ON THE PHONE WITH ROBERT MAHEU

By NORM CLARKE
Las Vegas Review-Journal

A rumor was circulating in mid-February that Howard Hughes’ loyal lieutenant Robert Maheu was ailing.

With Maheu, all you had to do was pick up the telephone and call him.

“I just keep going and I love it,” he said, his voice a bit weaker than I recalled from earlier conversations.

I had met Maheu, who died Monday in Las Vegas, about six years ago at a reception honoring French entertainment icon Line Renaud at a home in a gated community in Summerlin.

We chatted for a few minutes and when I mentioned my passion for old Vegas history, Maheu, then in his mid-80s but still sharp as ever, volunteered his telephone number. "Call any time."

For the next six years, it was rare that we didn’t discuss his years with Hughes or his career during our telephone conversations. It was never on a chit-chat basis. Most of the time there was a news angle involved, and Maheu was ever willing to share his memories and a perspective that only a handful of Las Vegans possess.

One of those occasions was in November 2004, hours after the historic Desert Inn was imploded to make room for what is now the Wynn Las Vegas.

He told me watched the event on television. He sat there riveted, he said, as the series of explosions brought down the building where the reclusive billionaire ran his empire for four years with Maheu as his mouthpiece.

"I thought it would be closure, but the relationship I had with this man can never be closed," said Maheu, who served as Hughes' alter-ego from 1957 to 1970.

Hughes arrived at the Desert Inn in secret on Thanksgiving Eve in 1966 after arranging for a special train to take him and his staffers to Las Vegas.

"We stopped the train five miles out of town and brought him in unnoticed," said Maheu.

For the next four years, Maheu worked all hours for Hughes, who lived in the D.I.’s penthouse, where he had the windows blacked out. Hughes and Maheu never met. They communicated by telephone and through hand-written notes.

Hughes, in his early 60’s, was one of the most celebrated and wealthiest men in America at the time. He was a record-breaking aviator and a film producer/director who made headlines for dating many of Hollywood’s most beautiful stars. He owned Trans World Airlines.

More than anything, he was a man who loved challenges and he set up shop in Las Vegas because he smelled a buying opportunity.

He went on a casino-buying binge and purchased 17 in all, most of them under mob control.

“No one in th e world could have accomplished it as quickly as he did, buying out certain interests, being acceptable. In those days, publicly held companies could not buy into gaming.”

Hughes loved the energy of Las Vegas, and may have been influenced by the excitement created in the early 1960s by the Rat Pack.

Hughes was quoted as saying, "I like to think of Las Vegas in terms of a well-dressed man in a dinner jacket and a beautifully jeweled and furred female getting out of an expensive car."

Maheu, who first came to Las Vegas in 1964 for the highly popular Tournament of Champions golf soiree at the Desert Inn, told me one of his favorite Las Vegas stories, circa the mid-1960s.

"I remember when Gene Mayday, the owner of Checker Cab, had a survey that showed more full mink coats were embarking at the Desert Inn than all the (Strip) hotels together."

Maheu recalled purchasing the first limo in Las Vegas, "and I was very severely criticized for being ostentatious."

Three weeks ago before the D.I. was imploded, Maheu took his last look at Hughes' penthouse.

"They wanted me to take security and a group of executives to the room where Hughes stayed. Visualize the last portion of it (the tower) going north. He was on the east side, facing the pool. But he never saw the pool because he had all the windows blacked out," Maheu said.

"People say we made Las Vegas,” he told me. “We did not make Las Vegas; we got it ready. No one in the world could have accomplished it as quickly as he did. In those days, publicly held companies could not buy into gaming.

"We got it ready for Kirk Kerkorian, Irwin Molasky, the Greenspuns, Don Reynolds, Bill Harrah, the Houssels, and all the great talents here."

The next day, Maheu called and was distraught that he left hotel developer Steve Wynn off the list. I promised him I would mention it in my next column.

During one of our conversations, he corrected me when I made a reference that associated him with the C.I.A.

He said he never joined the C.I.A. He worked for the FBI before founding a security company in 1954 that later had dealings with the C.I.A. There are many published reports that he was the CIA-mafia liaison for the assassination attempts on Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

When Hughes died in 1970, aboard a plane, members of Hughes’ management team moved quickly to take over Hughes’ holdings.

“They (the management team) walked in, took over the hotels and started going into the cages. I called the governor (Paul Laxalt) to see if it had been cleared. I checked with George Franklin, the district attorney. I checked with the gaming control board and Ralph Lamb, who was sheriff. Ralph said, ‘they don’t have the power’ so I had them kicked out of the cages. They were trying to steal the empire.”

It was not the first time Maheu found himself in a dangerous spot.

I asked him, during one of the many telephones conversations, about the most dangerous assignment of his career.

“When I started my business, Robert Maheu Associates, in 1954, I was a solving entity. I specialized in solving problems. My first client was a group of independent stockholders who wanted to change the manageship of the New York Central railroad.

“My second client was Stavros Niarchos,” he said, referring to the arch-rival of Greek shipping tycoon, Aristotle Onassis.

Nirarchos “wanted to scutte the contract that Onassis had signed with the Saudi Arabia government to ship all of the country’s oil.

“The price of oil was $3 a barrel. Can you imagine if Onasssis’ deal had prevailed, how simple it owuld have been to add a couple bucks a barrel that would mean a profit of $10 million a day.

“it was his (Onassis’) intent at the time to take his first year’s profit and go to Venezuela and do the same thing,. He would have controlled more oil on the high seas than all the allied nations put together.

“What Saddam Hussein tried to do with an army, is exactly what Onassis was trying to do -- control all the oil in that part of the world. Onassis already had a leg up without shooting one gun.

“We turned the case,” said Maheu, matter of factly.

“I got the C.I.A. to help me, but they made it very clear to me if anything went wrong I would be on my own. They could not help me get a visa into Saudi Arabia; I had to get it on my own and you couldn’t make application an application for an exit visa until you were there.

“I had sent a man ahead of me, Kyle Twitchell. He was a mining engineer who had some work for them. The old king gave power of attorney to come back to the U.S. and get a group that evolved into Aramco. He was revered over there.

“I had met with king in 54,” said Maheu. Twitchell had chosen the location, the king’s summer palace in Jedda, a big palace, but my contact was a young Saudi, British-trained, who spoke perfect English. He would leave me, go in another room and go back and forth from 8 a.m. to midnight.

“Finaly, he said ‘Your excellency would like you to go back to your hotel and I will come to you at noon. At noon the next day, my phone rang. I went down and her is the man. ‘Your excellency is prepared to help. Here is your visa. He would like you to go back to some country, not the U.S., and release the information you gave us last night. I went from there to Rome and no one would touch it.

“Finally Niarchos called. and it hit the fan.. The issue was already in the world court. The king acquiesced. This was very interesting because the whole world of shipping was changing very rapidly.

“That was the most dangerous mission. I figured my chances of coming back were remote.”

After hooking up with Hughes, he quickly learned how connected his boss was. Maheu was renting a home in Brentwood when John F. Kennedy was elected president.

Hughes, who was running TWA at the time, furnished a plane that took Maheu and a small army of Hollywood celebrities to Washington, D.C. for the inauguration.

“The minute our plane, a DC-3, the biggest thing at the time, got airborne, Milton Berle got on the P.A. and said ‘nobody’s going to sleep tonight.’ He noticed that some of the musicians did not check their instruments. He told them to break them out. Here we were with the entertainment for the inaugural gala.

“At the gala, the mother of a top-secret man sat in my box. I was next to Everett Dirksen’s box and he had given me a lapel pin to go anywhere.

Before JFK and Jackie arrived, Maheu said the Secret Service informed him that he was to join them.

He followed them to the spot where the president and first lady would be arriving by limo.

Maheu was told “How would you like to open the door when the Kennedys arrive?”

Maheu knew why he was given the honor. JFK’s people had done their homework.

“We were contributing to both parties and I was in charge of all political activity for the entire world.”