Post by Arjan Hut on Jan 2, 2020 13:40:25 GMT -5
According to the FBI report, Margaret furnished the FBI with the envelope and ticket stub, but not the scrap of paper with the names. When Barry tracked this story down, it turned out that Hoover showed the papers to her daughter and her daughter also recalled the name “Silver Bell” or “Silver Slipper.”
Robert Maheu was usually described as the “right-hand man” or the “public face” of billionaire Howard Hughes. Yet, during the 15 years he worked mostly as Hughes’ chief adviser, acting as his liaison with politicians, celebrities and businessmen, he was never allowed to meet his reclusive boss face-to-face.
From his suite on the sealed-off top floor of the Desert Inn hotel, Las Vegas, the eccentric mogul would phone or send memos to his chief executive 20 or more times a day. “He and I had, undoubtedly, the most unbelievable relationship that’s ever existed in American business,” Maheu once said.
His own career was unbelievable in itself. He spent the second world war in the FBI, working in France to feed false information to the Nazis. He did dirty work for the CIA. He passed briefcases full of cash to politicians and others who might help Hughes. He spied on the recluse’s love interests, including Hollywood star Ava Gardner, tailing her car and going through her rubbish. And he out-blackmailed the many who tried to blackmail Hughes.
Robert Aimé Maheu was born in Waterville, Maine, on October 30 1917, the son of a grocer. His father was of French origin and the son grew up bilingual. After graduating with a law degree from Georgetown University, he joined the FBI in 1940, where his French was put to good use in counter-intelligence after the US entered the war. Posing as a Nazi sympathiser in France, he infiltrated pro-Nazi groups and spread misinformation about allied troop movements, including the Normandy invasion.
After the war he set up as a private eye in Los Angeles, landing a series of “cut-out” assignments from the CIA – “dirty” jobs that could not be traced back to the agency. Hughes first hired him in the mid-1950s to keep an eye on Gardner and other lady friends, later making him his chief adviser and ultimately chief executive of the billionaire’s Nevada operations. “I was his alter-ego …his eyes, his ears and his mouthpiece,” Maheu wrote in his 1992 autobiography Next to Hughes.
With Hughes’ backing, Maheu was the go-between in a 1960 CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, Cuba’s new communist leader, with the help of Mafia bosses and those expelled by Castro. “The CIA used the analogy, if we’d known the exact bunker that Hitler was in during the war, we wouldn’t have hesitated to kill the bastard,” Maheu wrote in his memoirs. “The CIA felt …f Fidel, his brother and Ché Guevara were assassinated, thousands of lives might be saved.”
Maheu enlisted three Mafia godfathers in a plan to poison Castro, so that the CIA and President Dwight Eisenhower could deny involvement and blame the killing on mobsters who had lost their casinos and brothels in Castro’s revolution. Maheu handed over poison pills to mafioso Johnny Roselli in Miami Beach’s Fontainebleau hotel but the plot fell through, either because someone tipped Castro off or the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by anti-Castro exiles was being planned. “If anything went wrong,” Maheu wrote, “I was the fall guy, caught between protecting the government and protecting the Mob, two armed camps that could crush me like a bug.”
Abruptly fired by the increasingly mentally ill billionaire in 1970 – “that no good son-of-a bitch robbed me blind”, Hughes said in a rare statement – Maheu spent the rest of his life as something of a hero in Las Vegas. His firm, Robert A. Maheu and Associates, invested in the city and encouraged others to invest, and “Iron Bob” became a stalwart of the community. The desert city had been run largely by the Mafia until the 1960s but Hughes’ money and clout, coupled with Maheu’s business acumen, helped the city clean up its act and become an attraction for respectable companies as well as tourists from around the world.
By 1970, Maheu’s investments had made Hughes the third biggest landowner in Nevada after the federal government and the state power company. He bought up the big hotels and casinos, the local TV station and even Las Vegas airport.
Writing in 1970, Hank Greenspun, the publisher of the Las Vegas Sun newspaper, said: “Howard Hughes was kind of heaven-sent to bring Las Vegas out of the economic doldrums and Bob Maheu headed the organisation. It was a healthy thing for our town to be the beneficiary of such vast financial resources …to give a new image and new direction to the way we were going.”
In the 1960s Hughes rented the entire top floor of the Desert Inn. When its owners, anxious to squeeze in high-rolling gamblers, asked him to leave, Hughes bought the place for $13m. “We had everything – private jets, helicopters, yachts, unlimited expense accounts – everything,” Maheu said. “And we wielded power beyond your imagination. We had the kind of power to be able to call up the Academy Awards and request a last-minute table; or call up the White House and request a meeting with the president and get it.” Maheu was on $500,000 a year salary.
In 1968 he gathered $50,000 in cash takings from Hughes’ Silver Slipper casino, stuffed it into a briefcase and handed it to an aide of Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic presidential candidate, as a gift from Hughes. It was about favours, not politics, and two years later Maheu handed $100,000 to Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, close friend of Republican President Richard Nixon.
(‘Dirty’ jobs man who was Howard Hughes’ adviser, 2008)