Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [49]
Peloquin was prepared for the worst. Stories of Hughes’s physical appearance were grim. Worse, Hughes had suffered another injury in England. Peloquin says Hughes—now nearing seventy, and in poor mental and physical health—had looked up an old British flying buddy, who offered to take him on one more flight over England. Hughes went along, possibly taking the controls of his friend’s airplane for several minutes. The flight was uneventful. But climbing out of the plane proved too challenging for Hughes, who fell, breaking his hip.
He refused to be taken to a hospital, so English doctors tried to set the hip in his hotel room. The operation wasn’t successful, and Hughes was in a lot of pain. He would be dead three years later.
Peloquin was, therefore, surprised to find a likable, lucid man in the hotel suite. “He wasn’t that odd,” Peloquin says. “His hair was reasonably long, but he talked sensibly.”
Hughes, who had a notorious germ phobia, didn’t shake hands, which made for an uncomfortable moment. But still, he didn’t wear Kleenex boxes on his feet, as some reports had described. Hughes suffered from gut-wrenching constipation because of the drug cocktail he consumed daily, and Peloquin says he spent a large part of each day on the toilet. As awful as that sounds, Hughes continued to innovate: he developed a toilet seat for himself based on the design of the military’s McClellan horse saddle, which had a hole in the crotch area.* Later, suffering from bedsores, Hughes designed himself a new mattress that helped alleviate the lesions.
In April 1976 Intertel landed one last secret mission on behalf of the mad billionaire. Hughes was staying in Acapulco’s Princess Hotel when he reached the end of his life. Naked, emaciated, and covered with bedsores, he lay dying. Gay and his other confidants decided to fly him back to the United States, but they said he died during the flight. For Hughes, it was the end of years of misery. But for his aides, who hoped to continue to run the Hughes empire, it was a nightmare. The first problem they faced was that Mexican authorities arrested the entire Hughes retinue in Acapulco. Mexican doctors had been appalled at Hughes’s condition, and suspected neglect—benign or otherwise.
Once again, Gay called Peloquin with an emergency request: get to Mexico and spring the Hughes entourage from prison. Peloquin and a former member of the Arizona border patrol took flights to Mexico.
“Bob, have you got any money?” the man from the border patrol asked Peloquin when they arrived.
“I’ve got a couple of thousand.”
“Give it to me.”
Peloquin handed over the cash. (When dealing with Hughes, Peloquin was accustomed to carrying huge amounts of hard currency.)
The border patrolman disappeared up a back alley, Peloquin says. “A couple of hours later, he came back to the hotel with the Hughes aides, and they were free. That’s Mexico.” Bribing Mexican law enforcement officers was apparently one of Intertel’s services—at least for the firm’s best client.
Now the Intertel men faced another quandary. Hughes’s rooms were loaded with his billionaire’s drugs, legal and illegal, stacked in box after box filled with small glass bottles. The aides were afraid they’d be arrested again, on narcotics charges. The border patrol man left the hotel room. He came back with a truck, and Hughes’s people loaded all the drugs into the back. He and Peloquin drove out into the Mexican desert, where the border patrolman had somehow secured a bulldozer. They watched as the drugs were dumped on the desert floor and crushed under the treads of the bulldozer.
“I think the fish in the bay got pretty high that night,” Peloquin says with a chuckle.
Intertel’s men spent the following months searching everywhere for Hughes’s will. But it was never found—if one had ever existed at all. Eventually, Hughes’s cousins in Texas, whom he had barely known, inherited his money.
AS ALL-CONSUMING AS he could be, Hughes wasn’t Intertel’s only client. Among others, there was the telecommunications giant ITT, and