Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [37]
The Case of the Greedy Greek was a classic tragedy. At least for Aristotle Onassis. In his hubris, the tycoon had made a secret deal with the dying king of Saudi Arabia that gave him a virtual monopoly on shipping oil from the Persian Gulf. It was Maheu’s mission to scuttle that contract. Ostensibly he was working for Onassis’s blood rival Stavros Niarchos. But the CIA was definitely in on it and so was then Vice-President Richard Nixon, and while not even the players seemed to be sure who was using whom on whose behalf, Big Oil was probably pulling the strings to make the world safe for Aramco. Still, it was Maheu’s show. He bugged Onassis’s offices in New York, Paris, and London, got proof that the contract had been bought with a bribe, exposed the scandal in a Rome newspaper secretly owned by the CIA, and finally journeyed to Jidda, where he personally presented his evidence to the Saudi royal family and killed the whole deal. Not bad for a private peeper on his first big job.
And he still found time to handle the Cramer case. Turns out the kid did have some kind of ties with the CIA. Liaison for Lockheed, apparently. What else Maheu dug up is unknown, but within months Cramer III and Jean Peters had separated, Jean was back in Hollywood seeing Howard Hughes, and in 1957 the former Mrs. Cramer became the new Mrs. Hughes.
By that time Maheu had figured out that the billionaire was his unnamed client and, in fact, was getting regular assignments. Fixing a city council race. Helping a would-be blackmailer recognize his mistake. That kind of thing. Finally, the same year Hughes got married, Maheu even got to speak to him.
Hughes was in Nassau, escaping his new wife while he pondered a Caribbean real-estate coup, and he called long-distance, summoning his gumshoe down to the Bahamas. Wanted Maheu to slip $25,000 to the Bay Street Boys. On that mission, cooling his heels in a hotel lobby, Maheu also caught a quick glimpse of his mystery client—from the back, as Hughes was about to enter an elevator, berating his hapless Mormon aides for their failure to have the door open and waiting.
Maheu recognized the voice. He would come to know it all too well. But that trip to Nassau was Hughes’s last public appearance, and it was as close as Maheu would ever get to seeing him. He would, however, begin to spend a lot of time out in Los Angeles tending to Hughes’s problems, especially with women.
Like the Case of the Captive Slave Girls. In the summer of 1959, Hughes, now in complete seclusion, holed up in the Beverly Hills Hotel, seeing no one, not even his wife, suddenly decided to add seven Miss Universe contestants to his harem. For years he had been stashing mistresses in safe houses all around Los Angeles, under surveillance and under guard, and although he had never seen some of them he still had several on standby. Now he wanted more. Fast.
He awakened Maheu in the middle of the night, sent him out to Long Beach with orders to offer the beauty queens movie contracts. All seven were lured into hotel suites and kept there awaiting promised screen tests. Hughes, however, seemed to lose interest, and after weeks without contact the girls started drifting away. When the billionaire discovered his loss, he flew into a rage and assigned a dozen of his operatives to keep the last, Miss Norway, from leaving.
Maheu apparently had no role in that part of the caper, but he did claim credit for hushing it up years later when it came to the attention of a Senate committee. “The files, Howard,” Maheu later told Hughes, “contained very devastating evidence pertaining