Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [8]
And he knew that whatever else was hidden away at Romaine, whatever lay behind the steel doors of those locked vaults, these secret papers were the real prize.
June 5, 1974. The night of the break-in.
The Pro knew something was wrong the instant he arrived. There was a stranger leaning against the wall, just inside the door. A man he’d never seen before.
“Who the fuck is that?” he demanded. Mr. Inside, standing next to the stranger, said, “That’s my partner.”
The Pro looked around to his own partners, the Jiggler and another man he had brought in for the big job, a professional safecracker he had worked with before. This wasn’t the plan. He had been expecting to find Red waiting there with Mr. Inside. Now, instead, this mystery man.
Was he a cop? A Hughes operative? Some secret agent? Was he going to bust the Pro right now or blow him away the minute he walked out the door? Whoever this guy was, whoever was really behind this job, the Pro was now certain there was a lot more to it than he had been told.
But it was too late to back out now, and he wanted to go ahead. He’d never have another chance to take off Howard Hughes.
He sent the mystery man upstairs with the Jiggler, supposedly to stand guard outside the one occupied room, to make sure that the switchboard operator didn’t walk in on the break-in, but really to have the Jiggler keep watch over this stranger. The two of them, both wearing handkerchief masks, stood there nervously shoulder to shoulder all night.
Meanwhile, the Pro and his partner went to work.
They went straight to the office where the Pro had spotted the $10,000 bank wrapper the night he cased the joint, laid a four-drawer filing cabinet on its back, peeled open a fire safe in the top drawer with a wedge and a hammer and a crowbar—and immediately hit paydirt. Six bundles of hundred-dollar bills, $10,000 in each, eight bundles of fifties each worth $1,000, and perhaps $500 more in small bills.
The Pro dumped it all into his tool satchel, a dark blue gym bag with white plastic handles, and also threw in two gold Juvenia watches each worth a grand. Not a bad haul. More than seventy big ones from the first safe they popped.
They left behind several hundred thousand dollars in series-E bonds—worthless paper, all nonnegotiable—and headed across the hall to a row of six walk-in vaults.
Mr. Inside pointed to one of the old Mosler safes, said it was stuffed with silver dollars, hundreds of bags, thousands in each, all of them old coins worth five bucks apiece. Dragging the two-tank acetylene torch over to the vault, the Pro lowered his goggles and went to work, burning through the ten-foot-high double steel doors until he had cut a hole big enough, and then clambered right in.
The vault was stacked wall to wall, practically floor to ceiling, all the way back ten feet deep. But not with silver dollars. Climbing over boxes and trunks and assorted debris, the Pro rummaged through the dark safe, shining his flashlight in every direction in an increasingly frantic search for the treasure, only to find another bizarre collection of Hughes’s personal effects: hundreds of hearing aids stashed in several wooden fruit crates; boxes upon boxes of old correspondence, letters and Christmas cards sent to him in decades past; numerous footlockers filled with old screenplays; another trunk of scrapbooks and several crammed with pilot logs; scores of silver-cup flying trophies and a gold cup from a golf tournament; more hearing aids; and a large ceremonial plate from William Randolph Hearst.
The Pro could have remained in that vault all night without getting a full inventory. Only three items really caught his attention. A seven-millimeter solid silver pistol with a card that read, “Captured from Hermann Goering.” A pair of German SS binoculars in a black leather case. And a huge cut-glass bowl bearing the inscription To Howard Hughes from Hubert Horatio Humphrey, with the vice-president’s seal etched below.