Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [15]
Then how did the used-car salesman come to have the billionaire’s secret papers? He said he got them from “Bennie.”
According to Gordon, Woolbright told him this strange tale. Woolbright said he was just sitting home one night when he got a call from a St. Louis man named Bennie. And that Bennie—whom he had met at a friend’s funeral two years earlier and never seen again—said he represented four other men from St. Louis who had pulled the Romaine job “on commission.” Now Bennie wanted Woolbright to ransom the purloined papers back to Hughes.
It was, by Gordon’s account of Woolbright’s odd tale, quite a haul. “There was stuff about political payoffs—Nixon, I think—and references to Hubert Humphrey as ‘our boy Hubert,’ ” claimed the actor. “Files on Air West and TWA. A complete rundown on everything happening in Las Vegas. And a hell of a lot about the CIA.” All of it handwritten by Hughes himself.
But the ransom attempt had fallen through. The would-be bagman was out of a job. Then Woolbright allegedly began thinking about Clifford Irving and figured that if Irving wangled $750,000 for a bogus autobiography, the real goods should be worth at least as much.
“That’s why he came to see me,” explained Gordon. “He thought that because I’m a professional writer, I’d be able to help him peddle the papers.”
Still, Gordon was a very odd choice. Although he often played the villain as an actor, Gordon was in fact quite close to the forces of law and order. A familiar face around police headquarters, he had written more than twenty scripts for “Adam 12,” a TV series glorifying two fictional squad-car cops. The license plates on Gordon’s own car read ADM-12, he had an honorary police badge, and his best friend was an investigator for the district attorney’s office.
Why would a bagman for the hottest burglars since Watergate risk spilling the beans to an ersatz cop? Why would the burglars entrust their valuable booty to Woolbright, a man their supposed contact had met only once? It made no sense.
Yet Gordon’s account would soon become central to the entire Romaine case, and new characters drawn into the drama did confirm the Woolbright connection.
The actor first took his new partner to see a Hollywood business manager, Joanna Hayes, but she told them nobody would buy hot Hughes papers from a used-car salesman. So they went instead to see a lawyer Gordon had heard was “well connected.”
Woolbright showed the lawyer, Maynard Davis, a memo supposedly written by Hughes, and Davis placed a call to his “Uncle Sidney”—Sidney Korshak, reputed to be one of the most powerful organized crime leaders in the country.
As it happened, Los Angeles police believed that Korshak may have played a role in the Romaine heist. According to an LAPD report, Hughes security chief Ralph Winte said he had “received information that there were possibly two attorneys involved, Sidney Korshak and Morris Shenker … if a sale [of the papers] was made, it would be through these attorneys.”
But Davis claimed his Uncle Sidney was out of town when he called, and swore he never discussed the Hughes papers with him.
Gordon said he and a dispirited Woolbright left the lawyer’s office and went to a nearby coffee shop. “Well, we tried our best shot and I guess we’re too lightweight to handle it,” the car salesman reportedly said. “It’s too big for us. I’ll just have to give this stuff back to the people and forget it.”
If Woolbright was discouraged, a large team of FBI men, CIA agents, and LAPD detectives was equally disheartened. Two months had passed since the burglary without a breakthrough, and the Glomar was completing its top-secret mission under threat of sudden exposure.
Finally, “Adam 12” Gordon tipped off the police. When his weird tale of the Woolbright connection flashed through law-enforcement circles, the reaction was immediate and seemingly decisive. The FBI told the LAPD to have Gordon reestablish contact with Woolbright and sent word to Chief Davis that there was a million dollars in CIA funds available