Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [1]
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