Nadine Henley looked out her window and spotted the envelope. Fearing a booby trap, she called the police bomb squad, which retrieved the package. It was definitely explosive.
Inside was a memo in Hughes’s handwriting on a sheet of yellow legal-pad paper. Addressed to Robert Maheu, the June 6, 1969, memo read:
Bob—
I would be ecstatic at the prospect of purchasing Parvin in the same manner as Air West. Do you think this really could be accomplished? I just assumed that the cries of monopoly would rule it out.
If this really could be accomplished, I think it would be a ten strike and might change all of my plans.
Please reply. Most urgent,
The document not only established Chester Brooks’s credentials—thus providing the first lead to the missing papers—but also raised some troubling questions. Hughes and two of his top aides were at that very moment under criminal investigation in the Air West case. And here the billionaire was suggesting that Parvin-Dohrmann, which owned several Las Vegas casinos, be acquired “in the same manner as Air West.”
Moreover, Parvin was then a known Mob front controlled by Sidney Korshak, a Beverly Hills attorney identified by the Justice Department as one of the country’s most powerful organized-crime leaders. Hughes had dealt with him before, and Korshak’s name was to surface again in the Romaine break-in saga.
But, for the moment, it was the mysterious Chester Brooks who held center stage. He had instructed the Hughes executives to signal their interest by placing a classified ad in the Los Angeles Times with the message “APEX-OK“ and a telephone number written backward. It was done. Three days later he called again and spoke to Nadine Henley in a conversation recorded by the police.
First Brooks had a message for Hughes: “It may please him to know that this is not part of any conspiracy through the Maheu people, and we wish this man no personal harm of any, any kind.”
Next he tried to put some heat on Henley: “There was quite a bit more money that was said to be taken than actually was. You might bring that to his attention. It seems that maybe he’s got some people in his own company who dabbled somewhat.”
And then Brooks got down to business: “The total price we’re interested in procuring is one million dollars. We want it in two separate drops. The first one of which will be $500,000 for half of the documents. The second one will follow in a three-day period.”
He concluded the ransom demand with a warning: “If there is at any time any breach of trust, the negotiations will stop at once.
“We’ll call you tomorrow and you can either give us a yes or a no,” added Brooks.
Henley stalled for time. “This is not money I could just pull out of my hat,” she said, noting that Hughes himself would have to be contacted. “It takes me a little time to get in touch with the man, sometimes, you know.”
“Well, that’s your responsibility,” replied Brooks. “We won’t call but one more time.”
As arranged, Brooks called back the next day for Henley’s answer. The police were waiting. A helicopter and a fleet of squad cars were poised on alert, all set to close in as soon as the call could be traced. They got the first three digits in just a few seconds, started to focus the dragnet on North Hollywood… and never got any closer than that.
Nadine Henley was not there to receive the call. “All righty,” said Chester Brooks, and hung up. He never called again.
The Pro was left sitting with his million-dollar haul. He decided to wait Hughes out. Wait until he was ready to sit down at the table and ante up for the big game. Wait until Hughes came after him. He waited for days, he waited for weeks, he waited for months, all the while hearing his TV blare news of Hughes, Maheu, Nixon, Rebozo, Watergate, wondering which if any of them had ordered the break-in, watching all these forces swirl about the hidden billionaire while he sat there with all of the man’s secrets.
And while the Pro waited, unknown to him, the biggest secret of all began to leak out.
When the final ransom call came, Nadine Henley and the entire Hughes high command were aboard a mystery ship in Long Beach harbor, at the world’s most exclusive bon-voyage party.
And while they waited in vain for Chester Brooks to call back, the mystery ship—the Hughes Glomar Explorer—set sail on a top-secret mission to a point in the Pacific 750 miles northwest of Hawaii.
The Glomar was known to the world as a futuristic deep-sea mining vessel that Hughes had built to scoop up the oceans’ vast untapped mineral wealth. Kay Glenn knew better. The mining venture was simply a cover. And the three-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar ship actually belonged not to Hughes but to the CIA.
Only a handful of people knew that, and on July 1 Glenn discovered something none of them knew.
A document outlining the Glomar’s true mission was missing. It was apparently now in the hands of the unknown burglars who had looted Romaine a month earlier. The security breach could not have come at a more sensitive time. The Glomar had just arrived at its destination and was about to reach a giant claw three miles underwater to recover a sunken Russian submarine from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Glenn’s boss, Bill Gay, called CIA Director William Colby to give him the news. Colby called FBI Director Clarence Kelley. Kelley called William Sullivan, head of the Bureau’s Los Angeles office. And Sullivan went directly to LAPD headquarters to confer with Los Angeles Police Chief Ed Davis.
When Sullivan emerged from his secret meeting with Chief Davis, he went downstairs to brief the detectives handling the Romaine investigation. He told them that “national security” was involved. He did not mention the Glomar or the Russian sub. But he did instruct the cops not to look at the stolen Hughes papers if they recovered them.
“We were supposed to close our eyes, seal the documents in a pouch, and deliver them unread to the FBI,” said one detective who was at the meeting. “That’s actually what they told us. I don’t know how we were expected to find the stuff with our eyes closed.”
Romaine was no longer a local police case. While lower-level officers were left to stumble about blindly, CIA general counsel John Warner met secretly with Chief Davis and Los Angeles District Attorney Joseph Busch.
“It’s clear that Busch and Davis believed they were really doing something big for national security,” recalled a prosecutor who became privy to the details. “But for the guys actually handling the investigation it was a disaster. Nobody knew what was up. The Hughes people were so goddamn mysterious, we couldn’t get a thing out of them, then the FBI steps in and starts playing cat-and-mouse—saying it’s your case, but don’t ask what’s going on—and lurking behind everything there’s the CIA.”
Indeed, some local law-enforcement officials wondered if the CIA had invented the “national security” claim to sabotage their investigation, to keep them from finding Hughes’s secrets.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, a hastily formed CIA task force noted that “the burglars may well have been hired by the Corporation itself” and wondered if the Glomar document was really missing at all.
Perhaps the entire Glomar scare was merely a ploy to cover up Hughes’s theft of his own files and at the same time bring the CIA into his battle against Maheu. “Hughes may attempt to place the blame for the burglary on Maheu,” reported the task force, “simultaneously attempting to ascertain how strongly the Agency feels about the loss of the sensitive document, and hope that the Agency may offer to intercede in the Maheu trial.”