Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [201]
While Nixon waited impatiently for his gang to nail O’Brien, the Hughes gang, unable to get White House assistance, made its own move to nail Maheu—and unwittingly caught the president in a deadly crossfire.
Out in Las Vegas, Intertel instigated an IRS probe against Maheu. It was a fateful move. The IRS investigation that began as a plot against Maheu soon mushroomed into a full-scale audit of the entire Hughes empire, turning first against Hughes himself, and finally against Richard Nixon.
Maheu, however, was aware only of his own IRS problems. He was certain that the investigation had been ordered from the White House. Convinced that Nixon had joined forces with Hughes, that the president was conspiring against him, that the FBI and the CIA were also poised to attack, Maheu fired a warning shot at the Oval Office.
Jack Anderson’s column appeared on August 6, 1971.
“Howard Hughes directed his former factotum Robert Maheu to help Richard Nixon win the presidency ‘under our sponsorship and supervision,’ ” Anderson reported. “Maheu allegedly siphoned off $100,000 from the Silver Slipper, a Hughes gambling emporium, for Nixon’s campaign. The money was delivered by Richard Danner, a Hughes exec, to Bebe Rebozo, a Nixon confidant.”
Nixon’s worst nightmare had come true. The Hughes payoff was out in the open.
Rebozo immediately called Danner, angrily demanding to know how Anderson found out. Danner’s answer was the final blow. Anderson had called him for comment, and said, “Don’t deny it, because I have seen the memo describing this in detail.” Maheu had shown it to him.
Anderson had documentary evidence. There was no way out. Still, he had called the payoff a “campaign contribution.” Obviously a trick. Nixon waited in horror for the full story to explode.
And nothing happened. Nothing that day, nothing that week, nothing that entire month. The story was simply ignored.
Then, without warning, late in September Maheu’s pal Hank Greenspun, publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, brought it back sharply to Nixon’s attention. The president had stopped off in Portland, Oregon, to meet with West Coast newspaper editors, on his way to Alaska for a meeting with the emperor of Japan. Greenspun approached White House press aide Herb Klein. He said he had a story that could “sink Nixon.” He had heard that a contribution of $100,000 from Hughes had been used to furnish the president’s San Clemente estate.
When word of Greenspun’s bombshell reached John Ehrlichman back in Washington, he immediately sent the president’s personal lawyer, Herb Kalmbach, flying out to Las Vegas. Kalmbach checked into the Sahara and met there with Greenspun for nearly four hours. He was slow to get to the Hughes money, as if he didn’t want the publisher to realize that was his real concern. And when Kalmbach finally did bring it up, it was only to vehemently deny that any of Hughes’s money had gone into San Clemente. “I know where every nickel came from,” said the lawyer, “and I can assure you none of it came from Hughes.” That done, Kalmbach started pumping Greenspun for dirt on Larry O’Brien.
Kalmbach himself didn’t know it, but Greenspun had come uncomfortably close to the truth. He just had the wrong house. Nixon had spent at least some of the $100,000 for improvements at Key Biscayne.
The noose was tightening, and a few weeks later Bob Bennett mentioned to Chuck Colson that Maheu had stolen Hughes documents stashed in Hank Greenspun’s safe.
Then, early in December, the same IRS probe that Intertel had instigated against Maheu began to turn against Nixon. An audit of John Meier’s mining-claim scam revealed that the president’s brother had been involved in the swindle. And worse yet, an informant had told the revenue agents that “Bebe Rebozo advised John Meier not to be available for IRS interview because of Don Nixon’s involvement.”
Soon a series of IRS “sensitive case reports” started coming into