Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [43]
The new industry—charging companies for access to secret information for which the government had already charged them via taxes—took off after the first Resorts International casino in the Bahamas opened in 1970. The casino magnate Crosby was impressed by Peloquin’s work, and, ever the entrepreneur, he had an idea. Why not spin off the investigative effort into a stand-alone company? With Crosby’s financial backing, Peloquin formed International Intelligence, Inc., or Intertel, hiring former colleagues right out of the anti-Mafia strike forces of the Department of Justice. He opened offices at Seventeenth and H Streets NW, across the street from the tony Metropolitan Club of Washington, where he and his colleagues soon became regulars. Intertel was just three blocks away from the White House, and a short walk from the Department of Justice. The place felt almost like an outpost of the federal government. Situated among so many sober gray government buildings, it was a secret spy service for the private sector.
In 1978, a former CIA agent turned author, George O’Toole, described Intertel in his book The Private Sector:
The men who run Intertel are not simply ex-cops embarked on a second career in midlife. You’ll find no tell-tale bulge beneath the shoulders of their tailored, three-piece business suits, and their slim attaché cases are more likely to contain pages of computer printouts than brass knuckles or handcuffs. Their clients are not retail merchants or jealous spouses, but giant international enterprises that do business under the crazy-quilt pattern formed by the laws of a dozen nations.1
Before long, Intertel’s staff included a cofounder, the former FBI agent John O’Connell; a former IRS investigator, William Kolar; and a former director of investigations at the National Security Agency, David Belisle. O’Toole called it “the greatest collection of recycled brass ever assembled in the private sector.”
Peloquin believed in the power of connections. Along with the others, he hired Herbert Hoover’s only nephew—since Hoover never married, his nephew was in many ways his heir. “That brought in a lot of business,” Peloquin says. “When you can say, ‘I’ll have Hoover’s nephew look into it for you,’ it’s surprising.”
JUST THREE MONTHS after opening the doors of the new company in 1970, Peloquin got a call from Chester Davis, the general counsel for Howard Hughes.* Davis reported that Hughes had decided to force out his long-serving loyal consultant, Robert Maheu.
Actually, Davis and another of Hughes’s lieutenants, Bill Gay, were waging a power struggle against Maheu, who they felt had come to exert too much control over Hughes and his sprawling business interests, which included not only Trans World Airlines but Hollywood productions and Las Vegas casinos, among others. The increasingly paranoid Hughes had dropped almost entirely out of sight, living in his apartment atop the Desert Inn with the windows curtained against the sunlight, and communicating only through scrawled notes. Most of the people working for Hughes had never seen him in person.
Hughes now had long, scraggly hair, and he refused to trim his fingernails and toenails, which had grown into curled yellow claws. He was taking a staggering quantity of painkilling drugs, feeding an addiction that had begun when he broke his back in an airplane crash in 1946. Hughes had brought his struggling XF-11 reconnaissance airplane down in a crowded residential area in Beverly Hills. Thanks to the quick thinking of a passing Marine Corps sergeant who pulled him from the wreckage, Hughes survived. But after he began taking the painkilling drugs, he was never quite the same.* For Maheu, Davis, and Gay, control over Hughes meant domination of one of the biggest corporate empires in America, and millions of dollars in potential income for themselves.
Gay and Davis may have sensed an