Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [14]
And if Nixon had more than the Glomar on his mind, Colby too had other worries. Not only was the Castro assassination plot threatening to blow, but the Hughes organization also had a virtual monopoly on highly classified spy satellites and provided cover for CIA agents working abroad.
“Obviously we had other contracts with elements of the Hughes empire—research things and technology, and things like that—and to the extent that any of those …” Colby’s voice trailed off. “But I don’t know what was stolen,” he continued. “I’m not sure anybody knows precisely what was taken. So I certainly can’t say that any other project was compromised. I just don’t know.”
Only one thing was certain: the missing secret papers had to be recovered.
While the Glomar lowered its giant claw, and Colby huddled with Nixon, and the entire Hughes-CIA-FBI intelligence network went on red alert, two unlikely new characters joined the show. Leo Gordon, a sometime actor and screenwriter, and Donald Ray Woolbright, a sometime used-car salesman known to police as a petty thief.
Their alleged meeting late in July turned the Great Hughes Heist into an “Upstairs, Downstairs” melodrama, with Woolbright and Gordon playing the lowlife subplot in the running saga of powerful men in desperate pursuit of great secrets. Before it was over, Woolbright would be indicted by a grand jury that heard Gordon as its star witness. The following account of their meeting is based on Gordon’s testimony.
“I don’t know whether I should tell you this,” Woolbright began hesitantly, pacing the actor’s living room. “But I’ve been beating it around in my head for days, and I’ve been walking the walls with it. I have something that’s very big and I don’t know quite how to handle it.”
The car salesman was agitated. He couldn’t sit still.
“Who is the most important man you can think of in the world today?” he suddenly asked.
“Kissinger,” replied Gordon.
“How about Howard Hughes?” suggested Woolbright. “What would you say if I told you I had two boxes of Howard Hughes’s personal documents?”
Gordon, who had seen newspaper accounts of the break-in, guessed that the documents must have come from Romaine. Woolbright, he claimed, simply nodded.
It was fitting that the Romaine mystery should take its next odd B-movie twist in Leo Gordon’s living room. An aging Hollywood veteran, Gordon had played the second-level heavy in a long string of third-rate movies with titles like The Restless Breed, Gun Fury, and Kitten with a Whip; appropriately, he had also appeared in The Man Who Knew Too Much. His was one of those nameless leathery faces that had flickered through every TV action series from “Gun-smoke” to “The Untouchables.” As an actor, he almost always played the bad guy. His specialty was death scenes; spliced together they would run at least three hours.
Woolbright also had a tough-guy image. But his was not manufactured in Hollywood. A product of the north St. Louis slums, the car salesman had run up a hometown police record almost as long as Gordon’s list of screen credits. He had twenty-six arrests, on charges ranging from burglary and fencing to assault and carrying a concealed weapon. But for all his arrests, Woolbright had never done any time, and his only conviction was for a petty misdemeanor. Back in St. Louis, police called him a “nickel-and-dimer,” a street hustler with no real stature in the criminal community. And they could not believe that Woolbright was even remotely involved in the Hughes heist.
“If he did it,” said one officer, “it would be the equivalent of a sandlot ballplayer going to the major leagues and hitting a home