Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [4]
Adding to the mystery, the Romaine heist was the sixth unsolved burglary of a Hughes office in just four months. In February 1974 there was a break-in at the billionaire’s Las Vegas headquarters. No documents were reported taken, although police found filing cabinets rifled, desks ransacked, and papers strewn on the floor. In March, burglars struck another Hughes office in Las Vegas. At about the same time, the New York law offices of Hughes’s chief counsel, Chester Davis, were hit. Again no papers were reported missing. In Washington there was a break-in at Mullen & Company, a public relations firm owned by Hughes lobbyist Robert F. Bennett, who also fronted for the CIA and employed Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt. File drawers were left open, but once again no papers were reported stolen. And finally, in April, Hughes’s office in Encino, a Los Angeles suburb, was entered through the roof. This time the thieves made off with a voice scrambler, a sophisticated device that was used to secure telephone conversations with Bennett’s Washington office and CIA headquarters in Langley.
It was against this background that Los Angeles police began to investigate the new heist at 7000 Romaine. In a confidential report written several weeks after the break-in, LAPD detectives noted some curious aspects of the bizarre case:
“The building is taped and wired for an electrical alarm system, but it had not been operative for one year. Without knowledge of this fact, it appears the alarm is operative.”
“The physical layout of this building and the type of material kept in each office is not general knowledge, even within the organization.”
“Although only one large Mosler walk-in vault was torched, there are 18 additional vaults on the same floor which were not attacked.”
“Three of the offices were entered with keys. One of the most important was that of Kay Glenn. Investigating officers tried to shim this door and others and found it was not possible.”
Even more troubling were the results of polygraph examinations administered to the Hughes employees. Mike Davis, the lone security guard on duty the night of the break-in, failed to appear three times and finally refused to take a lie-detector test. “I just don’t believe in it,” he explained. “A man should be trusted on his word.” Davis was fired. The only witness to the burglary was now himself a suspect.
His boss, Vince Kelley, Summa’s West Coast security chief, did take a polygraph—but failed. He “displayed guilty knowledge to all four examiners who reviewed the tape,” according to the police report. A later FBI report on Kelley’s test was more explicit: “He was asked about prior knowledge, where the stolen property was located, and if he was present during the robbery. He ‘failed miserably’ when answering all these questions.”
To clear himself, Kelley arranged a second polygraph test through a private eye, who found him “clean.” What Kelley didn’t mention was that the same private eye and two of their mutual friends had been involved in one of the five earlier Hughes break-ins, the Encino job, and had actually ended up with the stolen scrambler.
Yet although he had failed to report the earlier theft, failed to install a burglar alarm at Romaine, failed his lie-detector test, and then chose a pal connected with one Hughes burglary to clear him of complicity in another, Kelley was not dismissed. He remained West Coast security chief.
Adding to this strange puzzle, Kelley’s boss, Ralph Winte, the man in charge of security for the entire Hughes empire, had himself been involved in plotting the theft of another cache of secret Hughes papers. E. Howard Hunt had just recently revealed in sworn Senate testimony that he had plotted with Winte to seize a stash of Hughes’s memos by busting open the safe of Las Vegas newspaper publisher Hank Greenspun, in a joint venture between the Hughes and Nixon forces, approved by Attorney General Mitchell.
An FBI report