The Case of the Greedy Greek was a classic tragedy. At least for Aristotle Onassis. In his hubris, the tycoon had made a secret deal with the dying king of Saudi Arabia that gave him a virtual monopoly on shipping oil from the Persian Gulf. It was Maheu’s mission to scuttle that contract. Ostensibly he was working for Onassis’s blood rival Stavros Niarchos. But the CIA was definitely in on it and so was then Vice-President Richard Nixon, and while not even the players seemed to be sure who was using whom on whose behalf, Big Oil was probably pulling the strings to make the world safe for Aramco. Still, it was Maheu’s show. He bugged Onassis’s offices in New York, Paris, and London, got proof that the contract had been bought with a bribe, exposed the scandal in a Rome newspaper secretly owned by the CIA, and finally journeyed to Jidda, where he personally presented his evidence to the Saudi royal family and killed the whole deal. Not bad for a private peeper on his first big job.
And he still found time to handle the Cramer case. Turns out the kid did have some kind of ties with the CIA. Liaison for Lockheed, apparently. What else Maheu dug up is unknown, but within months Cramer III and Jean Peters had separated, Jean was back in Hollywood seeing Howard Hughes, and in 1957 the former Mrs. Cramer became the new Mrs. Hughes.
By that time Maheu had figured out that the billionaire was his unnamed client and, in fact, was getting regular assignments. Fixing a city council race. Helping a would-be blackmailer recognize his mistake. That kind of thing. Finally, the same year Hughes got married, Maheu even got to speak to him.
Hughes was in Nassau, escaping his new wife while he pondered a Caribbean real-estate coup, and he called long-distance, summoning his gumshoe down to the Bahamas. Wanted Maheu to slip $25,000 to the Bay Street Boys. On that mission, cooling his heels in a hotel lobby, Maheu also caught a quick glimpse of his mystery client—from the back, as Hughes was about to enter an elevator, berating his hapless Mormon aides for their failure to have the door open and waiting.
Maheu recognized the voice. He would come to know it all too well. But that trip to Nassau was Hughes’s last public appearance, and it was as close as Maheu would ever get to seeing him. He would, however, begin to spend a lot of time out in Los Angeles tending to Hughes’s problems, especially with women.
Like the Case of the Captive Slave Girls. In the summer of 1959, Hughes, now in complete seclusion, holed up in the Beverly Hills Hotel, seeing no one, not even his wife, suddenly decided to add seven Miss Universe contestants to his harem. For years he had been stashing mistresses in safe houses all around Los Angeles, under surveillance and under guard, and although he had never seen some of them he still had several on standby. Now he wanted more. Fast.
He awakened Maheu in the middle of the night, sent him out to Long Beach with orders to offer the beauty queens movie contracts. All seven were lured into hotel suites and kept there awaiting promised screen tests. Hughes, however, seemed to lose interest, and after weeks without contact the girls started drifting away. When the billionaire discovered his loss, he flew into a rage and assigned a dozen of his operatives to keep the last, Miss Norway, from leaving.
Maheu apparently had no role in that part of the caper, but he did claim credit for hushing it up years later when it came to the attention of a Senate committee. “The files, Howard,” Maheu later told Hughes, “contained very devastating evidence pertaining to Miss Norway, a participant for Miss Universe, who claimed that she had virtually been held a captive, and a tape which a former private investigator working for you had sold to the Committee, wherein a certain girl was talking to her boyfriend and claiming that she was being held captive, that she was under constant surveillance, etc. All of this evidence was completely destroyed in my presence, and we never had one bit of publicity.”
Maheu was becoming a valued operative, an essential part of the strange new hierarchy of nursemaids, bodyguards, and business executives Hughes was gathering around him. The billionaire was no longer content to share his gumshoe. It came to a head when Maheu tried to return to Washington to be with his wife, who was about to give birth to their fourth child. Hughes was as intent on holding onto him as he had been on keeping Miss Norway.
In a furious series of phone calls Hughes insisted that Maheu stay. Told him he had once seen a woman walking in the park with a basket on her head stop just long enough to have a baby, then walk on with the baby in the basket. Finally, pulling out all the stops, Hughes demanded that Maheu shut down his detective agency, join him full time, and become his “alter ego.”
Maheu, however, was not quite ready for complete monogamy. It was not his wife who was the real competition. It was the CIA.
The Agency had another odd job for Maheu. To set up a Mob hit of Fidel Castro. For months the CIA had been trying to eliminate the new Cuban leader with poison cigars, LSD, exploding seashells, and a powerful depilatory to make his beard fall out. Now, in the summer of 1960, they decided to bring in some real pros. So they called in Maheu, “a tough guy who can get things done.” His mission—to make contact with the Mafia and arrange a $150,000 contract murder.
In the first week of November 1960, five men gathered in a suite at the Fountainbleu Hotel in Miami Beach. Maheu had no need to introduce his CIA case officer James O’Connell to his Mafia pal John Roselli. They had already met, at a party in Maheu’s home. Roselli, the Syndicate’s silver-haired “ambassador” to Las Vegas and Hollywood, introduced the two strangers. Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana and the Mafia’s former man in Havana Santos Trafficante. The daisy chain was almost complete, and Trafficante said he could line up a Cuban to make the hit.
But already there were problems. Just a few days before the big sit-down, Giancana got word that his girl, singer Phyllis McGuire, was two-timing him in Las Vegas with comedian Dan Rowan. To keep Giancana in Miami and on the job, Maheu had sent an operative to bug Rowan’s room, the wireman had been busted by a hotel maid, and the Las Vegas sheriff had called in the FBI. Giancana thought that was so funny he almost choked on his cigar laughing.
And now, up in the Fountainbleu, there was real discord. The CIA man O’Connell told the mobsters he wanted Castro gunned down in a “gangland-style killing.” Like in “The Untouchables.” The Mafiosi, however, wanted this hit done with the dignity befitting a patriotic enterprise. Giancana rejected the standard rub-out as “too dangerous” and suggested poison pills. Roselli also favored something “nice and clean,” no “out-and-out ambushing,” perhaps a secret poison that would disappear without a trace. Like in “Mission Impossible.”
It took the CIA’s Technical Services Division months to perfect the botulinum toxin. Ultimately—just weeks before the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion—Maheu would pass the deadly capsules to a sweating Cuban standing in the doorway of the Boom Boom Room at the Fountainbleu.
But long before the pills were passed, indeed shortly after the big sit-down adjourned, Maheu received an urgent phone call. Holed up in his hotel room, trying to put together a rush job to kill Castro, trying to mediate between the Mob and the CIA, trying to keep the jealous Giancana in Miami, trying to get his wireman out of jail in Las Vegas, trying to keep himself from being indicted for the bugging, trying to ward off the Las Vegas sheriff and a very suspicious J. Edgar Hoover, trying to keep the lid on all the leaks, trying to hold the whole damn thing together, Maheu suddenly also had to deal with Howard Hughes.