CHAPTER 22

HUGHESGATE

“THE BASTILLE”

IT HAD seemed a good idea in 1972 for Michael E. Davis to join the Summa Corporation as a guard at Romaine Street. His brother-in-law, Chuck Waldron, had started there in 1957 and was doing very nicely. Following service as a chauffeur, escort for budding actresses, assistant to Kay Glenn, and supervisor of the building staff, Waldron had become a personal aide to Hughes. For giving Hughes his medicine, taking and delivering messages, and performing other secretarial chores, Waldron received close to $100,000 a year. Upon marrying Waldron’s sister, Davis had converted to Mormonism, the proper religious credential for a swift rise in the Hughes hierarchy. But after three years, Davis’s career had stalled. Still employed as a guard, he spent his nights making the rounds inside and outside the block-long building, assuring the security of the fortress that Nadine Henley called “the Bastille.”¹

With Hughes’s withdrawal from the outside world and the transfer of most executive functions to Bill Gay’s Encino office, Romaine Street had declined to little more than a records center and warehouse of Hughes memorabilia. Locked away in half a dozen walk-in vaults and scores of filing cabinets and safes were negatives and prints of all Hughes’s films, his pilot logs, aviation trophies, other personal mementos, and 475 scrapbooks filled with newspaper and magazine articles about Hughes from 1931 to 1975.² By far the most valuable contents of the building were the informal Hughes archives, a collection of Hughes’s personal, business, and financial papers dating back half a century. The papers touched every phase of his career—contracts awarded to a stable of starlets, his management of TWA and RKO, his acquisition of Las Vegas hotels, casinos, and real estate. There were thousands of memoranda that Hughes had written in longhand on yellow legal tablets, expressing his wishes and views on everything from underground nuclear tests and the status of blacks in American society to detailed instructions on the handling of the TWA lawsuit and the purchase of Air West. And then there were the truly sensitive papers, messages, and memoranda, some written or dictated by Hughes, many prepared by his lieutenants, accounting for their progress on a particular assignment. There were reports on intricate schemes to avoid paying taxes and speculation about what federal agents might overlook in an audit. There were reports of secret dealings with government agencies—the Internal Revenue Service, the Justice Department, the Civil Aeronautics Board. There were summaries of negotiations or understandings reached with men in the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House.

Shortly before 1 A.M. on Wednesday, June 5, 1974, Michael Davis, a thirty-nine-year-old father of six children who now supplemented his income as a Hughes security guard at night by working as a car salesman during the day at Crossroads Chevrolet in North Hollywood, completed an uneventful exterior inspection of Romaine Street. As he opened one of the doors to go back inside—a door secured by both a key and a combination lock—he was suddenly grabbed from behind, shoved through the door, and ordered to “be quiet and don’t look around,” Davis said.³ He did not see his assailants, he said, but he believed there were two men. They blindfolded him, taped his mouth and hands, and then pushed him into the ground-floor office of Kay Glenn. Oddly, the door to that office was ajar, although Glenn later insisted that, in keeping with his usual practice, he had locked it when he left work between seven and eight o’clock the night before.

Meanwhile, out in the hallway a clanking noise sounded as two more men arrived dragging a pair of gas tanks—one stamped “United States Navy”—and an acetylene torch. They stopped in front of a large walk-in vault across from Glenn’s office and set to work. They knew exactly what they were doing. Working quietly and efficiently, they applied just the right mix of acetylene and oxygen to assure a flame that would cut quickly and leave a minimum of residue. The old Mosler safe had two outer doors secured by a combination lock and two inner doors with a relatively unsophisticated key lock. An expert safecracker, assuming that the inner doors would be locked, would have cut around the dial on the outer doors, thereby exposing the lock on the inner doors, which then could be punched out. But the Romaine Street intruders cut instead along the bottom of the vault, a faster and easier approach because it eliminated the necessity of cutting through the chromium locking bars surrounding the locking mechanism. That is, it would be a faster and easier approach if the two inner doors had been left open.

They had been.

Back in Glenn’s office, after ordering Davis to stand against a wall, the other pair of burglars pried open a four-drawer filing cabinet—the top drawer was a safe—and began sifting through the contents. There were stacks of $100, $50, and $20 bills, which they pocketed, along with three Juvenia watches and a Levi Strauss stock certificate. As the men sorted through the files, scattering unwanted papers on the floor, Davis heard them mutter from time to time, “Looky here, this is it” and “Look at this.”⁴ Davis estimated that they remained in Glenn’s office thirty to forty-five minutes, and then he was taken back into the hallway and marched west along the corridor as his captors forced open a door or two and looked into other offices. When they reached the end of the building, they turned around, retraced their steps the length of the hallway, and climbed a stairway to the second floor. At the top of the steps, they pushed Davis into the office of Lee Murrin, a forty-year veteran of the organization who oversaw Hughes’s personal financial affairs. Again, Davis said, he was told to stand against the wall. After an unsuccessful attempt to pry open an old-fashioned safe, the men sent for the acetylene torch. When they began cutting through the locking bars, Davis recalled that it became “terribly smoky and extremely hot” because it was “not a great big office.”⁵

In all, Davis believed he spent thirty to forty-five minutes in Murrin’s office before he was ushered back out into the second-floor hallway, where they again began walking west until they reached the office of Carol Snodgrass, an accounting clerk. There, the men easily forced open another combination filing cabinet and safe. “This is a piece of cake,” one said.⁶ They spent about fifteen minutes shuffling through papers, and then moved Davis back to the hallway where they continued on to the office of Nadine Henley. Although Miss Henley worked out of Summa’s headquarters in Encino, she also maintained an office at Romaine Street, where she had spent more than two decades. It was not necessary to force open the door of Miss Henley’s locked office, for Davis heard one of the men insert a key. Inside, they ignored the wall safes, focusing their attention on documents. Davis could hear the men sorting through the papers, saying at different times “Take this” or “Don’t take this.”⁷ After ten or fifteen minutes they left Miss Henley’s office, carrying with them, in addition to certain papers, a pair of Wedgwood bowls, a collection of South American butterflies in a silver backing, and a rare Mongolian bowl.

Back in the hallway, the burglars returned to the east end of the building and a conference room which had also been left unlocked. Thousands of Hughes’s personal papers were stuffed into several filing cabinets and spread across a table, where they had been assembled for cataloging and indexing. Again, Davis listened as the men ruffled through the papers, announcing to each other “Look at this” and “Take this.”⁸ The burglars spent about thirty minutes examining the papers, discarding some, placing others in boxes. “They seemed to know just what they wanted.”⁹ When the men finished packing the papers, they walked Davis back downstairs and into a warehouse room. There, he said, his ankles were taped and he was ordered not to leave. He obeyed.

“I was told to stay there, you know,” Davis said. “They didn’t say five minutes or five hours. So I stayed a reasonable length of time. I don’t know how long with all these things, you know, going through my mind, but I stayed there what I felt was a reasonable length of time.”¹⁰ Then, he said, “I managed to roll over on the rolls of carpet onto the floor and I stood, and with the pressure on the ankles where it was taped, there was some leverage where I could move. So at that time I hobbled into Kay Glenn’s office, which was out the door and the first office in the hallway.”¹¹

With his hands, ankles, and mouth taped, Davis said he managed to get the telephone off the hook, opening an intercom line to Operations on the west end of the second floor—the one room the burglars had carefully avoided—where Harry F. Watson, the only other staff person in the building, was manning the telephones. Following Romaine Street’s standard procedure for logging all communications, Watson noted that the call came in at 4:40 A.M. Picking up the phone, he heard a muffled voice that said what sounded like “I’m bound and gagged.” Watson asked the caller to repeat the message. “They have got me bound and gagged,” the muffled voice said again.¹²

Watson rushed to Operations’ doors to make certain they were still locked, then called Kay Glenn and the police. In the meantime, Davis said, he was able to break the tape on his ankles, and he went to the second floor and into the Xerox room adjoining Operations. He called over an intercom to Watson, announcing, “I’m outside.” Watson replied, “Stay where you are. I have called the police.”¹³ A few minutes later the police arrived, and Davis described the burglary.

The next day, newspaper accounts of the burglary were sketchy, as they had been following the Watergate break-in. The New York Times reported, “A security guard at Howard R. Hughes’ Hollywood message center and office building was bound and gagged by a group of men who then ransacked private papers and opened two safes, where they stole about $60,000.”¹⁴ The newspaper quoted a police spokesman as saying that “Hughes staff members would not say what papers were missing.”¹⁵

In the days after the burglary, Hughes executives maintained their customary silence in response to questions about the break-in, not only from the news media but from the Los Angeles police as well, refusing to say exactly what private papers of Hughes, if any, had been stolen. Romaine Street’s report to Hughes himself, confined to his bedroom at the Xanadu Princess Hotel in Freeport, was as vague as the report to the police.

Hughes’s reaction to the break-in was ruled by his own peculiar brand of logic. His immediate concern was not what might have been stolen but who was going to determine what was stolen. He especially feared that some outsider might be allowed to rummage through his archives—perhaps an insurance adjuster. The thought chilled him, and he spelled out precise instructions to an aide, who relayed them to Miss Henley, Murrin, and Glenn:

He wants to know who is actually going to look in the various areas, vaults, and rooms at Romaine to ascertain just what is missing and presumed stolen in the robbery. He does not want some insurance investigator to take it upon himself to start opening boxes and crates when he has left such rigid instructions through the years on the handling of such sensitive items as his motion picture equipment, etc. He wants a detailed report, step by step, on just how it is intended that these searches be made. He wants this report before anything is touched.¹⁶

Nearly two weeks after the burglary, at 5:45 P.M. on Monday, June 17, Harry Watson received a telephone call in the Romaine Street Operations from a man who identified himself as Chester Brooks. He first asked to speak to Nadine Henley. Watson said she was not available. He then asked for Kay Glenn. Watson said he was out of town. Finally, he asked who Watson was. Watson told him and the caller announced, “Mr. Watson, it is about the burglary and it is urgent.”¹⁷

Watson said the caller told him that

in a park in the San Fernando Valley, near your office, there is a trash can under a tree, opposite 16944 Ventura Boulevard, and on top of the trash can there would be a white envelope and it was to be seen only by Nadine Henley or Kay Glenn…. If they want to contact me, they should put an ad in the classified Los Angeles Times and it should say, “Apex okay,” and should contain a phone number written backwards.¹⁸

Watson immediately called Miss Henley at the Encino office at 17000 Ventura Boulevard and gave her the message. She looked out the third-floor window of her office, across the street to the park the caller mentioned, and “thought that a white envelope was quite obvious in one of the trash cans.”¹⁹ She also noticed a motorcycle policeman in the street. Suspecting something more sinister than an envelope, quite possibly a letter bomb—“We have so many spurious calls that it is very difficult to tell what’s what,” she said later—Miss Henley sent Paul Winn, an attorney in the office, to explain the situation to the police officer and seek his help in retrieving the envelope.²⁰ The motorcycle policeman concluded that if the Hughes organization believed the letter might contain a bomb, he was not going to take any unnecessary risks. He placed a call for assistance to the Los Angeles Police Department’s bomb squad.

A short time later, Loren C. Wells, a bomb-squad officer, arrived and carefully examined the envelope. When Wells opened it, in place of the bomb feared by Miss Henley he found a single sheet of yellow legal paper and a smaller piece of paper about four inches by five inches. On the smaller piece were the typewritten words “Air West” and “Parvin Dohrmann.”^* On the yellow legal paper there was a handwritten message addressed to “Bob.” The note, dated June 6, 1969, said:

I would be ecstatic at the prospect of purchasing Parvin in the same manner as Air West. Do you think this really could be accomplished? I just assumed that the cries of monopoly would rule it out.

If this really could be accomplished, I think it would be a ten strike and might change all of my plans.

Please reply. Most urgent.²¹

The message, signed “Howard,” appeared to be one of Hughes’s countless memoranda to Bob Maheu. The reference to Parvin concerned the Parvin-Dohrmann Company, which then owned three hotels and casinos in Las Vegas. The Hughes memorandum and the accompanying note established that the caller Watson had spoken with was someone with intimate knowledge of the burglary. He was also quite familiar with the internal workings of the Summa Corporation. For although the Encino office dated back to 1958, few outsiders knew of its existence. Even Hughes believed the office had been closed some years earlier, as he had ordered. The directory in the lobby of the three-story building bore no listing for the Summa Corporation, Howard Hughes, or Hughes employees. In fact, the directory listed no tenants at all on the third floor, where Bill Gay, Nadine Henley, Vincent Kelley—a Hughes security chief—and other Summa executives worked behind doors secured by push-button combination locks.

Responding to the directions of the mysterious Chester Brooks, Hughes officials placed a classified ad in the Los Angeles Times, with the Romaine Street telephone number reversed. Los Angeles police put a recording device on the telephone and everyone sat back and waited. The call for Miss Henley came three days later, on June 20.

THE MILLION-DOLLAR BURGLARY

“Mrs. Henley, this is Mr. Brooks calling, regarding the ad in the paper,” said the caller.²² After asking a few identifying questions, Brooks got down to the basics:

 

BROOKS: Here’s what our intentions are; number one, it may please him to know that this is not part of any conspiracy through the Maheu people or anything of that nature and we wish this man no personal harm of any, any kind.

MISS HENLEY: Okay.

BROOKS: I want that clearly understood.

MISS HENLEY: Okay.

BROOKS: Number two, there was quite a bit more money that was said to be taken than actually was. You might bring that to his attention. It seems that maybe he’s got some people in his own company who dabbled somewhat.

MISS HENLEY: I see.

BROOKS: Number three, the total price that we’re interested in procuring is $1 million for the content. We want it in two separate drops. The first one of which will be $500,000 for half of the documents.

MISS HENLEY: Mmm, mmm.

BROOKS: The second one will follow within a three-day period.

MISS HENLEY: Mmm, mmm.

BROOKS: If there is at anytime there’s any breach of trust, the negotiation will stop at once. There’ll be no further attempt made to contact any of the people. We know how the Hughes [organization] operates in this type of situation, we’re not fools, and we can probably trust it much more than he himself can. At any rate, we will call you tomorrow and you can either give me a yes or no at that time—

MISS HENLEY: Can I ask you what time? I did have some outside appointments tomorrow.

BROOKS: We’ll call you at 12 sharp.

MISS HENLEY: That doesn’t help me too much. Could you call a little later?

BROOKS: Well, give me a time, Mrs. Henley.

MISS HENLEY: Well, no, say three.

BROOKS: We’ll call you at 3 o’clock and if it’s satisfactory, give us your answer at that time, just as simple as that.

MISS HENLEY: Okay.

BROOKS: If not, we have other channels.

MISS HENLEY: Now it takes me a little time you know. This is not money I could just pull out of my hat, and takes me a little time to get in touch with the man, sometimes, you know.

BROOKS: Well, that’s your responsibility. We won’t call but one more time. Thank you very much.²³

 

At 4:18 P.M. the next day, the call came into Operations. “Is Miss Henley there?” the voice asked.

“No. Who is this?” asked a Summa employee who had picked up the phone, Miss Henley’s private line.

“This is Chester Brooks,” replied the caller.

“She’s in a meeting,” said the Summa employee—an answer that carried with it the implication that neither Nadine Henley nor any other knowledgable Summa executive was much concerned about recovering Hughes’s stolen papers.

“All righty. Thank you,” said Chester Brooks. And he hung up.²⁴

True to his word, the man who called himself Chester Brooks never telephoned again.

To the Los Angeles police there had always been something special about the Romaine Street break-in, something that set it apart from the more than thirty thousand other burglaries committed in the city thus far that year. It was a belief that was quickly reinforced. A special agent in the FBI field office in Los Angeles called to let the police know that his “home office in Washington [was] interested. They feel Watergate is involved.”²⁵ An assistant United States attorney advised police that the burglary might have been an attempt to thwart SEC criminal and civil investigations of Hughes’s purchase of Air West. A subpoena for certain Romaine Street records had been prepared just a few days before the break-in.

In a report on the theft, one of the police officers assigned to the investigation concluded “that someone within the [Summa] Corporation set up this burglary. It is not known at this time if the purpose of the burglary was for money or for certain documents that were removed.”²⁶

Police gave polygraph tests to seventeen Summa employes. The one notable exception was Michael Davis. “It’s my firm belief that I don’t believe in polygraph machines dictating whether a fellow’s telling the truth or not, and I just refused to take it,” Davis said.²⁷ Given an ultimatum by Summa executives to take the test or be fired, Davis refused and was fired. Of the seventeen Summa employees who did take the test, one failed. He was Vincent Kelley, director of internal security for Summa in Los Angeles. Although he did not pass the examination, Kelley was retained on the Summa payroll.²⁸

Some weeks after the burglary, a Summa executive called the FBI and reported, belatedly, “among the documents stolen was one that related to national security and the CIA.”²⁹ Instead of assigning agents from the local field office, as it ordinarily would, the FBI sent two agents from Washington to confer with police in Los Angeles, informing them, rather cryptically, that “there was a national-security document involved, that if they found the document they would recognize it, and they were to forget they had ever seen it.”³⁰ FBI agents (or CIA agents posing as FBI agents, it is not clear which) floated about Los Angeles, offering to pay $1 million for the return of the stolen Hughes papers—the same papers that just a few weeks earlier Summa executives had deemed so unimportant.

After all of this, if doubts persisted that something was peculiar about the Romaine Street burglary, they vanished with the arrival of two new characters upon the scene, both indigenous to Southern California. One was a sometime actor, screenwriter, and television scriptwriter. The other was a car salesman. They quickly emerged as the leading players in a cast that already included scores of FBI agents, private detectives, Summa executives, CIA agents, Los Angeles police, SEC investigators, Hughes security agents, Justice Department attorneys, and other official and nonofficial types who flitted in and out of the burglary case.

The actor and screenwriter was Leo Gordon, who back in the 1950s and 1960s appeared in supporting roles in an assortment of western and adventure movies. For the most part they were productions like Man in the Shadow, in which Gordon played the dislikable associate of a despotic rancher (Orson Welles), who was waging a private war with the courageous sheriff (Jeff Chandler). Gordon wrote screenplays for films like Escort West, Hot Car Girl, The Cry Baby Killer, and All the Loving Couples. The last movie was an X-rated production of the initiation of a new couple into a suburban wife-swapping set. Gordon’s wife, Lynn Cartwright, had played one of the swap-mates. More recently, Gordon had been writing scripts for “Adam-12,” a television series depicting the exploits of a pair of Los Angeles police officers.

The car salesman was Donald Ray Woolbright, who had moved to Los Angeles just three years earlier. Back in St. Louis, where he grew up in the city’s slums, Woolbright had compiled a record of two dozen arrests for a variety of alleged offenses, including burglary, assault, and counterfeiting. When Woolbright moved to California in 1971, the intelligence unit of the St. Louis Police Department sent a message to the Los Angeles police advising them of his background and describing him as a “con-man, burglar and fence.”³¹ Soon after he came to the West Coast, Woolbright became a partner in a Woodland Hills jewelry store and a car salesman in a North Hollywood lot, just across the street from the one where Mike Davis, the Hughes security guard, sold cars.

Woolbright and Leo Gordon had known each other for about a year. Gordon had bought a car from Woolbright, and then had sent two friends to buy their cars from him. One day toward the end of July, Woolbright dropped by Gordon’s Sunland home. He seemed agitated, as Gordon recalled their meeting that day. “I don’t know whether I should tell you this,” he said, “but I have been beating it around in my head for three days and I have been walking the walls with it. But I have something that’s very big and I don’t know quite how to handle it.”³² There was a pause.

Two of the characters in the drama that swirled around the burglary of Hughes’s Romaine Street command post: Leo Gordon (left), an actor and screenwriter, and Donald Ray Woolbright, a car salesman. The Gordon photo dates from 1955 when he played the part of a warlord in The Conqueror, a movie produced, coincidentally, by Howard Hughes. United Press International

“Who is the most important man you can think of in the world today?” Woolbright asked.

“Kissinger,” Gordon replied.

“How about Howard Hughes?” Woolbright offered.

“Well, I have to agree,” Gordon said.

“What would you say if I told you I had two boxes of Howard Hughes’ personal documents?” Woolbright asked.

“Well, where did they come from?” Gordon asked.

When Woolbright hesitated, Gordon quickly interjected, “Well, there’s only one place it could have come from and that’s the burglary that happened about a month and a half ago.”³³

Woolbright nodded and began to relate a bizarre tale. He was at home one night he said, when his wife answered a telephone call from a man who identified himself as Bennie from St. Louis. Woolbright said he did not know any Bennie and refused to talk. The man called again. He gave Mrs. Woolbright a message to relay to her husband: “I was at Tex and Joe’s funeral in St. Louis and I saw and met you then there.”³⁴ This time, Woolbright took the phone. Bennie from St. Louis announced that he represented the people who had Hughes’s secret papers and he offered Woolbright a job as “a bag man to make a transfer of the papers and pick up the ransom for the papers.”³⁵ Woolbright’s fee as the middleman in what would be a million-dollar extortion case was fixed at a modest $15,000.

Gordon listened as Woolbright continued his story, insisting that he had not been involved in the burglary but that “there were four men brought out from St. Louis specifically to do the job.”³⁶ He also said that the amount stolen in the burglary was considerably more than the $60,000 reported. It was “more like four times that amount,” he said.³⁷ Gordon wondered “why would professional burglars, after taking X number of dollars, labor themselves and burden themselves down with several boxes of papers that could tie them into the crime immediately if anybody met them.”³⁸

“That was the reason they went there,” Woolbright explained.³⁹ “The whole object of the burglary was to get the papers and the money was ancillary.”⁴⁰ Woolbright said that after the break-in, the Hughes papers were taken to Las Vegas, where some were “taken out of the batch” by an unidentified person or persons—presumably whoever commissioned the burglary—and “the balance returned” to the thieves.⁴¹

Gordon was impressed by Woolbright’s detailed knowledge of the burglary. Woolbright recited an inventory of items that the burglars had taken from Romaine Street in addition to the papers: a butterfly collection, Wedgwood vases, watches—items that had not been mentioned in newspaper reports published at the time of the break-in. Police later concluded that Woolbright “knew details that could only have been known by someone who did take part in the crime or was very close to someone who did take part in the crime.”⁴²

Gordon said Woolbright sought his advice on what to do with the stolen papers because “I’m a writer… and it was his idea that in view of the [Clifford] Irving thing and everything else, that someone would pay handsomely for these documents because they are all handwritten by Mr. Hughes.”⁴³

Thus Leo Gordon, a onetime actor who played heavies in westerns, and Donald Woolbright, a small-time police character from St. Louis, formed an alliance to determine the fair market value of Hughes’s papers. With Woolbright in tow, Gordon went to see Joanna Hayes, the wife and business manager of a novelist friend. She was not helpful. Next, they went to see a West Los Angeles attorney, Maynard Davis, the nephew of Sidney Korshak, a multimillionaire Hollywood attorney with impressive connections in the motion-picture industry, the political community, and the crime syndicate. Korshak’s friends and acquaintances over the years ranged across the social scale, including the actress Jill Saint John, Robert F. Kennedy, and Chicago mobster Charles (Cherry Nose) Gioe. After listening to Gordon and Woolbright, Davis was somewhat skeptical. According to Gordon, Davis said, “I’d like to see something tangible, you know, solid, not just words, and I’ll make a couple of calls.”⁴⁴ It was, Gordon and Woolbright agreed, a reasonable request. After the meeting broke up, Woolbright set out alone to get the Hughes papers.

Two days later, Gordon said, Woolbright called him and reported “that he had just come back from Las Vegas in his Corvette with Bennie, and the papers were in the trunk.”⁴⁵

“Do you have some place I can put the stuff?” he asked.

“My safe,” Gordon replied. But when he said the safe was a five-foot Diebold, Woolbright told him “it was not big enough.”⁴⁶

The two dealers in purloined papers returned to Maynard Davis’s law office and showed him a memorandum written by Hughes concerning underground nuclear tests in Nevada. Gordon said Davis indicated that he had already contacted Greg Bautzer, the Hollywood lawyer Hughes retained in past years. Bautzer expressed an interest in the papers, Davis said, but he insisted on meeting with the burglars. On that, Woolbright was unyielding. “No way,” he declared.⁴⁷ Davis then offered his visitors this parting advice, Gordon recalled, “I have a gut feeling and you guys make up your own mind. If I were you, I would drop it. You are playing with dynamite.”⁴⁸

A disheartened Woolbright and Gordon retired to a coffee shop to review their lack of progress. As Gordon remembered the conversation, Woolbright said, “We tried our best shot, and I guess we are too lightweight to handle it. It is too big for us. I’ll just have to give this stuff back to the people and forget it, and it is a pity because I have already spent part of the money.”⁴⁹ The two men parted company, with Gordon neglecting to mention that he had told the whole story to someone else. That person was Frank Hronek and Gordon had known him for fifteen years. Their families vacationed together. They were close personal friends. Hronek was an intelligence officer in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

Sometime during August, Hronek visited Gordon at his home and played a tape recording of the telephone conversation between Nadine Henley and the man who called himself Chester Brooks. There was no question in Gordon’s mind. Chester Brooks was Donald Woolbright. After a meeting with another Los Angeles police officer who was in charge of the investigation of the still-unsolved Romaine Street break-in, it was suggested that Gordon should reestablish contact with Woolbright. Gordon arranged a meeting and attempted to renew Woolbright’s interest in the caper by telling him that he had found a person “who is very interested in the papers. A friend of Bob Mitchum’s.”⁵⁰ All in all, it was a rather implausible tale the scriptwriter had come up with—“I was winging a story,” he said later—and it immediately aroused Woolbright’s suspicions. He wanted a few days to think it over.⁵¹

A second meeting was scheduled at Denny’s Restaurant, at Coldwater and Ventura. Gordon alerted Hronek so that the intelligence officer could observe the meeting at a discreet distance. After Gordon arrived at Denny’s, he waited about forty-five minutes for Woolbright to appear. Then the telephone rang, a waitress answered it, and asked, “Is there a Mr. Gordon here?”⁵² It was Woolbright.

“I can’t make it,” Woolbright said. “I’m out at Sambo’s at Topanga Canyon. Come out [here].”⁵³

At Sambo’s, Gordon said, Woolbright asked him to repeat his story. “I want to know exactly what you are doing, exactly who you are dealing with, who you are talking to, and what the whole setup is,” Woolbright demanded.⁵⁴

Gordon explained again that “Mitchum was the primary mover as far as returning these papers to Hughes, because Mitchum was a friend of Mr. Hughes.”⁵⁵

“I don’t buy it,” Woolbright snapped. “You are not leveling with me.”

“I’m telling you all I can tell you. The less you know, the better,” Gordon said.

“Nothing is going to happen until you level with me,” Woolbright replied.

“All right, I’ll level with you,” Gordon said. “The police are on to it. The feds are on to it. They know you and they know me and all they are interested in right now is recovering those documents because national security is involved.”⁵⁶

After some persuading, Gordon said, Woolbright agreed to go along with his proposal to obtain a file of the stolen papers, which the burglars supposedly had in their possession. First, though, Gordon said Woolbright told him, “these people would want some sincere money or out front money.”⁵⁷

“What will it take?” Gordon asked.

“At least five thousand dollars,” Woolbright said. “I have got seventeen hundred on me and I have got to leave some money for Joannie. I need some money for expenses.”

“You put in fifteen. I’ll put in thirty-five. That’s five thousand,” Gordon figured.⁵⁸

Back in business once again, the pair drove to Gordon’s home, where he said he took twenty-five $100 bills and two $500 bills from his safe and gave them to Woolbright. Woolbright said he planned to leave for Denver at 11:30 that night, and hastened to add, “My God, don’t tell the police or the feds I’m on my way to Denver. I don’t want any tails on me because if I show up with a tail, I’m a dead man. I’ll be en route from there to Houston and I might have to go to Miami.”⁵⁹

Gordon said he never saw him again. There was one telephone call eleven or twelve days later, Gordon said, during which Woolbright exclaimed, “You won’t believe the bills I have run up.”⁶⁰

“I don’t care about the bills. I hope you are not buying cars with my money,” Gordon joked.

“What kind of crack is that?” an unamused Woolbright replied.

“I’m just kidding you,” Gordon said.

“Well, I’m doing the best I can,” Woolbright said. “I have got to move around. I’ll be in touch.”⁶¹

Woolbright hung up and Gordon said he never heard from him again.

In the weeks following the Romaine Street burglary, both the CIA and the FBI behaved peculiarly. The FBI’s initial response to the break-in had been that it related to Watergate. Interestingly, on the day of the burglary, Donald and Edward Nixon were to testify before the Senate Watergate Committee, which was continuing to look into an allegation that the Hughes $100,000 given to Rebozo had been parceled out to Nixon family members. According to newspaper accounts, “the brothers declined to answer some questions put to them at a closed session Wednesday morning and failed to appear for a scheduled afternoon session.”⁶² Later that month, Bebe Rebozo, whose personal and business records also were being sought by the committee, left the country before a subpoena could be served.^*

In any event, the CIA established contact with the national office of the FBI following the burglary to determine what had been stolen and to monitor progress of the investigation. An internal CIA memorandum, summarizing a discussion of the burglary by top agency officials, noted that

with a background of two previous burglaries of Summa Corporation offices in the past three months, one in Las Vegas, Nevada, and one in Encino, California, as well as the court trial which has been recently completed in Los Angeles, wherein Robert A. Maheu is suing Hughes corporation for some $17 million, it was felt by all concerned that an effort should be made to determine if the FBI, in its liaison with local police, has developed any information concerning possible suspects in the perpetration of the instant burglary on 5 June 1974, or the two previous in Las Vegas and Encino.^63†

The CIA memorandum also indicated the FBI had received information indicating that “a current theory existing within the LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department] that the burglars may well have been hired by the corporation itself.”^64*

By August, the CIA, which is responsible for foreign intelligence operations, had picked up leads on this domestic criminal act that not even the FBI had learned. In a three-page memorandum, dated August 5, 1974, the CIA advised the FBI:

Information has recently been brought to our attention, described as having originated from a “fairly reliable” source, which may be of interest to your Bureau. In substance, [the CIA source] has stated the following:

“The burglary in question was committed by five individuals from the Midwest and was mob-sponsored. Property taken included cash, personal notes and handwritten memoranda by Howard Hughes; correspondence between Hughes and prominent political figures; etc. The amount of cash taken is said to be approximately four times the amount publicized. The personal papers are said to be sufficient in volume to fill two foot lockers and are filed in manila-type file folders and catalogued in some fashion. The contents are said to be highly explosive from a political view and, thus, considered both important and valuable to Hughes and others as well. Efforts are now being made to sell the material which the Source believes is still being held in the Los Angeles area.”…The above information is transmitted for whatever action you deem necessary. If, as a result of your possible investigation, information is developed concerning the highly sensitive intelligence project involved, it is requested that prior to taking any action your Bureau coordinate with this office.⁶⁵

Not long thereafter, when Gordon and Woolbright stumbled into the case, the FBI, with the CIA’s support, prepared an elaborate scheme for buying back the stolen Hughes files, utilizing a Los Angeles Police Department informant. As the FBI field office in Los Angeles outlined the plan for Washington:

LAPD informant will introduce seller to Los Angeles attorney, who would then give name of New York attorney who had client possibly interested in stolen merchandise. Should [unknown subjects] decline to proceed further, bureau agent from L.A. division would be identified as assistant to New York attorney, and who would be available to fly to Los Angeles with $100,000 with which to negotiate a buy of merchandise. Stipulation would be not to buy package unseen, but rather to examine individual pieces of merchandise and to negotiate buy of individual pieces if felt worthwhile and useful to New York attorney’s client. It is believed that this procedure would enable undercover agent to examine all merchandise. Personal representative referred to above to make available $100,000 on Sept. 23, 1974, to be placed in safety deposit box in Los Angeles bank as “show money” to be utilized by undercover special agent if buy transaction…. At present time, no actual negotiations to make buy under way, but Los Angeles [FBI office] is currently endeavoring to make necessary arrangements to set up buy transaction and to provide appropriate cover for bureau agents and informant should individuals dealing with LAPD informant indicate access to and desire to sell stolen merchandise.⁶⁶

The ransom of the documents was to be carried out through Gordon. But at a meeting attended by Los Angeles police officers, FBI agents, and Gordon on October 2, Gordon insisted, according to a CIA internal report, “that he must have total immunity in writing both from the federal and California jurisdictions for himself and Woolbright.”⁶⁷ As another condition for cooperation, Gordon wanted a promise that “Woolbright would not have to testify before any type of judicial proceeding or be required to identify anyone involved with this matter.”⁶⁸ It was during these delicate negotiations that a CIA official recorded in a memorandum information given to him by Lawrence S. Mohr, supervisor of the FBI criminal desk:

Mr. Mohr advised that Leo V. Gordon had an extensive criminal record….He recalled that Gordon served 30 days in 1942 in New York; that he had been arrested as a robbery suspect in L.A. [Los Angeles] in 1944; that he had been convicted for robbery and assault with intent to commit murder in 1947, at which time he was sentenced to 11 years at San Quentin with an 11 year probation period to follow. He was arrested for assault and battery in 1952; no disposition was shown in this case. He was questioned about a robbery in L.A. in 1959, again with no disposition shown. His latest arrest was in 1968 for disturbing the peace in L.A.⁶⁹

The scheme to buy back the Hughes papers eventually collapsed, and by November the FBI and the CIA had lost all interest in the stolen documents. Leo Gordon complained to federal agents that he was out the $3,500 he had given to Woolbright. An agent in the FBI field office in Los Angeles notified Washington that “allegedly suspect Don Woolbright has returned to the Los Angeles area and informant feels Woolbright took him for a $3,500 investment. Los Angeles [FBI office] and LAPD highly skeptical of Gordon’s contention that he gave Woolbright $3,500 to go to Florida and attempt to obtain samples of pertinent material or that Woolbright ever made any such trip.”⁷⁰

After five months, the FBI was finally considering the possibility of conducting a thorough investigation of the Romaine Street burglary, but the bureau agonized over the consequences of such an investigation for a “sister agency”—the CIA. Following a joint FBI-CIA strategy conference in Los Angeles, the FBI field office there informed Washington:

Conference at Los Angeles included discussion of possibilities of embarrassment to sister federal agency in the event of direct and full field investigation of theft by FBI. Such investigation would entail contact with Robert Maheu, Jack Hooper, Hank Greenspun, writer James Phelan, as well as Summa Corporation executives and employees. Consideration would be given for Bureau polygraphs of Summa people… who allegedly had specific knowledge of pertinent item being sought in this case. Consideration would also be given to direct contact with suspect Donald Woolbright and possible utilization of grand jury as weapon. The representative of sister agency plans to contact his Washington offices November 1, 1974, and contact will be made with the Bureau to arrange case conference for discussion of whether or not direct investigation should be instituted at this time. The representative requested that no immediate investigation be conducted pending the conference at Washington, D.C., and the outcome of a decision regarding the project at high levels expected in the next couple of weeks. He further requested that the money previously provided in this case be held pending arrangements to retake possession by his agency. In view of the possibilities of direct investigation and inquiry with some of the nationally known personalities involved with the Howard Hughes interests, which might lead to disclosure, it is recommended that no further investigation be conducted by the FBI unless the other interested federal agency is in agreement with the above mentioned interviews and course of action.⁷¹

The CIA promptly told the FBI that any investigation of the Romaine Street burglary would be damaging to national security. It was an argument reminiscent of fourteen years earlier when the agency had killed an FBI investigation of Maheu’s role in the Las Vegas wiretap installed to placate mobster Sam Giancana.

So it was that later in November, CIA officials seemed gratified that the FBI and Los Angeles Police Department were not working very hard on the theft of the Hughes papers. An official who attended one meeting wrote in a memorandum:

The group covered all possible aspects of the case as to what the Agency should do at this time. It was finally decided, however, that the Agency would do nothing but monitor the case and request nothing from the FBI except what the FBI is doing, i.e., the FBI is monitoring the Los Angeles Police Department. At the current time the Los Angeles Police Department is not conducting a current investigation, so in effect they are doing nothing at this time.⁷²

While the CIA watched the FBI do nothing, and the FBI watched the Los Angeles Police Department do nothing, both the Senate Watergate Committee and the Watergate special prosecutor’s office ignored the Romaine Street burglary entirely. When it was suggested privately by certain law-enforcement officers that the special prosecutor’s office especially had failed to look into the burglary, an indignant attorney in the office sent a letter to the FBI requesting “an inventory of documents which may have been taken in the burglary.”⁷³ The request was delayed until nearly a year after the burglary and just before the special prosecutor’s office went out of business. As for the Senate Watergate Committee, one committee investigator said, “Other than what was in the press, I don’t think we got involved.”⁷⁴

Late in 1974, Donald Woolbright packed up his family, sold his house in Canoga Park, and moved back to Missouri, where he bought a small farm near Williamsville, a tiny hamlet in the Ozarks about seventeen miles northwest of Poplar Bluff.^* About the same time, the Los Angeles Police Department—after the decision had been made by the CIA and FBI not to solve the burglary—turned their attention to Woolbright, not to question him about the stolen Hughes papers, but to build a case against him for receiving stolen property. Unable to identify either the burglars or those who commissioned the crime, the police and the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office—which had maintained liaison with the CIA throughout—decided to settle for the person who apparently received, or at least had access to, the stolen documents.

Early in 1975, as the police and district attorney’s office were putting the finishing touches on their case against Woolbright, two more characters, a veteran and a newcomer, appeared in the Romaine Street burglary scenario, spinning stories as fanciful and bizarre as those of Gordon and Woolbright. The veteran was Michael Davis, the Romaine Street guard who had been fired for refusing to take a polygraph test. The newcomer was William E. Colby, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.