Citizen Hughes Read online

  A hardcover edition of this book was originally published in 1985 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. It is here reprinted by arrangement with Michael Drosnin.

  CITIZEN HUGHES. Copyright © 1985 by Michael Drosnin. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit our website at www.broadwaybooks.com

  First Broadway Books trade paperback edition published 2004

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Drosnin, Michael.

  Citizen Hughes / Michael Drosnin.— 1st Broadway Books pbk. ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Hughes, Howard, 1905–1976. 2. Millionaires—United States—

  Biography. 3. Political corruption—United States. 4. United States—

  Politics and government—1945–1989.1. Hughes, Howard,

  1905–1976. II. Title.

  CT275.H6678D74 2004

  338.7′67′092—dc22

  [B] 2004049671

  eISBN: 978-0-307-48299-0

  v3.1_r1

  For my family,

  for my friends,

  for all who kept

  the faith.

  “There was nothing either above or below him.… He had kicked himself loose of the Earth.… His intelligence was perfectly clear—concentrated, it is true, upon himself with horrible intensity, yet clear.… But his soul was mad.…

  “Everything belonged to him—but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.”

  —Joseph Conrad

  Heart of Darkness

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Introduction The Great Hughes Heist

  1 Mr. Big

  2 Bob and Howard

  3 The Kingdom

  4 Network

  5 Fear and Loathing

  6 Armageddon

  7 Mr. President

  8 Poor Hubert

  9 Camelot

  10 Nixon: The Payoff

  11 Howard Throws a Party

  12 Nixon: The Betrayal

  13 Exodus

  Epilogue I Watergate

  Epilogue II The Final Days

  Authenticity Report

  Notes on Illustrations

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  It’s been two decades since this book first revealed the truth about the world’s most secretive man, Howard Hughes. It is now out again with a new Hughes movie, The Aviator.

  In that time two things have been proven beyond any doubt. First, that the nearly 10,000 documents on which this book is based are real. They are the papers Howard Hughes sent and received, the handwritten notes he wrote from hiding to his unseen henchmen. It was the way the billionaire hermit ruled his empire.

  The papers were stolen from Hughes headquarters on June 5, 1974. A million-dollar buyback bid from the CIA and an FBI investigation failed. I tracked down the burglars two years later. We made a deal—I would keep their identity secret if they gave me the stolen Hughes documents.

  After this book was published, the man who received most of the Hughes memos, his righthand man, Robert Maheu, confirmed the authenticity of the documents on ABC and NBC television news shows. And one of the few who had direct contact with Hughes, Roy Crawford, the aide who delivered the memos from Hughes to Maheu, also confirmed the documents were genuine on the ABC news magazine 20/20.

  It was indisputable proof that two top handwriting experts—Ordway Hilton, who exposed Clifford Irving’s famous hoax “autobiography” of Hughes as a fraud, and John J. Harris, who proved Melvin Dummar’s “Mormon Will” a forgery—were right: These handwritten Hughes documents were authentic.

  So this book is proven to be the one true account of Hughes from the only reliable source—Howard himself.

  A second fact proven true after this book was originally published—Hughes really did try to buy the government of the United States, and instead helped bring it down.

  Just last year, PBS broadcast a documentary in which a key Watergate conspirator, Jeb Magruder, said on camera that he heard President Richard Nixon personally order the break-in that led to his resignation two years later.

  According to Magruder, who passed on Nixon’s orders to the burglars, the President directed his attorney general, John Mitchell, to send the “Plumbers,” his dirty-tricks squad, into Democratic National Committee headquarters.

  Some questioned why Magruder waited so long to tell the truth. In fact, he did not. Magruder told me the same story, on background, two decades before (see this page–this page). Now that he has made it public, I can reveal it.

  And Magruder also told me the President’s motive—to cover up $100,000 in hidden cash Nixon received from Hughes.

  In a real sense, this book is the story of two break-ins, the one that brought down a President, and the other that revealed the truth about Hughes. The White House at first dismissed Watergate as a “third-rate burglary.” No one said that about the June 5, 1974, break-in at Howard Hughes headquarters in Hollywood.

  Michael Drosnin

  New York City

  April 2004

  Introduction

  The Great Hughes Heist

  No one called it a third-rate burglary. There was no need to—no one got caught. Besides, a nation still transfixed by Watergate hardly noticed the June 5, 1974, break-in at 7000 Romaine Street in Hollywood.

  The target, a hulking block-long two-story building, looked like an abandoned warehouse. It had no name. But for a quarter-century 7000 Romaine was the nerve center of a vast secret empire. It belonged to Howard Hughes.

  The burglars were not only after his money but also his secrets. At the height of his wealth, power, and invisibility, the phantom billionaire commanded his empire by correspondence, scrawling his orders in thousands of handwritten memos, hearing back from his henchmen in memos dictated to his aides, dealing with outsiders only through the Romaine switchboard, which kept verbatim transcripts of all incoming calls.

  And the Romaine vaults safeguarded all those memos, all those transcripts, all of Hughes’s personal and corporate files, all the secrets of a mystery man who was known to have dealings with the CIA, the Mafia, and the White House and whose hidden empire seemed to reach everywhere.

  The fortresslike steel-and-concrete building was said to be impregnable. Published accounts detailed a fail-safe security system that included laser-beam surveillance, X-ray detection devices, and electronic alarms to alert a private army before anyone could even get near the burglarproof safes. Entry was by appointment only, and few outsiders were ever allowed through the four-combination, pushbutton-lock doors.

  But in the early morning hours of June 5, 1974, persons unknown managed to get in uninvited. No alarms blared, because there was no working alarm system. No private army opened fire, because there was no private army. Romaine was a Hollywood façade, protected only by a single unarmed security guard.

  The guard, Mike Davis, had just completed his rounds outside the building. It was 12:45 A.M.

  “As I opened a side door,” he would later tell the police, “someone came from behind and jammed a hard object into my back. I never actually saw a gun. I just assumed they
were armed. I knew I wasn’t.”

  “Let’s go, we’re going in,” Davis said the burglars ordered, pushing him ahead of them. They told the guard to lie facedown on the floor. Blindfolded and gagged, his wrists taped cross-handed, Davis said he saw nothing but thought he heard four men, the two who came up behind him and two more who arrived soon after, dragging in a two-tank acetylene torch on a clattering steel dolly.

  He heard them send a lookout upstairs, where the only other person in the building was manning the switchboard in a soundproof room and didn’t hear a thing.

  “If the doors are open, you can hear a pin drop,” explained the oblivious operator, Harry Watson. “If they’re closed, you could drop a bomb and I wouldn’t hear it. That night my doors were closed and I wouldn’t have heard a tank come through.”

  The burglars took their time, moving through the maze of offices in the sprawling building as if they had a treasure map. According to Davis, they first led him straight to Kay Glenn’s office. Glenn was managing director of Romaine and chief deputy to Bill Gay, one of three top executives who ran the Hughes empire through its holding company, Summa Corporation. There the burglars peeled open a safe in the top drawer of a filing cabinet, removing thousands in cash and unidentified documents.

  At the same time, Davis said he heard the pop and crackle of a blowtorch. Directly across the hall, the safecrackers burned a gaping hole through the steel doors of a walk-in vault. “Looky here, this is it!” the guard heard one exclaim.

  Before they were finished, the burglars had torched another large safe, pried open three smaller ones, and ransacked several offices, including that of Nadine Henley, Hughes’s longtime personal secretary and a member of Summa’s ruling triumverate.

  Finally, Davis said, the intruders marched him upstairs and entered a second-floor conference room where the billionaire’s personal files had been assembled at the orders of his general counsel, Chester Davis, the third member of Summa’s top command.

  “This is a piece of cake,” said one of the burglars, prying open a file cabinet, and the guard said he could hear them tell each other, “Take this, not those. Yeah, those are the good ones,” as they dropped folder after confidential folder into cardboard boxes on the floor.

  Almost four hours after they had arrived, the burglars trussed Davis around the knees and ankles with surgical tape, left him lying on a couch in a basement furniture warehouse, and vanished.

  He did not leap up after them. “If I could have freed my arms and legs and pulled the blindfold off and jumped one of them for the sake of Hughes, I wouldn’t have done it,” the guard later explained. “I knew the security at Romaine was lousy, and I tried to tell all the top people, but no one seemed to care. And I was only getting crumbs, while they were getting a whole loaf of his bread.”

  So, as ordered, Davis lay still on the couch. About half an hour after the burglars had escaped, he loosened his bonds and hobbled back up to Kay Glenn’s office. There he phoned upstairs to the still oblivious switchboard operator, who called the police.

  Detectives combed the cavernous Hughes headquarters without finding a solid clue. There were no identifiable fingerprints, the abandoned acetylene tanks could not be traced, and no one in the nearly deserted industrial district had seen the burglars. One of the cops who surveyed the scene was later quoted as saying, “They knocked off Romaine like it was a corner delicatessen.”

  The police revealed only that $60,000 had been taken although some press reports placed the figure as high as $300,000. The Hughes organization, of course, said nothing. In fact, taking immediate control of the case, Summa dispatched a representative to police headquarters to censor all announcements.

  So there was no public mention of the other missing items, but in a bulletin sent to law-enforcement agencies, the Los Angeles police also listed as stolen a bizarre grab bag including two large Wedgwood vases, a pink-and-blue ceramic samovar, an antique wooden Mongolian eating bowl, and Nadine Henley’s butterfly collection.

  No one was told about the solid-gold medallion found in a basement trash bin, where it had been inexplicably discarded by the burglars.

  And not a word was said about the big secret of the break-in: the secret papers of Howard Hughes had disappeared.

  There was virtually no powerful force in this country, indeed in the world, that did not have an interest in the missing files, that did not have reason to steal them, that did not have reason to fear their loss. There was circumstantial evidence to suggest that the CIA, the Mafia, even the White House was behind the break-in. There was still stronger evidence that Hughes had “stolen” his own files to safeguard them from subpoena.

  Certainly both the timing of the break-in and the ease with which it was accomplished raised immediate questions about the Great Hughes Heist. The burglars were not the only ones after his private papers.

  Just three days before the break-in, the Securities and Exchange Commission had subpoenaed all the documents at Romaine relating to Hughes’s 1969 takeover of Air West. Nothing more directly threatened the billionaire. Hughes himself and two of his top aides had been indicted for conspiring to manipulate the airline’s stock, defrauding shareholders of $60 million. President Nixon, his confidant Bebe Rebozo, and his brother Donald had all been implicated in the deal, and Hughes faced a possible twelve years in jail.

  “Hughes and his agents may have been motivated to make it appear that there was a theft in order to avoid complying with our subpoenas,” suggested a secret SEC report.

  Just six days before the break-in, a federal judge had ordered Hughes to surrender five hundred memos demanded by his former chief of staff, Robert Maheu. Ousted in a 1970 palace coup, Maheu was at war with the new high command and had filed a seventeen-million-dollar slander suit against Hughes for calling him “a no-good, dishonest son of a bitch who stole me blind.” The bitter legal battle had already produced charges of Hughes-CIA skulduggery, secret payoffs to Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, and a proposed million-dollar bribe to Lyndon Johnson. Maheu claimed the subpoenaed memos would confirm all his allegations.

  He also suspected that Hughes had arranged the burglary to get rid of the damning documents, but Summa officials claimed that Maheu himself had masterminded the break-in and hinted to police that he may have done it in cahoots with the Mafia. For years Hughes’s intelligence network had been trying to link Maheu to the Mob, to find proof that he had conspired to loot the billionaire’s Las Vegas casinos. While the FBI also considered Maheu a suspect, it raised the possibility that the Mafia had acted on its own.

  “We may indeed have an effort on the part of organized crime to gain information regarding Mr. Hughes through this break-in,” concluded a confidential FBI report. “This could be to calibrate the stockholder or otherwise obtain useful documents for pressure purposes: e.g., to maintain organized-crime status in Nevada.”

  Meanwhile, both the Senate Watergate Committee and the Watergate special prosecutor were probing a concealed $100,000 “contribution” from Hughes to Nixon by way of Rebozo. There was substantial evidence that the cash not only bought the president’s approval of the Air West takeover but also won Attorney General John Mitchell’s go-ahead on Las Vegas hotel purchases that violated antitrust laws.

  In fact, Senate investigators believed that the Hughes connection had triggered Watergate. It all began, they theorized, with Nixon’s fears that Democratic party chairman Larry O’Brien had learned of the Rebozo payoff—and perhaps a great deal more—while employed as the billionaire’s Washington lobbyist. The Senate committee demanded that Hughes appear in person and surrender his files, and the special prosecutor issued several subpoenas just weeks before the break-in.

  Now the FBI saw a possible Watergate link to the Romaine heist. A Los Angeles police report log noted: “Received call from Karis, FBI—states home office in Washington interested; they feel Watergate is involved.”

  And the CIA, in its own list of “possible culprits,” after Mah
eu, the Mafia, and “foreign government—not necessarily USSR,” also suggested that the Hughes break-in had been “politically motivated to aid or deter Watergate investigation.”

  But the Agency itself was also suspect. Shortly before the burglary, Senate investigators got the first official hint that Maheu, while working for Hughes, had orchestrated a CIA-sponsored plot to assassinate Fidel Castro with the help of two leading Mafiosi. It was the CIA’s dirtiest secret, and Maheu had revealed it to Hughes in a phone call that may well have been transcribed and stored at Romaine.

  And all of these probes were coming to a head when Romaine was looted and the secret papers vanished.

  “If you go on the theory that someone wanted to find out what Hughes knew, or wanted to make sure no one else found out, everyone but the Loch Ness monster was suspect,” commented a detective assigned to the case.

  Adding to the mystery, the Romaine heist was the sixth unsolved burglary of a Hughes office in just four months. In February 1974 there was a break-in at the billionaire’s Las Vegas headquarters. No documents were reported taken, although police found filing cabinets rifled, desks ransacked, and papers strewn on the floor. In March, burglars struck another Hughes office in Las Vegas. At about the same time, the New York law offices of Hughes’s chief counsel, Chester Davis, were hit. Again no papers were reported missing. In Washington there was a break-in at Mullen & Company, a public relations firm owned by Hughes lobbyist Robert F. Bennett, who also fronted for the CIA and employed Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt. File drawers were left open, but once again no papers were reported stolen. And finally, in April, Hughes’s office in Encino, a Los Angeles suburb, was entered through the roof. This time the thieves made off with a voice scrambler, a sophisticated device that was used to secure telephone conversations with Bennett’s Washington office and CIA headquarters in Langley.

  It was against this background that Los Angeles police began to investigate the new heist at 7000 Romaine. In a confidential report written several weeks after the break-in, LAPD detectives noted some curious aspects of the bizarre case: