Meanwhile, Gay made his own move on the White House. He contacted an obscure bureaucrat in the Department of Transportation, a fellow Mormon named Robert Foster Bennett, whose father happened to be a United States senator and, like Gay himself, a leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Gay knew that the younger Bennett also had a White House connection, Nixon’s bully boy Chuck Colson. Gay asked Bennett two questions. Could he, through Colson, block the gas dumping? And would Maheu really be able to do it through his Danner-Rebozo connection?
Nothing could stop the nerve gas, Bennett reported back. Not him. Not Colson. Not Maheu. No one.
While Gay made his secret move on the White House through his mysterious Mormon connection, Chester Davis was having more success with a clandestine court action.
Working entirely behind the scenes, never letting the name Hughes surface in public, Davis had a longtime legal associate, Lola Lea, file suit in federal court to enjoin the nerve-gas pollution, ostensibly on behalf of a group of concerned citizens, the Environmental Defense Fund. He also managed to get Florida’s governor, Claude Kirk, a Republican feuding with Nixon, to join in the lawsuit.
At first, the surreptitious legal maneuver triumphed. Just as the army finished off-loading the gas from its trains to the waiting ship, a federal judge issued a temporary injunction, ordering the gas-laden old freighter not to set sail with its deadly cargo. The victory, however, was short-lived. After further hearings the next day, the judge lifted her injunction despite “serious misgivings” about the dump site. It was not its proximity to the Bahamas that troubled the judge, but her fears that sinking the nerve gas three miles deep would subject it to water pressure so great that all of the concrete coffins would get crushed at once, releasing all of the lethal poison simultaneously. Freeing the military to dump the gas, she suggested that it be done in shallower water.
Up in his penthouse, a distraught Hughes received the news with alarm. It was not the legal setback that most upset him but the change in depth.
“What has me worried the most now is all this talk about selecting a location where the water will be shallower,” he wrote in an urgent scrawl.
“I think this is dynamite, because the search for such a site could easily lead to a location even less desirable than the one presently selected,” he added, envisioning a dump practically on the beach of his intended island refuge.
“I have no concern about the depth of the water. In fact, I think the deeper the better.”
On Saturday night, the unstoppable Lola Lea, still posing as an attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund, reached Chief Justice Warren Burger at his home and managed to persuade the Nixon appointee to once more block the dumping. It was only a temporary reprieve. At high noon Sunday the military won the final showdown in the court of appeals, and the gas-laden ship immediately left port on its two-day voyage to the Bahamas.
With the collapse of his clandestine court battle, Hughes turned frantically back to Maheu and Nixon. There was no more talk of calypso-boy cartoons. The billionaire had been reduced to another desperate eleventh-hour plea. Only the president could save him now.
Maheu confidently stepped back in, dropping code names, presenting himself to the penthouse as the only operative with the real connections.
“Our ‘friend from Florida’ has just returned after spending the entire weekend with the ‘top man,’” he wrote, after making contact with Rebozo, just back from Camp David.
“In spite of our participation in the injunction, which they very quickly identified, they are thoroughly convinced that Danner and me were not involved in that particular operation,” added Maheu, unable to resist an I-told-you-so slur on the failed Gay-Davis initiative.
“There was much time spent considering alternate sites, but additional scientific inputs bolstered the conviction that the proper site had been chosen. Our friend stated that the ‘top man’ presumably did not reiterate his request that you have faith and confidence in him, since that message had been delivered previously.
“Again, however, they are prepared to give you a full scientific briefing, either in person or on the telephone, which they are convinced would satisfy all your apprehensions,” he concluded, for all his big connections able to offer only blind faith and another briefing. “Our friend stated again that the ‘top man’ had categorically refused to listen to any suggestion about disposition here in Nevada, thinking very seriously that he was cooperating with us to the fullest.”
Hughes didn’t want a briefing, and he didn’t want to hear another word about Nixon’s good intentions. He wanted the nerve gas shipped to the North Pole. And now, on Tuesday morning, as it instead neared the Bahamas, the billionaire demanded that Maheu stop fooling with Rebozo and go see the president.
It was too late. By the time Hughes sent Maheu on his White House mission, the deadly convoy had already reached the dump site. By the time Maheu could get to Washington, the nerve gas would be deep-sixed. But the resourceful Maheu had a plan.
“Howard, bearing in mind that when we reach the ‘top man’ the scheduled dumping will be literally minutes away, I wonder if we should not consider the following action,” the never-say-die lieutenant wrote. “I happen to know that at San Clemente they are geared with a permanent installation of scramblers which permit the President to communicate comfortably anywhere in the world where comparable scramblers are located.
“It is conceivable, therefore, that I should fly immediately to San Clemente so as to communicate whatever message I have within a period of an hour rather than the 5 or 6 hours it would take to go to Washington,” he suggested to Hughes, who was furiously composing a still undisclosed secret message to Nixon.
“The decision which the Army has made, and which obviously the White House has backed 100% is being watched by the whole world to its final conclusion. It would be a lot easier for the President to explain a delay of an hour than one of six.
“I think we should be doubly careful that we do not make one false move and that in no way do we lose the confidence of the Administration. There is no doubt, Howard, that the man’s nose was out of joint when he detected our ‘Italian hand’ in the injunction,” added Maheu, even now at the zero hour taking another shot at Chester Davis, born Caesar Simon in Rome, Italy.
“Howard, I hope I am not being too verbose because time is of great urgency and I truly know what this particular matter means to you,” concluded Maheu, his sharp tactical analysis turning into a windy exposition as the minutes ticked away.
While Maheu discussed tactics with Hughes, a crack team of navy frogmen opened flood valves deep in the holds of the LeBaron Russell Briggs, and the old World War II liberty ship, weighed down by tons of nerve gas, began to sink slowly into the Atlantic 150 miles from Paradise Island.
Unaware that the gas ship had already been scuttled, Hughes finally made a command decision. No phone calls. No San Clemente. He insisted that Maheu meet personally with the president.
“Howard, there is no problem in getting the appointment,” a glum Maheu replied in a classic good-news/bad-news memo. “Unfortunately, however, the sinking started some time ago, and they are now at the point of no return.”
At 12:53 P.M. on Tuesday, August 18, 1970, after taking on water for four hours, the half-submerged death ship with its cargo of nerve gas suddenly took a huge gulp and disappeared beneath the waves. Within eight minutes it had hit bottom.