But the CIA had to assume that the Glomar memo was in fact stolen, had to recognize that even the Russians might have it, and William Colby had to tell that to the president.
It must have been an odd meeting. In less than a month Richard Nixon would be forced out of office; his dealings with Hughes were under heavy scrutiny; and Colby knew that the president had reason beyond the Glomar to worry about the Romaine heist: the missing secret papers might contain a whole brace of “smoking guns.”
Indeed, the CIA suspected that the White House itself might be behind the break-in. In its first list of “possible culprits,” the Agency suggested that the burglary was “politically motivated to aid or deter Watergate investigation,” and among “possible customers” the CIA included “anti-impeachment forces if documents are embarrassing.”
But Colby claimed to recall no mention of Watergate in his meeting with Nixon, and very little talk of Romaine. “Obviously it was a major difficulty, obviously I was responsible to the president and kept him advised as to what was going on. I’m sure we discussed the potential exposure of the Glomar project. But I can’t remember any particular discussion of the break-in. I’m just saying it would be quite normal for me to keep him advised of something like that.”
And if Nixon had more than the Glomar on his mind, Colby too had other worries. Not only was the Castro assassination plot threatening to blow, but the Hughes organization also had a virtual monopoly on highly classified spy satellites and provided cover for CIA agents working abroad.
“Obviously we had other contracts with elements of the Hughes empire—research things and technology, and things like that—and to the extent that any of those…” Colby’s voice trailed off. “But I don’t know what was stolen,” he continued. “I’m not sure anybody knows precisely what was taken. So I certainly can’t say that any other project was compromised. I just don’t know.”
Only one thing was certain: the missing secret papers had to be recovered.
While the Glomar lowered its giant claw, and Colby huddled with Nixon, and the entire Hughes-CIA-FBI intelligence network went on red alert, two unlikely new characters joined the show. Leo Gordon, a sometime actor and screenwriter, and Donald Ray Woolbright, a sometime used-car salesman known to police as a petty thief.
Their alleged meeting late in July turned the Great Hughes Heist into an “Upstairs, Downstairs” melodrama, with Woolbright and Gordon playing the lowlife subplot in the running saga of powerful men in desperate pursuit of great secrets. Before it was over, Woolbright would be indicted by a grand jury that heard Gordon as its star witness. The following account of their meeting is based on Gordon’s testimony.
“I don’t know whether I should tell you this,” Woolbright began hesitantly, pacing the actor’s living room. “But I’ve been beating it around in my head for days, and I’ve been walking the walls with it. I have something that’s very big and I don’t know quite how to handle it.”
The car salesman was agitated. He couldn’t sit still.
“Who is the most important man you can think of in the world today?” he suddenly asked.
“Kissinger,” replied Gordon.
“How about Howard Hughes?” suggested Woolbright. “What would you say if I told you I had two boxes of Howard Hughes’s personal documents?”
Gordon, who had seen newspaper accounts of the break-in, guessed that the documents must have come from Romaine. Woolbright, he claimed, simply nodded.
It was fitting that the Romaine mystery should take its next odd B-movie twist in Leo Gordon’s living room. An aging Hollywood veteran, Gordon had played the second-level heavy in a long string of third-rate movies with titles like The Restless Breed, Gun Fury, and Kitten with a Whip; appropriately, he had also appeared in The Man Who Knew Too Much. His was one of those nameless leathery faces that had flickered through every TV action series from “Gun-smoke” to “The Untouchables.” As an actor, he almost always played the bad guy. His specialty was death scenes; spliced together they would run at least three hours.
Woolbright also had a tough-guy image. But his was not manufactured in Hollywood. A product of the north St. Louis slums, the car salesman had run up a hometown police record almost as long as Gordon’s list of screen credits. He had twenty-six arrests, on charges ranging from burglary and fencing to assault and carrying a concealed weapon. But for all his arrests, Woolbright had never done any time, and his only conviction was for a petty misdemeanor. Back in St. Louis, police called him a “nickel-and-dimer,” a street hustler with no real stature in the criminal community. And they could not believe that Woolbright was even remotely involved in the Hughes heist.
“If he did it,” said one officer, “it would be the equivalent of a sandlot ballplayer going to the major leagues and hitting a home run in the World Series his first time at bat.”
Then how did the used-car salesman come to have the billionaire’s secret papers? He said he got them from “Bennie.”
According to Gordon, Woolbright told him this strange tale. Woolbright said he was just sitting home one night when he got a call from a St. Louis man named Bennie. And that Bennie—whom he had met at a friend’s funeral two years earlier and never seen again—said he represented four other men from St. Louis who had pulled the Romaine job “on commission.” Now Bennie wanted Woolbright to ransom the purloined papers back to Hughes.
It was, by Gordon’s account of Woolbright’s odd tale, quite a haul. “There was stuff about political payoffs—Nixon, I think—and references to Hubert Humphrey as ‘our boy Hubert,’” claimed the actor. “Files on Air West and TWA. A complete rundown on everything happening in Las Vegas. And a hell of a lot about the CIA.” All of it handwritten by Hughes himself.
But the ransom attempt had fallen through. The would-be bagman was out of a job. Then Woolbright allegedly began thinking about Clifford Irving and figured that if Irving wangled $750,000 for a bogus autobiography, the real goods should be worth at least as much.
“That’s why he came to see me,” explained Gordon. “He thought that because I’m a professional writer, I’d be able to help him peddle the papers.”
Still, Gordon was a very odd choice. Although he often played the villain as an actor, Gordon was in fact quite close to the forces of law and order. A familiar face around police headquarters, he had written more than twenty scripts for “Adam 12,” a TV series glorifying two fictional squad-car cops. The license plates on Gordon’s own car read ADM-12, he had an honorary police badge, and his best friend was an investigator for the district attorney’s office.
Why would a bagman for the hottest burglars since Watergate risk spilling the beans to an ersatz cop? Why would the burglars entrust their valuable booty to Woolbright, a man their supposed contact had met only once? It made no sense.
Yet Gordon’s account would soon become central to the entire Romaine case, and new characters drawn into the drama did confirm the Woolbright connection.
The actor first took his new partner to see a Hollywood business manager, Joanna Hayes, but she told them nobody would buy hot Hughes papers from a used-car salesman. So they went instead to see a lawyer Gordon had heard was “well connected.”
Woolbright showed the lawyer, Maynard Davis, a memo supposedly written by Hughes, and Davis placed a call to his “Uncle Sidney”—Sidney Korshak, reputed to be one of the most powerful organized crime leaders in the country.