Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [144]
*The moment of high drama became the climactic scene in a 2004 movie called The Aviator, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes and Alan Alda as Senator Brewster.
*Shimon continued his decades-long career as a wiretapper. In 1962, he bugged yet another attorney’s room at the Mayflower Hotel, and was indicted and convicted on charges resulting from the incident, although the conviction was reversed on appeal. He pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor charges, according to The Intruders, a book written by Senator Edward V. Long in 1967, following his Senate investigation into illegal wiretapping.
†The address of the New York Telephone Company office was 228 East Fifty-Sixth Street. There is a Verizon telecommunications facility in the same building today.
*At the subsequent trial, Broady’s lawyers insisted that the real figure behind the wiretapping scheme was a private detective named Charles Gris.
†Broady also tapped other phones, including those of the St. Joseph Lead Company, the Knoedler art gallery, the chairman of the board of Pepsi-Cola, a prominent lawyer, and a publishing company, according to The Intruders.
*Corio had a long career on Broadway and as a B-movie actress, appearing in films such as Swamp Woman (1941). Neither she nor the critics took her films seriously. “I was the Queen of the Quickies,” she once said. “Those pictures weren’t released, they escaped.”
*Things didn’t turn out as well for Senator Long. Many believe that his years-long investigation of bugging and wiretapping annoyed the FBI’s powerful director J. Edgar Hoover, who wanted its use of such technology to remain a closely guarded secret. Whether Hoover leaked the material or not is unclear, but soon two media outlets ran allegations that Long had received tens of thousands of dollars in payments from a lawyer connected to the Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, who was then in prison. Life magazine alleged in 1967 that Long had run the hearings on bugging mainly as a way to find evidence to clear Hoffa of his conviction, in 1964, for jury tampering. Long was defeated in a primary and resigned from the Senate on December 27, 1967.
*Murphy later refused to tell a reporter for the New York Times whether or not he’d misled his own client. He would say only this: “If the government had decided that they were going to keep someone secure, I don’t think that I would be the one to blow him out of the water.”
*My father, Ron Javers, was a reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle traveling with the murdered congressman, Leo Ryan. He was wounded during the shoot-out in Guyana and later was the coauthor of a book on the Peoples Temple, The Suicide Cult: The Inside Story of the Peoples Temple Sect and the Massacre in Guyana.
*Hundley went on to an illustrious career in legal defense. When he died in 2006, his obituary in the New York Times noted that he’d represented President Richard Nixon; Attorney General John N. Mitchell, at Mitchell’s Watergate trial; Tongsun Park, a South Korean accused of bribing congressmen; and Vernon Jordan.
*It was a small world: Chester Davis had been referred to Peloquin by a personal friend of President Nixon, the Florida banker Charles G. “Bebe” Rebozo. In later years, Rebozo would come under congressional scrutiny for allegedly passing along a $100,000 contribution from Howard Hughes to the Nixon campaign.
*Peloquin recalls that one of his duties at Intertel was to deliver a monthly check for hundreds of dollars—a significant amount of money in those days—to William Durkin, the marine sergeant who had pulled Hughes from the burning wreckage. Peloquin’s account of a generous lifetime reward contradicts the account of Durkin’s family, who maintained that he never took money from Hughes. Durkin died in 2006.
*Roselli was killed in a Mafia hit in Miami in 1976. He had just testified about the plot against Castro before a Senate committee, and reportedly had not asked permission of the mob bosses beforehand.