But the street-wise cop did smell trouble. Big trouble. Digging for dirt on O’Brien, he was coming up instead with dirt on Nixon. He tried to warn Dean off the case.
“The revelation that an O’Brien-Mahew relationship exists poses significant hazards in any attempt to make O’Brien accountable to the Hughes retainer,” cautioned Caulfield. “Mahew’s controversial activities and contacts in both Democratic and Republican circles suggests the possibility that forced embarrassment of O’Brien in this matter might well shake loose Republican skeletons from the closet.
“Mayhew apparently forwarded Hughes’s political contributions, personally, to both parties over the last ten years. Former FBI agent Dick Danner has been an aide to Mayhew. Danner professes a friendship with Bebe Rebozo.
“As one gets closer to Mayhew’s dealings, it becomes evident that his tentacles touch many extremely sensitive areas of government, each one of which is fraught with potential for Jack Anderson-type exposure.
“There is a serious risk here for a counter-scandal if we move precipitously.”
Dean was all but ready to bail out entirely when Chuck Colson arrived with the mysterious Bob Bennett in tow. Colson was not about to be frozen out of this intrigue, and his pal Bennett had the inside story on O’Brien.
Dean reported it to Haldeman: “Bennett informs me that there is no doubt about the fact that Larry O’Brien was retained by Howard Hughes. He felt confident that if it was necessary to document the retainer with O’Brien he could get the information through the Hughes people, but it would be with the understanding that the documentation would not be used in a manner that might embarrass Hughes.”
Urged on by Nixon, afraid that Colson would grab all the credit, Haldeman ignored the danger signs and demanded action.
“Once Bennett gets back to you with his final report,” he ordered Dean, “you and Chuck Colson should get together and come up with a way to leak the appropriate information. Frankly, I can’t see any way to handle this without involving Hughes, so the problem of ‘embarrassing’ him seems to be a matter of degree. However, we should keep Bennett and Bebe out of it at all costs.”
But Bennett’s final report was not what the White House expected. Instead of delivering the goods on O’Brien, he returned to Washington from a meeting with the new Hughes command in Los Angeles to suggest a criminal investigation of Robert Maheu.
The O’Brien deal was “straightforward,” said Bennett, and exposing it would only revive the old Nixon scandals. O’Brien probably knew everything that Maheu knew, and Maheu knew everything. It was Maheu who had handled all of Hughes’s political activity, and now he was involved with notorious gangsters. Maheu, not O’Brien, was the real problem.
Bennett’s convoluted monologue left Dean confused. Was he trying to use the White House to get Maheu on behalf of the Mormons, as it seemed on the surface, or was he subtly playing on Nixon’s paranoia: forget about O’Brien, he knows too much.
But Dean had heard enough. He told Haldeman they were “treading in dangerous waters.” And Haldeman was also ready to let the whole matter drop.
Nixon, however, was not. All the president’s men were now queasy about the Hughes probe—even Rebozo seemed nervous—but the president himself only pushed harder. All his worst fears about O’Brien had been confirmed. If O’Brien indeed knew about the Hughes-Nixon dealings, then he certainly had to be neutralized.
“O’Brien’s not going to get away with it,” Nixon once more told Haldeman. Everybody always went after him over any possible Hughes connection—even taking that “cheap shot” at his poor brother—yet nobody was trying to expose O’Brien. Nixon wanted the proof, the full story, all the dirt, and he wanted it now. It became a constant refrain.
While Nixon waited impatiently for his gang to nail O’Brien, the Hughes gang, unable to get White House assistance, made its own move to nail Maheu—and unwittingly caught the president in a deadly crossfire.
Out in Las Vegas, Intertel instigated an IRS probe against Maheu. It was a fateful move. The IRS investigation that began as a plot against Maheu soon mushroomed into a full-scale audit of the entire Hughes empire, turning first against Hughes himself, and finally against Richard Nixon.
Maheu, however, was aware only of his own IRS problems. He was certain that the investigation had been ordered from the White House. Convinced that Nixon had joined forces with Hughes, that the president was conspiring against him, that the FBI and the CIA were also poised to attack, Maheu fired a warning shot at the Oval Office.
Jack Anderson’s column appeared on August 6, 1971.
“Howard Hughes directed his former factotum Robert Maheu to help Richard Nixon win the presidency ‘under our sponsorship and supervision,’” Anderson reported. “Maheu allegedly siphoned off $100,000 from the Silver Slipper, a Hughes gambling emporium, for Nixon’s campaign. The money was delivered by Richard Danner, a Hughes exec, to Bebe Rebozo, a Nixon confidant.”
Nixon’s worst nightmare had come true. The Hughes payoff was out in the open.
Rebozo immediately called Danner, angrily demanding to know how Anderson found out. Danner’s answer was the final blow. Anderson had called him for comment, and said, “Don’t deny it, because I have seen the memo describing this in detail.” Maheu had shown it to him.
Anderson had documentary evidence. There was no way out. Still, he had called the payoff a “campaign contribution.” Obviously a trick. Nixon waited in horror for the full story to explode.
And nothing happened. Nothing that day, nothing that week, nothing that entire month. The story was simply ignored.
Then, without warning, late in September Maheu’s pal Hank Greenspun, publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, brought it back sharply to Nixon’s attention. The president had stopped off in Portland, Oregon, to meet with West Coast newspaper editors, on his way to Alaska for a meeting with the emperor of Japan. Greenspun approached White House press aide Herb Klein. He said he had a story that could “sink Nixon.” He had heard that a contribution of $100,000 from Hughes had been used to furnish the president’s San Clemente estate.
When word of Greenspun’s bombshell reached John Ehrlichman back in Washington, he immediately sent the president’s personal lawyer, Herb Kalmbach, flying out to Las Vegas. Kalmbach checked into the Sahara and met there with Greenspun for nearly four hours. He was slow to get to the Hughes money, as if he didn’t want the publisher to realize that was his real concern. And when Kalmbach finally did bring it up, it was only to vehemently deny that any of Hughes’s money had gone into San Clemente. “I know where every nickel came from,” said the lawyer, “and I can assure you none of it came from Hughes.” That done, Kalmbach started pumping Greenspun for dirt on Larry O’Brien.
Kalmbach himself didn’t know it, but Greenspun had come uncomfortably close to the truth. He just had the wrong house. Nixon had spent at least some of the $100,000 for improvements at Key Biscayne.
The noose was tightening, and a few weeks later Bob Bennett mentioned to Chuck Colson that Maheu had stolen Hughes documents stashed in Hank Greenspun’s safe.
Then, early in December, the same IRS probe that Intertel had instigated against Maheu began to turn against Nixon. An audit of John Meier’s mining-claim scam revealed that the president’s brother had been involved in the swindle. And worse yet, an informant had told the revenue agents that “Bebe Rebozo advised John Meier not to be available for IRS interview because of Don Nixon’s involvement.”
Soon a series of IRS “sensitive case reports” started coming into the White House, slipped to John Ehrlichman by Nixon’s man in the commissioner’s office. Donald’s escapades with Meier were detailed—not merely the bogus mining claims but land deals and stock deals with organized-crime figures, Hawaiian vacations paid for by Meier with Hughes ultimately picking up the tab, trips to the Dominican Republic for shady joint ventures with the island’s top government leaders.