was detailed by William Turner, a former SEC official who initiated the case and later pursued the criminal prosecution as an assistant U.S. Attorney in Nevada. Turner also made available the quoted SEC report.

  The account of the Maheu case was drawn from court records. Summa’s claims of a Maheu-Mob link to the burglary are noted in police, FBI, and CIA reports. The quoted FBI report on a possible organized crime connection was dated August 26, 1974.

  The Senate Watergate Committee and Special Prosecutor probes of the Hughes-Nixon connection were detailed in published reports, documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and interviews with staff investigators. The Hughes connection to Watergate was first detailed in an unpublished forty-six-page report by the Senate committee staff. The quoted LAPD report log is dated July 5, 1974. FBI agent James G. Karis claimed in an interview not to recall the basis of his suggestion of a Watergate link to Romaine.

  The quoted CIA list of “possible culprits” is dated July 4, 1974, and was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The discovery of the Castro plot by the Senate Watergate Committee was disclosed by a staff investigator. The details, including Maheu’s call to Hughes, were disclosed by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975.

  The five earlier Hughes break-ins were described in LAPD, FBI, and CIA reports, and further detailed in interviews with detectives involved in the local police investigations. The quoted LAPD report on the Romaine case is dated July 30, 1974. Davis’s refusal to submit to a polygraph and Kelley’s failure of his polygraph are noted in the same police report. The FBI report on Kelley’s lie-test is also dated July 30, 1974.

  Kelley arranged a second polygraph through a private eye named Robert Duke Hall, who was murdered two years later on July 22, 1976. According to Burbank police Lt. Al Madrid, who handled the murder case, the same two men charged with killing Hall—Jack Ginsburgs and Gene LeBell—also staged the April 1974 break-in at Hughes’s Encino office and delivered the stolen voice scrambler to Hall, who eventually returned it to Kelley. Madrid said in an interview that he found no evidence that the Encino theft was linked to the Romaine break-in six weeks later, or that Hall’s murder was in any way connected to either of the burglaries.

  Howard Hunt first revealed Winte’s involvement in the aborted Greenspun break-in in sworn testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee, later confirmed by G. Gordon Liddy in Will (St. Martin’s Press, 1980, pp. 204–205), and by Bennett in statements to both the Senate committee and the Special Prosecutor’s Office.

  The LAPD’s conclusion that the Romaine heist was an “inside job” is quoted from its July 30, 1974, report.

  The inside story of the break-in was revealed to me in a series of interviews with one of the burglars, my confidential source called the Pro, and as noted above his account was verified by LAPD, CIA, and FBI records, by interviews with law-enforcement officials, and by my own investigation.

  The Chester Brooks ransom calls were detailed by police reports, grand jury testimony, and a transcript of the call recorded by the LAPD. The Hughes memo left by Brooks was later filed in court. The police dragnet for Brooks was detailed in LAPD and FBI reports. Henley’s failure to receive the final call and her attendance at the Glomar event was noted in LAPD and CIA reports. Henley apparently left instructions for Kay Glenn to receive the ransom call in her absence, but Glenn also missed the call, according to a CIA report.

  Glenn’s discovery that the Glomar document was missing is noted in CIA reports. Sources at the CIA, FBI, and LAPD detailed the series of contacts that ensued. The Sullivan briefing was described by a detective who was present. The CIA suspicion that the Hughes organization staged the break-in and then falsely claimed the Glomar document was missing was noted in a July 5, 1974, report by the Agency’s task force. CIA Director Colby confirmed his meeting with President Nixon in a series of interviews, and his quoted remarks are from those interviews.

  All accounts of the Gordon-Woolbright meetings are based on Gordon’s grand jury testimony, further detailed by Gordon in a series of interviews. Woolbright’s background was obtained from Los Angeles and St. Louis police records. Their contacts with J. P. Hayes and Maynard Davis were confirmed by both Hayes and Davis in interviews. Winte’s report that Korshak and Shenker may have been involved was noted in an LAPD report dated August 25, 1976. Shenker denied any involvement with the burglary or the stolen papers in an interview. Korshak refused comment.

  Gordon’s contact with the police, and the FBI-CIA reaction was detailed by Gordon, by an investigator for the Los Angeles district attorney’s office he first contacted, by LAPD detectives, and FBI and CIA reports. The quoted CIA “payoff” report is dated October 7, 1974. The quoted FBI buyback scheme is dated September 23, 1974. Gordon described his talks with the authorities and with Woolbright in grand jury testimony and interviews. His account is confirmed by LAPD and FBI reports.

  The quoted FBI report of the CIA-FBI strategy meeting is dated November 1, 1974. The CIA’s report to the FBI describing the stolen Hughes papers is dated August 5, 1974. The CIA report closing the case is dated November 25, 1974.

  Michael Brenner, the assistant district attorney handling the Romaine case, confirmed in a series of interviews that the Hughes organization had not cooperated with the police investigation, that the CIA had interfered with his grand jury probe—at one point actually halting the investigation completely—and Brenner also commented. “The aspect of the case that worries me is that there probably wasn’t a burglary.”

  At his first trial in April 1977. Woolbright was convicted of receiving stolen property and acquitted of attempted extortion. His conviction was set aside on appeal because the trial judge had wrongfully ordered the deadlocked jurors to reach a verdict. His second trial in June 1978 ended in a hung jury, and the district attorney dismissed all charges against Woolbright.

  The famous “missing Glomar document” was not among the Hughes papers stolen from Romaine. The Pro said in an interview that he never had or saw any such document. Ten months after the break-in, the security guard Mike Davis came forward and told the district attorney that he, not the burglars, had taken the Glomar memo. Davis claimed he found it on the floor after the burglars had escaped, stuffed it into his pocket, forgot that he had it, panicked, kept it hidden in a bedroom drawer, and finally flushed it down the toilet, afraid to get “involved.” “It was just an absent-minded thing,” Davis explained in an interview. “I don’t know why I did these things. I can’t figure it out myself.”

  1 Mr.
Big

  My reconstruction of the first scene, Hughes watching reports of RFK’s assassination, comes from one of his own handwritten memos not quoted here but in chapter 9 (this page). In it, Hughes himself recounts his TV vigil, noting that he was awake for two nights watching CBS and that he “heard Mankiewicz make the fateful announcement.” To determine what he had seen, I viewed videotapes of the same CBS reports.

  The description of Hughes lying naked in his bedroom is based on interviews with a personal aide who recalled the RFK death watch. The aide also recalled that Hughes had a Zenith Space Commander, and Hughes’s own memo shows that he used it to check out all the networks.

  The process by which Hughes sent his orders to Maheu was confirmed both by Maheu and the Mormon attendants, as well as by one of the security guards who made the deliveries. That Hughes summoned his aides by snapping a fingernail against a paper bag was confirmed by the aides, who said they could hear the familiar signal above his blaring TV, even when he kept his door closed.

  The timing of the RFK memos was determined both by their content and Maheu’s unpublished Senate Watergate Committee testimony that Hughes first ordered him to hire Kennedy’s men within minutes of Bobby’s death. (The first memo Hughes wrote that night was misdated 6/7/68, but was clearly written 6/6/68, and the date was therefore deleted in the facsimile to avoid confusion.)

  A series of memos revealed the outcome—the hiring of O’Brien—and I interviewed O’Brien and his associates for further detail. The link between Hughes’s impulsive command to hire the Kennedy team and the Watergate break-in four years later is established in the epilogues, based on sources detailed later in these notes.

  Hughes’s physical condition at this time has been well established in voluminous court testimony and prior accounts but was verified in specific and in greater detail through extensive interviews with two of his Mormon attendants and one physician, Dr. Harold Feikes, who examined Hughes at least twenty times from 1968 through 1970.

  The account of Hughes’s codeine addiction and his use of other drugs is based on a 1978 report of the Drug Enforcement Administration, medical records, court testimony from his aides and physicians, and interviews with two of the Mormons who witnessed Hughes preparing and injecting his fix on numerous occasions.

  My newsreel-like account of Hughes’s early public exploits is based on my viewing of the actual newsreels, on contemporaneous press reports, on interviews with persons involved, and, in the case of the Senate hearings, on the hearings record. The 1957 crisis triggered by the TWA battle, the loss of Dietrich, and his marriage were recounted by aides in interviews and court testimony and by Dietrich in several interviews.

  The notes Hughes made for his message to Jean Peters on his train trip to Boston is the only extant handwritten memo to his wife. Peters has testified that she never received a letter from Hughes, and while he often wrote messages for his aides to read to her, all others but this were destroyed on his standing orders to shred and burn all personal memos. The aide who recited a version of this farewell message to Jean recounted the event in a later deposition.

  Hughes’s arrival in Nevada was detailed in interviews with two aides who were present, one of whom wheeled Hughes’s stretcher into the Desert Inn bedroom. “I was with him when we went up to the ninth floor and actually put him in that room so I could look around and see if there might be a room he’d like better,” recalled the aide. “But he didn’t want to be bothered with moving around any further, so he just stayed in the first room I picked by chance.”

  The estimate of Hughes’s net worth on his arrival in Las Vegas is based on the 1966 U.S. corporate income-tax return filed by Hughes Tool Company, which reports total assets of $759,956,441, including cash and securities of $609.4 million. That does not include almost $100 million of his TWA windfall, eventually paid as a capital-gains tax, nor does it include Hughes’s personal bank accounts and other holdings, most notably all the stock of the Hughes Aircraft Company. It is impossible to state with any precision the true worth of his empire, because most of it was in privately held stock never put on the open market and in real estate and other assets never appraised. Fortune magazine put his total worth at $1,373,000,000 in 1968, while Hughes himself in a 1969 memo claimed his empire was worth “more than two billion dollars.”

  The description of Hughes’s penthouse suite is based on interviews with two of his Mormon aides, as is the description of Hughes surrounded by his memos. “They were maybe the neatest stacks of papers in the world,” commented one.

  All of Hughes’s aides confirmed either in interviews or court testimony that the four years Hughes spent in Las Vegas was the only time in his life that he regularly risked writing down his orders. While he sometimes wrote longhand memos before and after Las Vegas, he almost always dictated his messages instead, and destroyed most of what little he did write as soon as the business in question was concluded. In his earlier years, Hughes handled most matters by telephone, and only in his Las Vegas years did Hughes ever send handwritten memos to anyone.

  The description of Hughes reading his memos is based on accounts from his Mormons. While thoroughly grounded in fact—Hughes did regularly root through his old papers in exactly the manner described—in this one instance I have re-created a typical scene and used it to present a selection of memos obviously not read by Hughes on any one occasion.

  Hughes’s relationship with his Mormon aides was recounted by all of them in interviews and depositions. His relationship with Jean Peters was described by her in court testimony. That he kept her under surveillance is revealed in his own memos: “HRH wants to know as soon as possible about the surveillance house across the street from the Mrs.”

  2 Bob and Howard

  Maheu himself recounted his first assignment from Hughes in a sworn deposition and provided further details in an interview. An associate of the lawyer who hired him confirmed several details. Maheu also testified in his deposition that Cramer worked for the CIA.

  Maheu confirmed his own CIA retainer in an interview and in testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1975. The committee report reveals that he produced the Sukarno pornographic movie for the CIA, and a staff investigator disclosed that CIA files show that Maheu obtained prostitutes for foreign leaders, including Hussein, on behalf of the Agency.

  Maheu’s successful effort to scuttle the Onassis contract is also revealed in the Senate report, which notes that he “worked closely with the CIA.” A staff investigator said that CIA files reveal Nixon’s involvement and that Maheu in fact met at least once with Nixon, and state that “the possibility that he has had continuing contact with Nixon on this or other matters cannot be ruled out.”

  Maheu himself recounted his early assignments for Hughes in depositions and court testimony. He testified that he first saw Hughes while in the Bahamas to make contact with Sir Stafford Sands, leader of the ruling white clique known as the “Bay Street Boys,” to whom Hughes had ordered him to give $25,000 to ease the way for a real estate deal.

  The Miss Universe caper (mistakenly identified as a Miss America contest) was described by Maheu in court and also detailed by Jeff Chouinard, a Hughes operative who ran his harem guard. In his memo claiming credit for killing a 1966 Senate probe of the incident, Maheu failed to mention his real coup: killing a Senate probe of Robert A. Maheu Associates, with the help of the CIA. Maheu’s firm had acquired a shady reputation, and, according to FBI reports, several of the “associates” were suspected of offenses ranging from wiretapping to extortion to kidnapping, but the CIA managed to quash a subpoena for Maheu’s testimony.

  Maheu’s role in the Castro plot was detailed in a 1975 report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, and again in a 1979 report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. According to staff investigators for both committees, an unpublished 1967 CIA report on the plot refers to Maheu as “a tough guy who can get things
done.” Exactly what Maheu had done to justify such confidence is unknown. There is no evidence of a prior homicide in known CIA files, although one of Maheu’s “associates,” John Frank, was suspected of the kidnapping and presumed murder of a Dominican dissident on behalf of dictator Rafael Trujillo, one of Maheu’s clients. In any event, no one else was even considered for the Castro job. Maheu was the first and only choice.

  The passing of the poison pills was described by another Maheu operative, Joe Shimon, who claimed to have witnessed the transfer. There are several other versions of who passed the pills to whom, but every version except Maheu’s has him handling it. Roselli claimed that Maheu met with the Cuban in Maheu’s hotel room, “opened his briefcase and dumped a whole lot of money on his lap, and also came up with the capsules.” Maheu admits only to seeing the pills, not delivering them.

  According to a Senate staff investigator, unpublished CIA reports confirm that Maheu informed Hughes of the Castro plot and did so with the approval of his CIA case officer James O’Connell. Maheu himself described his phone conversations with Hughes in Senate testimony and in later interviews.

  Maheu’s role in handling Hughes’s political contributions began in 1961, according to his court testimony, which he reiterated in an interview, but he claims that “the amounts were very nominal for quite a few years” and that he handled no major contributions until Hughes arrived in Las Vegas.

  Both Dalitz and Maheu recounted the Desert Inn eviction crisis in depositions later filed in Maheu’s slander suit against Hughes, and Maheu gave further details in an interview and in an account quoted by James Phelan in his book Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years (Random House, 1976, pp. 63–64). Maheu reported his enlistment of Hoffa in contemporaneous memos sent to Hughes. Dalitz was identified by the Kefauver Committee as Cleveland manager of the national crime syndicate run by Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky in the 1930s, and FBI wiretaps made public in 1963 showed that Dalitz was still a Lansky man, also associated with Mafiosi like Roselli and Giancana. “I was seen with them,” Dalitz fretted in one bugged conversation. “I don’t think that’s good. It ties the whole Mob up.”