Citizen Hughes

by Michael Drosnin

  Maheu reported Roselli’s role in Hughes’s purchase of the Desert Inn in both court and Senate testimony and recounted his threat to resign and Hughes’s offer of a half-million-dollar retainer in depositions and court testimony.

  In an interview, Maheu noted that his constant fights with Hughes had driven him to drink and said that he had sent some memos “when I was half crocked that I wished I had never dictated.” By late 1967 Maheu’s drinking problem had become so serious that the CIA worried it would lead to revelation of the Castro plot, according to congressional sources who saw CIA “risk analysis” reports. Curiously, the only person privy to the plot the CIA didn’t keep tabs on was Hughes himself.

  3 The Kingdom

  Paul Laxalt refused repeated interview requests. He failed to answer four letters sent to his home and Senate office, he ignored all requests for an accounting of money received from Hughes, and his campaign treasurer, Jerry Dondero, also refused to make any financial data public. Laxalt’s brother Peter, a partner in the family law firm on retainer to Hughes, also declined to answer any questions even after they were submitted in writing at his request.

  “The Senator has ducked this question many times,” explained his press aide, David Russell. “He’s all Hughesed-out.”

  Laxalt himself has publicly admitted on several occasions that he waived all normal licensing procedures to help Hughes buy up Las Vegas, and two former members of the Gaming Commission confirmed that the governor personally pushed through Hughes’s casino applications. Laxalt has stated that he backed Hughes to get rid of the mobsters who owned the casinos, but when he ran for governor in 1966, and again when he ran for the Senate in 1974 and 1980, Laxalt accepted campaign contributions from these same organized-crime figures, including the principal owner of both the Desert Inn and the Stardust, Moe Dalitz. (See Edward Pound, “Some Backers of Laxalt Show Up in FBI Files,” Wall Street Journal, June 20, 1983.) When asked why he did not return the Dalitz money, Laxalt said, “Moe Dalitz is a friend of mine.”

  Laxalt’s December 1967 meeting with members of Nevada’s Gaming Commission and Gaming Control Board is recounted in a December 14, 1967, FBI report obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The governor’s fears about Hughes were also recalled by one of the officials present as well as by the FBI’s chief agent in Las Vegas, Dean Elson, who wrote the report. “They didn’t know if they had an imposter there or not, they didn’t know if they had anyone,” said Elson, who quit the FBI to go to work for Hughes in 1968. “There were a lot of discussions with Bob Maheu to try to get prints from a drinking glass or something, to have him remove something from the penthouse, but he was never able to do it.”

  J. Edgar Hoover’s rejection of Laxalt’s plea to determine if Hughes was alive was handwritten by Hoover at the bottom of the FBI report.

  Hughes’s early sojourns in Las Vegas were described by Walter Kane, a longtime employee whose primary job was to sign showgirls and starlets to “movie contracts.” “We used to come up here and he didn’t want to miss a place—every place in town, we’d go in,” recalled Kane in an interview. “He loved show business, he was fascinated by show people, and of course the showgirls.”

  Hughes bought the Desert Inn for $13.25 million on March 31, 1967, the Sands for $23 million on July 27, 1967, the Castaways for $3.3 million on October 26, 1967, the Frontier for $23 million on December 28, 1967, and the Silver Slipper for $5.4 million on April 30, 1968. His deal for the Stardust, at $30.5 million, was never closed, but later he bought the Landmark for $17.3 million and Harold’s Club in Reno for $10.5 million.

  Laxalt’s phone conversation with Hughes took place on January 5, 1968. In addition to Hughes’s tirade about the water, the governor later confided to associates that he was also taken aback by the echo-chamber effect of Hughes’s phone amplifier, which he described as “weird, a strange sound, really quite unsettling.”

  Laxalt has publicly admitted receiving job offers from Hughes while governor but has always claimed that he turned them down, never noting that he did so only after years of negotiations, just as he was about to leave office. His family law firm received $10,000 a month from Hughes as a retainer in 1970, plus fees of at least $60,000, according to Tom Bell, law partner of the governor’s brother Peter. Another attorney associated with the firm said that Laxalt himself received legal fees “in excess of $100,000” from Hughes immediately after stepping down as governor, but Laxalt told Jack Anderson that he got only $72,000.

  Roselli’s claim that the Desert Inn eviction crisis was a Mafia plot was quoted by Jimmy Fratianno in Ovid Demaris, The Last Mafioso: The Treacherous World of Jimmy Fratianno (Times Books, 1981, p. 188). According to IRS and Justice Department sources, effective control of Hughes’s casinos remained in the hands of the previous Mob owners, and Maheu retained most of the old staff at the Desert Inn and the Sands, while bringing in Lansky’s former pit boss at the Flamingo to run the casino at the Frontier. Former IRS intelligence chief in Las Vegas, Andy Baruffi, confirmed in a series of interviews that millions—perhaps more than $50 million—were skimmed from Hughes’s casinos. “We investigated three possibilities,” said Baruffi, who ran a massive audit of the Hughes empire from 1971 through 1973. “That Maheu was stealing the money, that Hughes himself was stealing the money, or that organized crime was doing it either with one or the other or on its own. We knew the Mob was somehow involved because the same Mob people who ran the casinos before Hughes bought them ran them after, and these people would not have run a skim of that magnitude without orders from the top. And we knew that the money had disappeared. But we could never find out where it had gone.”

  Of the $858,500 drawn from the Silver Slipper and passed to Nevada politicians, Tom Bell, in a sworn deposition and a series of interviews, admitted to handling $385,000. Bell said that another Hughes operative, Jack Hooper, handled other Slipper political funds but did not know how much he disbursed, and Hooper refused to grant an interview. Maheu testified under oath that he passed $50,000 to Senator Bible in 1968 and $70,000 to Senator Cannon in 1970. When Bell revealed the other contributions in court testimony, several of the named beneficiaries claimed they received less—List said he got only $6,200; Fike said he got $25,000. None of the politicians ever signed a receipt, and the payments were always made in cash.

  Bell also testified that Laxalt personally solicited contributions: “From time to time during Paul Laxalt’s administration he asked me to convey to Mr. Hughes the desirability of making political contributions to certain candidates. He actually visited me personally with reference to supporting particular Republican candidates.” In a series of interviews, Bell added that Laxalt requested the funds in visits to the Frontier, on the telephone, and while they played tennis together, and recalled that the governor “pushed very hard” to get Hughes money for his designated successor Fike, who, according to Bell, personally came by to pick up his cash.

  The list of Hughes’s demands is quoted from Bell’s deposition.

  Laxalt’s letter to Attorney General Clark is reproduced in a report of the Senate Watergate Committee. To the governor’s claim that Hughes’s purchase of the Stardust was necessary to drive out the mobsters who owned it, the Justice Department replied: “We feel sure that Nevada’s interests can be equally well served by means which do not violate federal antitrust laws.” The department also noted that Hughes said he planned to retain all the old personnel at the Stardust.

  4 Network

  The scene of Hughes watching “The Dating Game” is reconstructed from a transcript of the March 29, 1969, show and from a handwritten Hughes memo of the same date quoted later in this chapter (p. 155).

  Hughes’s TV viewing habits were described by two of his Mormons and also gleaned from information in his own memos. His creation of the “Swinging Shift” is detailed in a series of memos.

  Hughes bought KLAS in 1967 from Hank Greenspun, publisher of the Las Vegas Sun. “Right after Hughes appeared in Las Vegas,
I began getting calls from his Mormons,” recalled Greenspun. “At first they asked that I keep the station open a little longer. Then they wanted to know if we’d put on westerns or airplane pictures. Finally I said, ‘Why doesn’t he just buy the damned thing and run it any way he pleases?’ ”

  On February 14, 1968, the FCC granted Hughes a license for KLAS without holding any hearings, although it had always required other applicants to appear in person. Commissioner Nicholas Johnson issued a stinging dissent: “Before we grant the management of what may become the largest company town in American history one-third control over its television communication, we owe it to the public to air these issues in open hearing.” Maheu meanwhile reported to Hughes: “We ran into a problem with the FCC examiner who indicated the necessity of a hearing with you present as sole stockholder. We handled that situation at the Commission level. Sen. Bible was very helpful.”

  The ABC tender offer Hughes called a two-hundred-million-dollar deal was actually a deal for $148.5 million. With ABC selling at $58.75 a share, Hughes offered $74.25 a share for two million shares, 43 percent of the outstanding stock. However, his memos make it clear that he ultimately planned to buy a controlling interest in ABC, at least 51 percent of the stock, perhaps far more.

  My account of the ABC board meeting is based on interviews with then ABC vice-president Simon Siegel and general counsel Everett Erlick, both of whom were present. “It was a total surprise,” said Erlick. “Our key strategy was to force Hughes into public, but we never knew why he dropped the bid.”

  Lyndon Johnson’s personal interest in the Hughes-ABC battle was recalled by a member of the White House staff and an associate of one of the president’s private attorneys, both of whom noted that Johnson always avoided contact with the FCC for fear it would raise questions about his own TV holdings in Austin. ABC’s Erlick also said that “LBJ had people watching it, but never got directly involved.” Johnson’s belief that Communists controlled the TV networks is quoted by Doris Kearns in Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (Signet, 1977, p. 331).

  Four of the seven FCC commissioners confirmed in interviews that the FCC was prepared to approve Hughes’s takeover of ABC if he appeared in person. “I regarded him as a much saner man then than I would now,” said Kenneth Cox. “We assumed that he would appear, and the FCC had already approved his purchase of KLAS, so we were on record in finding him qualified.” Even the maverick Nicholas Johnson, who opposed the KLAS license, was ready to approve the ABC deal. “Obviously he was mad as a hatter,” said Johnson. “But we didn’t know it at the time. Someone had to own ABC, and there are some who thought he’d do better at it than some guy brought in from some business school who used to work for Allied Chemical or something. It seemed to us to be merely a business deal.”

  None of the commissioners was aware of Hughes’s renewed plans to buy ABC in March 1969, but one noted that the network’s worsening financial condition might have made it even easier for Hughes to get FCC approval. “There was concern that ABC was so weak it would go under,” said Robert Lee. “We would have had to weigh the problem of one-man control against the network’s need for money.”

  The “beautiful white girl” who won “The Dating Game” was a black actress named Alice Jubert. The child who chose her was the six-year-old son of “Mission: Impossible” star John Copage.

  5 Fear and Loathing

  The Tony Awards show was broadcast Sunday, April 20, 1969. The Great White Hope was named best play; its star, James Earl Jones, was named best actor; and the woman who played his white mistress, Jane Alexander, was named best supporting actress.

  My account of the August 23, 1917, Houston race riot was drawn from contemporaneous press accounts and Robert V. Haynes’s A Night of Violence: The Houston Riot of 1917 (Louisiana State University Press, 1976).

  Jean Peters described her postmarriage relationship with Hughes in deposition and court testimony, and one of his personal aides provided further details in an interview. Another aide, Ron Kistler, who served Hughes at Goldwyn Studios and lived with him for three months at Nosseck’s in 1958, recounted the Porgy and Bess episode in a sworn deposition and also gave testimony on Hughes’s strange behavior at the projection studio.

  “He arrived wearing a white shirt, tan gabardine slacks, and brown shoes,” recalled Kistler. “Those were the clothes he wore all the time he was at Nosseck’s until finally the clothes got so filthy and foul-smelling that he took them off. Then he became a nudist.… He had a lot of telephone talks with Jean Peters. He told her he was in a hospital undergoing treatment for a disease the doctors couldn’t diagnose.”

  Hughes’s no-messages decree is transcribed in a Romaine Street log dated August 13, 1958. His breakdown at the Beverly Hills Hotel was described by Kistler in his deposition, and by another aide in an interview.

  All of the “germ warfare” memos quoted are from “Operating Memoranda” compiled in a loose-leaf binder entitled “Manual of Instructions/Office Procedures,” and also referred to as the “Romaine Street Procedures Manual.”

  The incident in which Hughes burned his clothes was recounted by Noah Dietrich in an interview. His relationship with “The Party” was described by Kistler; by the chief of his harem guard, Jeff Chouinard; and by an operative working for Chouinard who tapped her telephone on Hughes’s orders. The wireman recalled the teen-age mistress calling Hughes an “impotent old slob,” and Chouinard quotes her in his book (written with Richard Mathison) His Weird and Wanton Ways (Morrow, 1977, p. 153). Despite his playboy image, Hughes had always been shy with women, and a large number of his most famous affairs seem never to have been consummated, at least according to the accounts of several Hollywood actresses who later wrote about their relationships with him. Jean Peters has never discussed the intimate details of their marriage, but it is clear from her court testimony and from interviews with his aides that Hughes had not shared a bed with his wife for five years before he moved alone to Las Vegas.

  Of the four Nevada state senators who voted to kill the fair-housing bill, at least two received Hughes money from the Silver Slipper slush fund—James Slattery got $2,500 and James Gibson got $1,500. In a memo to Hughes, Maheu claimed a connection: “I do not claim one iota of credit for the foresight you had when you instructed me to make political contributions to ‘worthy’ public servants.… When I mentioned that Bell had been successful in killing the fair housing bill, please believe me that I had no intent to delete any of the credit which is due to your foresight. Without ‘our friends’ we would not have had a prayer.”

  Bell, who described himself as a close personal friend of Laxalt’s, refused in an interview to comment on Maheu’s report that Laxalt “delivered to Tom the critical vote which enabled Bell to kill it [the fair-housing bill] in committee.” As mentioned earlier, Laxalt himself refused repeated requests for an interview.

  My account of the October 1969 Las Vegas race riot was drawn from local and national press reports.

  Sammy Davis, Jr., could not be reached for comment on Maheu’s claim that he promised Hughes “no damage would ever come to you from ‘his people.’ ”

  6 Armageddon

  The scene of Hughes discovering the impending bomb blast was recounted by an aide who was on duty in the next room. “I had seen the headline, and was watching to see how he would react,” said the Mormon. “We were all waiting for the explosion—not from the bomb, but from the boss.”

  The AEC announcement of the “Boxcar” blast is quoted from local press reports. Emphasis was added to the final lines to reflect Hughes’s reaction to the warning that the impact would be greater on “upper stories of high buildings.”

  In interviews two of the Mormons who were in the penthouse during a major nuclear test described the impact, and in memos to Hughes several of the aides filed after-action reports.

  There is now no doubt that Hughes was right about the dangers of nuclear testing. A presidential panel reported in November 1968 that mega
ton-level underground blasts might trigger major earthquakes (see chapter 8, this page), and in December 1970 a huge radioactive leak from an underground test forced the AEC to admit that at least sixteen other blasts had spewed radiation beyond the test site, and that the Nevada Test Site itself was “unfit for public use for the forseeable future” due to extensive ground contamination.

  Moreover, the forced release of suppressed government records recently revealed that as early as 1953 the AEC knew that above-ground nuclear tests exposed large parts of Nevada and Utah to lethal fall-out, yet continued the tests for ten years and publicly claimed they were entirely safe. In May 1984, in the first of several hundred lawsuits filed on behalf of 375 victims of the test program, a federal judge ruled that the fall-out caused ten cancer deaths.

  Hughes was even right about the sheep. Not only had the Utah flock been killed by a March 1968 biological weapons test, but fifteen years earlier, in 1953, more than four thousand Nevada sheep died downwind of the nuclear test site, having absorbed a thousand times the radiation thought safe for humans. It was the first clear evidence of the danger, but the government lied, claimed the sheep had died of natural causes, and continued the blasts.

  Accounts of the “Boxcar” operation, of all the other nuclear tests, and of the Nevada Test Site are based on AEC documents, government films of the explosions, interviews with AEC officials, and contemporaneous press reports.

  The account of the AEC’s fears about Hughes and his impact on the test program is based on records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The government’s concern about Hughes was so great that his ban-the-bomb campaign generated almost a thousand AEC reports during his four years in Las Vegas.