Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [215]
A few days after the failed summit meeting, Rebozo told Nixon’s new chief of staff Alexander Haig about the Hughes problem. Haig called Deputy Treasury Secretary William Simon and asked for a status report on the IRS case. Simon informed him that Rebozo was going to be audited.
Rebozo hired a good tax lawyer. On June 18, following his lawyer’s advice, Bebe called the FBI’s chief agent in Miami, an old friend, and asked him to come over to his Key Biscayne bank. They entered the vault, and there in the presence of the agent and his lawyer, Rebozo opened safe-deposit box number 224. He slipped out two large manila envelopes and emptied bundles of hundred-dollar bills onto the table. It was the Hughes money, said Rebozo, and they counted it out.
There were no longer twenty bundles in bank wrappers, but ten bundles in rubber bands. Still, it was the same money he received, Rebozo insisted. He had simply removed the Las Vegas wrappers because of “the stigma applied to anything from Las Vegas.”
And it was all there, every penny, in fact it had multiplied. The count came to $100,100. Rebozo could not explain the extra hundred-dollar bill.
The next day he brought it all to his lawyer’s office, and prevailed on Danner to meet him there. Danner never showed. Finally, however, Danner put Rebozo in touch with Chester Davis, and the bluff Hughes attorney readily agreed to take back the money. “Be glad to accept it,” said Davis without ceremony.
Rebozo immediately unloaded the loot on Abplanalp’s corporate secretary, who handed it over to a Davis associate in New York on Wednesday, June 27, 1973.
Richard Nixon was finally rid of the Hughes cash, but he had not escaped the Hughes curse.
Out in Los Angeles one week later, on the Fourth of July, Robert Maheu blew the lid off the payoff.
Alone in a room with four lawyers, he celebrated the holiday by giving his deposition for a seventeen-million-dollar slander suit he had filed against Hughes, a suit triggered by his former boss’s outburst at the Clifford Irving press conference, the angry accusation that Maheu “stole me blind.”
It was the final act of their bitter divorce, and Maheu now openly revealed their most intimate dirty secrets.
“I have religiously protected Howard Hughes relative to political contributions,” said Maheu, posing as the still faithful spouse. “I think I should warn you,” he told the Hughes lawyers, “that if you want to push into the political world of Howard Hughes, I will put the consequences squarely on your shoulders.”
And then he told the tale of the big Nixon bribe.
“Mr. Hughes wanted to own the presidents of the United States,” said Maheu, and in the case of Nixon “certain political obligations had to be met.” Half of the hundred-thousand-dollar contribution was in direct payment for Attorney General Mitchell’s waiver of antitrust laws, the handshake deal he made with Danner that allowed Hughes to continue buying up Las Vegas. “Upon the return of Mr. Danner from Washington, D.C.,” said Maheu, “I made available to Mr. Danner the sum of $50,000 for delivery to Mr. Rebozo.”
When news of Maheu’s sworn revelation reached the Senate Watergate Committee, a team of investigators began to explore the hidden transaction, to push into the political world of Howard Hughes, and to find there the world behind Watergate.
The Hughes connection burst into public view on October 10. For the first time, the hundred-thousand-dollar deal was front-page news across the country, and the senators announced that they planned to subpoena Rebozo, the entire Hughes gang, even Hughes himself, haul them all before the committee and question them live on national television.
Staff investigators had already grilled Rebozo in Key Biscayne. In that and subsequent testimony, the Cuban tried to explain why he had kept the money hidden for three years and then returned it.
“I didn’t want to risk even the remotest embarrassment about any Hughes connection with Nixon,” said Rebozo. “I was convinced that it cost the president the 1960 election and didn