Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [38]
Maheu was becoming a valued operative, an essential part of the strange new hierarchy of nursemaids, bodyguards, and business executives Hughes was gathering around him. The billionaire was no longer content to share his gumshoe. It came to a head when Maheu tried to return to Washington to be with his wife, who was about to give birth to their fourth child. Hughes was as intent on holding onto him as he had been on keeping Miss Norway.
In a furious series of phone calls Hughes insisted that Maheu stay. Told him he had once seen a woman walking in the park with a basket on her head stop just long enough to have a baby, then walk on with the baby in the basket. Finally, pulling out all the stops, Hughes demanded that Maheu shut down his detective agency, join him full time, and become his “alter ego.”
Maheu, however, was not quite ready for complete monogamy. It was not his wife who was the real competition. It was the CIA.
The Agency had another odd job for Maheu. To set up a Mob hit of Fidel Castro. For months the CIA had been trying to eliminate the new Cuban leader with poison cigars, LSD, exploding seashells, and a powerful depilatory to make his beard fall out. Now, in the summer of 1960, they decided to bring in some real pros. So they called in Maheu, “a tough guy who can get things done.” His mission—to make contact with the Mafia and arrange a $150,000 contract murder.
In the first week of November 1960, five men gathered in a suite at the Fountainbleu Hotel in Miami Beach. Maheu had no need to introduce his CIA case officer James O’Connell to his Mafia pal John Roselli. They had already met, at a party in Maheu’s home. Roselli, the Syndicate’s silver-haired “ambassador” to Las Vegas and Hollywood, introduced the two strangers. Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana and the Mafia’s former man in Havana Santos Trafficante. The daisy chain was almost complete, and Trafficante said he could line up a Cuban to make the hit.
But already there were problems. Just a few days before the big sit-down, Giancana got word that his girl, singer Phyllis McGuire, was two-timing him in Las Vegas with comedian Dan Rowan. To keep Giancana in Miami and on the job, Maheu had sent an operative to bug Rowan’s room, the wireman had been busted by a hotel maid, and the Las Vegas sheriff had called in the FBI. Giancana thought that was so funny he almost choked on his cigar laughing.
And now, up in the Fountainbleu, there was real discord. The CIA man O’Connell told the mobsters he wanted Castro gunned down in a “gangland-style killing.” Like in “The Untouchables.” The Mafiosi, however, wanted this hit done with the dignity befitting a patriotic enterprise. Giancana rejected the standard rub-out as “too dangerous” and suggested poison pills. Roselli also favored something “nice and clean,” no “out-and-out ambushing,” perhaps a secret poison that would disappear without a trace. Like in “Mission Impossible.”
It took the CIA’s Technical Services Division months to perfect the botulinum toxin. Ultimately—just weeks before the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion—Maheu would pass the deadly capsules to a sweating Cuban standing in the doorway of the Boom Boom Room at the Fountainbleu.
But long before the pills were passed, indeed shortly after the big sit-down adjourned, Maheu received an urgent phone call. Holed up in his hotel room, trying to put together a rush job to kill Castro, trying to mediate between the Mob and the CIA, trying to keep the jealous Giancana in Miami, trying to get his wireman out of jail in Las Vegas, trying to keep himself from being indicted for the bugging, trying to ward off the Las