Maheu’s role in handling Hughes’s political contributions began in 1961, according to his court testimony, which he reiterated in an interview, but he claims that “the amounts were very nominal for quite a few years” and that he handled no major contributions until Hughes arrived in Las Vegas.
Both Dalitz and Maheu recounted the Desert Inn eviction crisis in depositions later filed in Maheu’s slander suit against Hughes, and Maheu gave further details in an interview and in an account quoted by James Phelan in his book Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years (Random House, 1976, pp. 63–64). Maheu reported his enlistment of Hoffa in contemporaneous memos sent to Hughes. Dalitz was identified by the Kefauver Committee as Cleveland manager of the national crime syndicate run by Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky in the 1930s, and FBI wiretaps made public in 1963 showed that Dalitz was still a Lansky man, also associated with Mafiosi like Roselli and Giancana. “I was seen with them,” Dalitz fretted in one bugged conversation. “I don’t think that’s good. It ties the whole Mob up.”
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.