Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [231]
Both Dalitz and Maheu recounted the Desert Inn eviction crisis in depositions later filed in Maheu’s slander suit against Hughes, and Maheu gave further details in an interview and in an account quoted by James Phelan in his book Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years (Random House, 1976, pp. 63–64). Maheu reported his enlistment of Hoffa in contemporaneous memos sent to Hughes. Dalitz was identified by the Kefauver Committee as Cleveland manager of the national crime syndicate run by Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky in the 1930s, and FBI wiretaps made public in 1963 showed that Dalitz was still a Lansky man, also associated with Mafiosi like Roselli and Giancana. “I was seen with them,” Dalitz fretted in one bugged conversation. “I don’t think that’s good. It ties the whole Mob up.”
Maheu reported Roselli’s role in Hughes’s purchase of the Desert Inn in both court and Senate testimony and recounted his threat to resign and Hughes’s offer of a half-million-dollar retainer in depositions and court testimony.
In an interview, Maheu noted that his constant fights with Hughes had driven him to drink and said that he had sent some memos “when I was half crocked that I wished I had never dictated.” By late 1967 Maheu’s drinking problem had become so serious that the CIA worried it would lead to revelation of the Castro plot, according to congressional sources who saw CIA “risk analysis” reports. Curiously, the only person privy to the plot the CIA didn’t keep tabs on was Hughes himself.
3 The Kingdom
Paul Laxalt refused repeated interview requests. He failed to answer four letters sent to his home and Senate office, he ignored all requests for an accounting of money received from Hughes, and his campaign treasurer, Jerry Dondero, also refused to make any financial data public. Laxalt’s brother Peter, a partner in the family law firm on retainer to Hughes, also declined to answer any questions even after they were submitted in writing at his request.
“The Senator has ducked this question many times,” explained his press aide, David Russell. “He’s all Hughesed-out.”
Laxalt himself has publicly admitted on several occasions that he waived all normal licensing procedures to help Hughes buy up Las Vegas, and two former members of the Gaming Commission confirmed that the governor personally pushed through Hughes’s casino applications. Laxalt has stated that he backed Hughes to get rid of the mobsters who owned the casinos, but when he ran for governor in 1966, and again when he ran for the Senate in 1974 and 1980, Laxalt accepted campaign contributions from these same organized-crime figures, including the principal owner of both the Desert Inn and the Stardust, Moe Dalitz. (See Edward Pound, “Some Backers of Laxalt Show Up in FBI Files,” Wall Street Journal, June 20, 1983.) When asked why he did not return the Dalitz money, Laxalt said, “Moe Dalitz is a friend of mine.”
Laxalt’s December 1967 meeting with members of Nevada’s Gaming Commission and Gaming Control Board is recounted in a December 14, 1967, FBI report obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The governor’s fears about Hughes were also recalled by one of the officials present as well as by the FBI’s chief agent in Las Vegas, Dean Elson, who wrote the report. “They didn’t know if they had an imposter there or not, they didn’t know if they had anyone,” said Elson, who quit the FBI to go to work for Hughes in 1968. “There were a lot of discussions with Bob Maheu to try to get prints from a drinking glass or something, to have him remove something from the penthouse, but he was never able to do it.”
J. Edgar Hoover’s rejection of Laxalt’s plea to determine if Hughes was alive was handwritten by Hoover at the bottom of the FBI report.
Hughes’s early sojourns in Las Vegas were described by Walter Kane, a longtime employee whose primary job was to sign showgirls and starlets to “movie contracts.” “We used to come up here and he didn’t want to miss a place—every place in town, we’d go in,” recalled Kane in an interview. “He loved show