Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [232]
Hughes bought the Desert Inn for $13.25 million on March 31, 1967, the Sands for $23 million on July 27, 1967, the Castaways for $3.3 million on October 26, 1967, the Frontier for $23 million on December 28, 1967, and the Silver Slipper for $5.4 million on April 30, 1968. His deal for the Stardust, at $30.5 million, was never closed, but later he bought the Landmark for $17.3 million and Harold’s Club in Reno for $10.5 million.
Laxalt’s phone conversation with Hughes took place on January 5, 1968. In addition to Hughes’s tirade about the water, the governor later confided to associates that he was also taken aback by the echo-chamber effect of Hughes’s phone amplifier, which he described as “weird, a strange sound, really quite unsettling.”
Laxalt has publicly admitted receiving job offers from Hughes while governor but has always claimed that he turned them down, never noting that he did so only after years of negotiations, just as he was about to leave office. His family law firm received $10,000 a month from Hughes as a retainer in 1970, plus fees of at least $60,000, according to Tom Bell, law partner of the governor’s brother Peter. Another attorney associated with the firm said that Laxalt himself received legal fees “in excess of $100,000” from Hughes immediately after stepping down as governor, but Laxalt told Jack Anderson that he got only $72,000.
Roselli’s claim that the Desert Inn eviction crisis was a Mafia plot was quoted by Jimmy Fratianno in Ovid Demaris, The Last Mafioso: The Treacherous World of Jimmy Fratianno (Times Books, 1981, p. 188). According to IRS and Justice Department sources, effective control of Hughes’s casinos remained in the hands of the previous Mob owners, and Maheu retained most of the old staff at the Desert Inn and the Sands, while bringing in Lansky’s former pit boss at the Flamingo to run the casino at the Frontier. Former IRS intelligence chief in Las Vegas, Andy Baruffi, confirmed in a series of interviews that millions—perhaps more than $50 million—were skimmed from Hughes’s casinos. “We investigated three possibilities,” said Baruffi, who ran a massive audit of the Hughes empire from 1971 through 1973. “That Maheu was stealing the money, that Hughes himself was stealing the money, or that organized crime was doing it either with one or the other or on its own. We knew the Mob was somehow involved because the same Mob people who ran the casinos before Hughes bought them ran them after, and these people would not have run a skim of that magnitude without orders from the top. And we knew that the money had disappeared. But we could never find out where it had gone.”
Of the $858,500 drawn from the Silver Slipper and passed to Nevada politicians, Tom Bell, in a sworn deposition and a series of interviews, admitted to handling $385,000. Bell said that another Hughes operative, Jack Hooper, handled other Slipper political funds but did not know how much he disbursed, and Hooper refused to grant an interview. Maheu testified under oath that he passed $50,000 to Senator Bible in 1968 and $70,000 to Senator Cannon in 1970. When Bell revealed the other contributions in court testimony, several of the named beneficiaries claimed they received less—List said he got only $6,200; Fike said he got $25,000. None of the politicians ever signed a receipt, and the payments were always made in cash.
Bell also testified that Laxalt personally solicited contributions: “From time to time during Paul Laxalt’s administration he asked me to convey to Mr. Hughes the desirability of making political contributions to certain candidates. He actually visited me personally with reference to supporting particular Republican candidates.” In a series of interviews, Bell added that Laxalt requested the funds in visits to the Frontier, on the telephone, and while they played tennis together, and recalled that the governor “pushed very hard” to get Hughes money for his designated successor Fike, who, according to Bell, personally came by