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By Root 1277 0

opportunity in the power vacuum created by Hughes’s mental instability. For years, Maheu had served as an outside consultant to Hughes from his perch at his investigative agency in Washington, D.C., Robert A. Maheu and Associates. He’d become Hughes’s go-to man for sensitive missions of all kinds, including compiling dossiers on the relationships between powerful figures in foreign governments, surveillance and investigation of Hughes’s own executives, hiring actors who looked like Hughes to use as doubles in schemes to throw off process servers in court cases, and overseeing the distribution of political campaign contributions.2 Hughes knew that Maheu had been a contractor for the CIA since the early 1950s, and that his firm was a front for some of the CIA’s most covert activities. For a power-hungry paranoiac like Hughes, Maheu was a handy man to have around.

But most of all, Hughes valued Maheu because he knew the veteran spy’s deepest secret—that in 1960 and 1961, Maheu had served as the CIA’s point of contact with the underworld tough Johnny Roselli and the Mafia boss Sam Giancana in its failed plot to assassinate the Cuban leader Fidel Castro on the eve of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. In August 1960, Maheu flew to Los Angeles to meet with Roselli at the Brown Derby restaurant. Surrounded by Hollywood executives and actors, the two discussed the murder of Castro.

At first, Roselli was incredulous. “Me? You want me to get involved with Uncle Sam?” he asked. “The feds are tailing me wherever I go. They go to my shirt-maker to see if I’m buying things with cash. They go to my tailor to see if I’m using cash there. They’re always trying to get something on me. Bob, are you sure you have the right guy?”3

Maheu assured Roselli that the offer from the CIA was real. And he explained the conditions: no one could ever know that the government had worked with the Mafia to kill Castro. Maheu told Roselli that if the matter ever became public, he’d deny it. If Roselli accepted, he would be on his own. The mobster hesitated and then agreed. The CIA and the mob were officially business partners.

At a meeting in 1961 at Miami’s Fontainbleau Hotel, Maheu’s CIA controller handed him a white envelope containing several poison pills. The plan called for Maheu to pass the pills to the Mafia figures, who would use their connections from the prerevolutionary days of the Cuban casino business to pass the pills to someone in Castro’s entourage to slip into the dictator’s drink.

The problem was that all the time Maheu was dealing with the Mafia on behalf of the CIA, agents from the FBI were tailing both him and the mobsters. After all, the FBI had been trying to prove its case against the mob for years, and had detailed surveillance under way on the very men Maheu was meeting. The FBI wanted to know: why was a veteran agent and known CIA contact suddenly palling around with the mob?

One night, during a dinner meeting with Roselli, Maheu spotted two FBI tails in the restaurant. After Roselli left to go to the men’s room, Maheu cornered the men and pulled them into the kitchen, trying to get them off the case. Roselli hadn’t noticed them, but if he did spot the federal agents spying on his dinner meeting, he might get too spooked to go through with the plot against Castro. Back in his hotel room, Maheu called the CIA from the hotel phone—which he knew would be tapped by the FBI—and let the FBI’s agents listen in on the conversation, just so they could figure out what was going on, and why they ought to leave Roselli alone for the time being.*4

Maheu said later that he never got the “go-signal” from the CIA, even though there were reports from the Mafia that they were ready to deploy their end of the assassination plot. When the Bay of Pigs invasion ended in disaster, Maheu walked away from the mess. He said he was never again involved in the agency’s attempts to kill Castro.†

Hughes knew this dark tale because he was trying to get Maheu to come to Los Angeles to work for him at the same time Maheu was in Florida plotting with the