Finally, Davis said, the intruders marched him upstairs and entered a second-floor conference room where the billionaire’s personal files had been assembled at the orders of his general counsel, Chester Davis, the third member of Summa’s top command.
“This is a piece of cake,” said one of the burglars, prying open a file cabinet, and the guard said he could hear them tell each other, “Take this, not those. Yeah, those are the good ones,” as they dropped folder after confidential folder into cardboard boxes on the floor.
Almost four hours after they had arrived, the burglars trussed Davis around the knees and ankles with surgical tape, left him lying on a couch in a basement furniture warehouse, and vanished.
He did not leap up after them. “If I could have freed my arms and legs and pulled the blindfold off and jumped one of them for the sake of Hughes, I wouldn’t have done it,” the guard later explained. “I knew the security at Romaine was lousy, and I tried to tell all the top people, but no one seemed to care. And I was only getting crumbs, while they were getting a whole loaf of his bread.”
So, as ordered, Davis lay still on the couch. About half an hour after the burglars had escaped, he loosened his bonds and hobbled back up to Kay Glenn’s office. There he phoned upstairs to the still oblivious switchboard operator, who called the police.
Detectives combed the cavernous Hughes headquarters without finding a solid clue. There were no identifiable fingerprints, the abandoned acetylene tanks could not be traced, and no one in the nearly deserted industrial district had seen the burglars. One of the cops who surveyed the scene was later quoted as saying, “They knocked off Romaine like it was a corner delicatessen.”
The police revealed only that $60,000 had been taken although some press reports placed the figure as high as $300,000. The Hughes organization, of course, said nothing. In fact, taking immediate control of the case, Summa dispatched a representative to police headquarters to censor all announcements.
So there was no public mention of the other missing items, but in a bulletin sent to law-enforcement agencies, the Los Angeles police also listed as stolen a bizarre grab bag including two large Wedgwood vases, a pink-and-blue ceramic samovar, an antique wooden Mongolian eating bowl, and Nadine Henley’s butterfly collection.
No one was told about the solid-gold medallion found in a basement trash bin, where it had been inexplicably discarded by the burglars.
And not a word was said about the big secret of the break-in: the secret papers of Howard Hughes had disappeared.
There was virtually no powerful force in this country, indeed in the world, that did not have an interest in the missing files, that did not have reason to steal them, that did not have reason to fear their loss. There was circumstantial evidence to suggest that the CIA, the Mafia, even the White House was behind the break-in. There was still stronger evidence that Hughes had “stolen” his own files to safeguard them from subpoena.
Certainly both the timing of the break-in and the ease with which it was accomplished raised immediate questions about the Great Hughes Heist. The burglars were not the only ones after his private papers.
Just three days before the break-in, the Securities and Exchange Commission had subpoenaed all the documents at Romaine relating to Hughes’s 1969 takeover of Air West. Nothing more directly threatened the billionaire. Hughes himself and two of his top aides had been indicted for conspiring to manipulate the airline’s stock, defrauding shareholders of $60 million. President Nixon, his confidant Bebe Rebozo, and his brother Donald had all been implicated in the deal, and Hughes faced a possible twelve years in jail.
“Hughes and his agents may have been motivated to make it appear that there was a theft in order to avoid complying with our subpoenas,” suggested a secret SEC report.
Just six days before the break-in, a federal judge had ordered Hughes to surrender five hundred memos demanded by his former chief of staff, Robert Maheu. Ousted in a 1970 palace coup, Maheu was at war with the new high command and had filed a seventeen-million-dollar slander suit against Hughes for calling him “a no-good, dishonest son of a bitch who stole me blind.” The bitter legal battle had already produced charges of Hughes-CIA skulduggery, secret payoffs to Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, and a proposed million-dollar bribe to Lyndon Johnson. Maheu claimed the subpoenaed memos would confirm all his allegations.
He also suspected that Hughes had arranged the burglary to get rid of the damning documents, but Summa officials claimed that Maheu himself had masterminded the break-in and hinted to police that he may have done it in cahoots with the Mafia. For years Hughes’s intelligence network had been trying to link Maheu to the Mob, to find proof that he had conspired to loot the billionaire’s Las Vegas casinos. While the FBI also considered Maheu a suspect, it raised the possibility that the Mafia had acted on its own.
“We may indeed have an effort on the part of organized crime to gain information regarding Mr. Hughes through this break-in,” concluded a confidential FBI report. “This could be to calibrate the stockholder or otherwise obtain useful documents for pressure purposes: e.g., to maintain organized-crime status in Nevada.”
Meanwhile, both the Senate Watergate Committee and the Watergate special prosecutor were probing a concealed $100,000 “contribution” from Hughes to Nixon by way of Rebozo. There was substantial evidence that the cash not only bought the president’s approval of the Air West takeover but also won Attorney General John Mitchell’s go-ahead on Las Vegas hotel purchases that violated antitrust laws.
In fact, Senate investigators believed that the Hughes connection had triggered Watergate. It all began, they theorized, with Nixon’s fears that Democratic party chairman Larry O’Brien had learned of the Rebozo payoff—and perhaps a great deal more—while employed as the billionaire’s Washington lobbyist. The Senate committee demanded that Hughes appear in person and surrender his files, and the special prosecutor issued several subpoenas just weeks before the break-in.
Now the FBI saw a possible Watergate link to the Romaine heist. A Los Angeles police report log noted: “Received call from Karis, FBI—states home office in Washington interested; they feel Watergate is involved.”
And the CIA, in its own list of “possible culprits,” after Maheu, the Mafia, and “foreign government—not necessarily USSR,” also suggested that the Hughes break-in had been “politically motivated to aid or deter Watergate investigation.”
But the Agency itself was also suspect. Shortly before the burglary, Senate investigators got the first official hint that Maheu, while working for Hughes, had orchestrated a CIA-sponsored plot to assassinate Fidel Castro with the help of two leading Mafiosi. It was the CIA’s dirtiest secret, and Maheu had revealed it to Hughes in a phone call that may well have been transcribed and stored at Romaine.
And all of these probes were coming to a head when Romaine was looted and the secret papers vanished.
“If you go on the theory that someone wanted to find out what Hughes knew, or wanted to make sure no one else found out, everyone but the Loch Ness monster was suspect,” commented a detective assigned to the case.
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.