Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [2]
At the same time, Davis said he heard the pop and crackle of a blowtorch. Directly across the hall, the safecrackers burned a gaping hole through the steel doors of a walk-in vault. “Looky here, this is it!” the guard heard one exclaim.
Before they were finished, the burglars had torched another large safe, pried open three smaller ones, and ransacked several offices, including that of Nadine Henley, Hughes’s longtime personal secretary and a member of Summa’s ruling triumverate.
Finally, Davis said, the intruders marched him upstairs and entered a second-floor conference room where the billionaire’s personal files had been assembled at the orders of his general counsel, Chester Davis, the third member of Summa’s top command.
“This is a piece of cake,” said one of the burglars, prying open a file cabinet, and the guard said he could hear them tell each other, “Take this, not those. Yeah, those are the good ones,” as they dropped folder after confidential folder into cardboard boxes on the floor.
Almost four hours after they had arrived, the burglars trussed Davis around the knees and ankles with surgical tape, left him lying on a couch in a basement furniture warehouse, and vanished.
He did not leap up after them. “If I could have freed my arms and legs and pulled the blindfold off and jumped one of them for the sake of Hughes, I wouldn’t have done it,” the guard later explained. “I knew the security at Romaine was lousy, and I tried to tell all the top people, but no one seemed to care. And I was only getting crumbs, while they were getting a whole loaf of his bread.”
So, as ordered, Davis lay still on the couch. About half an hour after the burglars had escaped, he loosened his bonds and hobbled back up to Kay Glenn’s office. There he phoned upstairs to the still oblivious switchboard operator, who called the police.
Detectives combed the cavernous Hughes headquarters without finding a solid clue. There were no identifiable fingerprints, the abandoned acetylene tanks could not be traced, and no one in the nearly deserted industrial district had seen the burglars. One of the cops who surveyed the scene was later quoted as saying, “They knocked off Romaine like it was a corner delicatessen.”
The police revealed only that $60,000 had been taken although some press reports placed the figure as high as $300,000. The Hughes organization, of course, said nothing. In fact, taking immediate control of the case, Summa dispatched a representative to police headquarters to censor all announcements.
So there was no public mention of the other missing items, but in a bulletin sent to law-enforcement agencies, the Los Angeles police also listed as stolen a bizarre grab bag including two large Wedgwood vases, a pink-and-blue ceramic samovar, an antique wooden Mongolian eating bowl, and Nadine Henley’s butterfly collection.
No one was told about the solid-gold medallion found in a basement trash bin, where it had been inexplicably discarded by the burglars.
And not a word was said about the big secret of the break-in: the secret papers of Howard Hughes had disappeared.
There was virtually no powerful force in this country, indeed in the world, that did not have an interest in the missing files, that did not have reason to steal them, that did not have reason to fear their loss. There was circumstantial evidence to suggest that the CIA, the Mafia, even the White House was behind the break-in. There was still stronger evidence that Hughes had “stolen” his own files to safeguard them from subpoena.
Certainly both the timing of the break-in and the ease with which it was accomplished raised immediate questions about the Great Hughes Heist. The burglars were not the only ones after his