Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [3]
Just three days before the break-in, the Securities and Exchange Commission had subpoenaed all the documents at Romaine relating to Hughes’s 1969 takeover of Air West. Nothing more directly threatened the billionaire. Hughes himself and two of his top aides had been indicted for conspiring to manipulate the airline’s stock, defrauding shareholders of $60 million. President Nixon, his confidant Bebe Rebozo, and his brother Donald had all been implicated in the deal, and Hughes faced a possible twelve years in jail.
“Hughes and his agents may have been motivated to make it appear that there was a theft in order to avoid complying with our subpoenas,” suggested a secret SEC report.
Just six days before the break-in, a federal judge had ordered Hughes to surrender five hundred memos demanded by his former chief of staff, Robert Maheu. Ousted in a 1970 palace coup, Maheu was at war with the new high command and had filed a seventeen-million-dollar slander suit against Hughes for calling him “a no-good, dishonest son of a bitch who stole me blind.” The bitter legal battle had already produced charges of Hughes-CIA skulduggery, secret payoffs to Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, and a proposed million-dollar bribe to Lyndon Johnson. Maheu claimed the subpoenaed memos would confirm all his allegations.
He also suspected that Hughes had arranged the burglary to get rid of the damning documents, but Summa officials claimed that Maheu himself had masterminded the break-in and hinted to police that he may have done it in cahoots with the Mafia. For years Hughes’s intelligence network had been trying to link Maheu to the Mob, to find proof that he had conspired to loot the billionaire’s Las Vegas casinos. While the FBI also considered Maheu a suspect, it raised the possibility that the Mafia had acted on its own.
“We may indeed have an effort on the part of organized crime to gain information regarding Mr. Hughes through this break-in,” concluded a confidential FBI report. “This could be to calibrate the stockholder or otherwise obtain useful documents for pressure purposes: e.g., to maintain organized-crime status in Nevada.”
Meanwhile, both the Senate Watergate Committee and the Watergate special prosecutor were probing a concealed $100,000 “contribution” from Hughes to Nixon by way of Rebozo. There was substantial evidence that the cash not only bought the president’s approval of the Air West takeover but also won Attorney General John Mitchell’s go-ahead on Las Vegas hotel purchases that violated antitrust laws.
In fact, Senate investigators believed that the Hughes connection had triggered Watergate. It all began, they theorized, with Nixon’s fears that Democratic party chairman Larry O’Brien had learned of the Rebozo payoff—and perhaps a great deal more—while employed as the billionaire’s Washington lobbyist. The Senate committee demanded that Hughes appear in person and surrender his files, and the special prosecutor issued several subpoenas just weeks before the break-in.
Now the FBI saw a possible Watergate link to the Romaine heist. A Los Angeles police report log noted: “Received call from Karis, FBI—states home office in Washington interested; they feel Watergate is involved.”
And the CIA, in its own list of “possible culprits,” after Maheu, the Mafia, and “foreign government—not necessarily USSR,” also suggested that the Hughes break-in had been “politically motivated to aid or deter Watergate investigation.”
But the Agency itself was also suspect. Shortly before the burglary, Senate investigators got the first official hint that Maheu, while working for Hughes, had orchestrated a CIA-sponsored plot to assassinate Fidel Castro with the help of two leading Mafiosi. It was the CIA’s dirtiest secret, and Maheu had revealed it to Hughes in a phone call that may well have been transcribed and stored at Romaine.
And all of these probes were coming to a head when Romaine was looted and the secret papers vanished.
“If you go on the theory that someone wanted to find out what Hughes knew, or wanted to