Michael Drosnin - Citizen Hughes : The Power, the Money and the Madness

A hardcover edition of this book was originally published in 1985 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. It is here reprinted by arrangement with Michael Drosnin.

CITIZEN HUGHES . Copyright 1985 by Michael Drosnin. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Visit our website at www.broadwaybooks.com

First Broadway Books trade paperback edition published 2004

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Drosnin, Michael.
Citizen Hughes / Michael Drosnin. 1st Broadway Books pbk. ed.
p. cm.
1. Hughes, Howard, 19051976. 2. MillionairesUnited States
Biography. 3. Political corruptionUnited States. 4. United States
Politics and government19451989.1. Hughes, Howard,
19051976. II. Title.

CT275.H6678D74 2004
338.767092dc22
[B] 2004049671

eISBN: 978-0-307-48299-0

v3.1_r1

For my family,
for my friends,
for all who kept
the faith.

There was nothing either above or below him. He had kicked himself loose of the Earth. His intelligence was perfectly clearconcentrated, it is true, upon himself with horrible intensity, yet clear. But his soul was mad.

Everything belonged to himbut that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.

Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness

Its been two decades since this book first revealed the truth about the worlds most secretive man, Howard Hughes. It is now out again with a new Hughes movie, The Aviator.

In that time two things have been proven beyond any doubt. First, that the nearly 10,000 documents on which this book is based are real. They are the papers Howard Hughes sent and received, the handwritten notes he wrote from hiding to his unseen henchmen. It was the way the billionaire hermit ruled his empire.

The papers were stolen from Hughes headquarters on June 5, 1974. A million-dollar buyback bid from the CIA and an FBI investigation failed. I tracked down the burglars two years later. We made a dealI would keep their identity secret if they gave me the stolen Hughes documents.

After this book was published, the man who received most of the Hughes memos, his righthand man, Robert Maheu, confirmed the authenticity of the documents on ABC and NBC television news shows. And one of the few who had direct contact with Hughes, Roy Crawford, the aide who delivered the memos from Hughes to Maheu, also confirmed the documents were genuine on the ABC news magazine 20/20.

It was indisputable proof that two top handwriting expertsOrdway Hilton, who exposed Clifford Irvings famous hoax autobiography of Hughes as a fraud, and John J. Harris, who proved Melvin Dummars Mormon Will a forgerywere right: These handwritten Hughes documents were authentic.

So this book is proven to be the one true account of Hughes from the only reliable sourceHoward himself.

A second fact proven true after this book was originally publishedHughes really did try to buy the government of the United States, and instead helped bring it down.

Just last year, PBS broadcast a documentary in which a key Watergate conspirator, Jeb Magruder, said on camera that he heard President Richard Nixon personally order the break-in that led to his resignation two years later.

According to Magruder, who passed on Nixons orders to the burglars, the President directed his attorney general, John Mitchell, to send the Plumbers, his dirty-tricks squad, into Democratic National Committee headquarters.

Some questioned why Magruder waited so long to tell the truth. In fact, he did not. Magruder told me the same story, on background, two decades before (see ). Now that he has made it public, I can reveal it.

And Magruder also told me the Presidents motiveto cover up $100,000 in hidden cash Nixon received from Hughes.

In a real sense, this book is the story of two break-ins, the one that brought down a President, and the other that revealed the truth about Hughes. The White House at first dismissed Watergate as a third-rate burglary. No one said that about the June 5, 1974, break-in at Howard Hughes headquarters in Hollywood.

Michael Drosnin
New York City
April 2004

No one called it a third-rate burglary. There was no need tono one got caught. Besides, a nation still transfixed by Watergate hardly noticed the June 5, 1974, break-in at 7000 Romaine Street in Hollywood.

The target, a hulking block-long two-story building, looked like an abandoned warehouse. It had no name. But for a quarter-century 7000 Romaine was the nerve center of a vast secret empire. It belonged to Howard Hughes.

The burglars were not only after his money but also his secrets. At the height of his wealth, power, and invisibility, the phantom billionaire commanded his empire by correspondence, scrawling his orders in thousands of handwritten memos, hearing back from his henchmen in memos dictated to his aides, dealing with outsiders only through the Romaine switchboard, which kept verbatim transcripts of all incoming calls.

And the Romaine vaults safeguarded all those memos, all those transcripts, all of Hughess personal and corporate files, all the secrets of a mystery man who was known to have dealings with the CIA, the Mafia, and the White House and whose hidden empire seemed to reach everywhere.

The fortresslike steel-and-concrete building was said to be impregnable. Published accounts detailed a fail-safe security system that included laser-beam surveillance, X-ray detection devices, and electronic alarms to alert a private army before anyone could even get near the burglarproof safes. Entry was by appointment only, and few outsiders were ever allowed through the four-combination, pushbutton-lock doors.

But in the early morning hours of June 5, 1974, persons unknown managed to get in uninvited. No alarms blared, because there was no working alarm system. No private army opened fire, because there was no private army. Romaine was a Hollywood faade, protected only by a single unarmed security guard.

The guard, Mike Davis, had just completed his rounds outside the building. It was 12:45 A.M .

As I opened a side door, he would later tell the police, someone came from behind and jammed a hard object into my back. I never actually saw a gun. I just assumed they were armed. I knew I wasnt.

Lets go, were going in, Davis said the burglars ordered, pushing him ahead of them. They told the guard to lie facedown on the floor. Blindfolded and gagged, his wrists taped cross-handed, Davis said he saw nothing but thought he heard four men, the two who came up behind him and two more who arrived soon after, dragging in a two-tank acetylene torch on a clattering steel dolly.