The client who would change Bautzer’s life forever was Howard Hughes. For much of the twentieth century, he was considered to be the wealthiest man in the world. During their twenty-five-year relationship, Bautzer would serve as Hughes’s adviser, protector, confidant, harem-keeper, and best friend. Having Hughes as a client paid off in more ways than earning high fees from the billionaire. It made other important businessmen want Bautzer to be their lawyer. If he was good enough for Hughes, he was good enough for them. Although Hughes would later become reclusive, at the time Bautzer started as his counsel he was nothing like that. In fact, they had a lot in common. They were both athletic, handsome, competitive businessmen, out to conquer the world and bed beautiful movie stars.
Howard Robard Hughes Jr. was a financial titan, a singular genius who blazed trails in industry, aviation, and filmmaking. Greg Bautzer would most likely have first heard of him in late 1926, when Hughes was winning Los Angeles golf tournaments. Hughes and his wife Ella had recently moved to a home that was adjacent to the Wilshire Country Club on Muirfield Road so he could walk from his back door onto the ninth hole. He was twenty-one, tall, and boyishly handsome. He was also marked by fate. In 1909, when he was three, his father, Howard Hughes Sr., had patented a dual-cone rotary drill bit, which could pierce previously impenetrable rock. The Houston-based Hughes Tool Company (a.k.a. Toolco) would eventually collect massive licensing fees for most of the oil drilling in the world. In 1922, Howard Jr.’s mother died of an ectopic pregnancy. In 1924, his father died of a heart attack. Orphaned at eighteen, Howard Jr. collected his inheritance and took the reins of the company. His uncle, Rupert Hughes, was a successful screenwriter in Hollywood. The wealthy young man decided that he would invest his newfound wealth in film production. In 1926, he moved to the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and opened the film division of his Caddo Company at 7000 Romaine Street in Hollywood.
Hughes knew nothing about making films, but he learned quickly. His third film, Two Arabian Knights (1928), won an Academy Award for its director, Lewis Milestone. Hughes conceived his fourth film as a tribute to the British aviators of World War I. While he was filming gruesome air battles, Hollywood made the transition to sound films. As inventive as his father, Hughes was able to keep up. He reshot and recast, discovering Jean Harlow in the process. After spending three years and $3.75 million on the epic Hell’s Angels, Hughes gave it a monster premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. The film was a sensation, but it had cost too much to be profitable. Hughes made a few more films, but when he got into a protracted fight with the motion picture censorship committee over excessive sex and violence in his 1932 film Scarface, he left Hollywood, divorced his wife, and devoted himself to a new pursuit: aviation.
In 1932, Hughes founded his own aircraft company. He designed and tested fast airplanes, setting a transcontinental speed record in 1937. He wanted to prove that commercial air travel could be both fast and safe, so in 1938 he flew a Lockheed Super Electra around the globe in ninety-one hours. He was feted with a ticker-tape parade in New York. In 1939, he was honored with a Congressional Gold Medal for advancing the science of aviation. He then bought a controlling interest in Transcontinental Western Airlines (later renamed Trans World Airlines, or TWA for short), upgrading its fleet by means of a secret deal with Lockheed.
In 1941, he returned to moviemaking and produced a film that was so explicitly sexual it could not be released. The Outlaw sat on the shelf for six years, but Jane Russell, whom Hughes had tried to showcase in it, became an overnight star based on pinup photos featuring her ample bosom.
When World War II called for the manufacture of military planes, Hughes Aircraft stepped in, and in the process became the single largest employer in Southern California. After the war, Hughes continued to design aircraft, most memorably the XF-11, which he crashed in a residential neighborhood of Beverly Hills during a 1946 test flight. He was almost fatally injured and never fully recovered. The chronic pain he suffered for the rest of his life fostered an addiction to prescription medication.
Hughes came into Bautzer’s orbit around the time of Hughes’s purchase of RKO Radio Pictures in 1948. Bautzer knew that they had dated a number of the same women, among them Ginger Rogers and Ava Gardner. There are two versions of how Bautzer and Hughes met. The first involves their mutual friend Pat Di Cicco, who worked for Hughes in a capacity that has never been fully explained, but almost certainly involved procuring young ladies. In this version, it is Di Cicco who introduced Bautzer to Hughes in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the tycoon lived. According to publicist Henry Rogers, when Bautzer and Di Cicco arrived, they found Hughes in the bedroom, stark naked, a telephone in one hand, struggling to put on his trousers. A woman smoking a cigarette lay in his bed. Hughes finished his telephone conversation, zipped up his fly, and walked over to his two visitors.
“Howard,” said Di Cicco, “I want you to meet my friend Greg Bautzer, the best attorney in town.”
“Let’s go down to the bar for a drink,” Hughes grunted. The woman remained in the bed.
But the story Bautzer told his son, Mark, was that he first met Hughes in a nightclub. Bautzer was at a table with Lana Turner; by this time, they were no longer dating. A man came up to the table and leaned over to ask a question. “Mr. Hughes would like to know if Miss Turner will give him her phone number,” he said politely.
“You tell that miserable son of a bitch that if he wants to talk to Lana, he’s going to have to face me,” responded Bautzer. “And if he’s a man, he’ll do it.” The emissary retreated. In a few minutes, Hughes walked over and introduced himself.
It is impossible to say whether either of these stories is true. What is known for certain is that by 1947 Bautzer was very good friends with people who were among Hughes’s inner circle, and it is likely that one of them made the introduction. In addition to his longstanding friendship with Hughes’s girl-getter, Pat Di Cicco, Bautzer was also close to another well-known Hughes bird dog, casting director Walter Kane. An incident in December 1947, illustrated just how close Bautzer was to Kane.
Walter Kane was a forty-five-year-old talent agent and the former husband of actress Lynn Bari, the so-called “Woo Woo Girl” and the “Girl with the Million-Dollar Figure.” Just after midnight on December 12, Kane swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills, then had a change of heart and called Dr. Lee Siegel. A rescue squad rushed Kane to the hospital from his home on Doheny Road in Beverly Hills, where Dr. Siegel had found a suicide note and called the persons listed. They gathered by Kane’s hospital bed: Bautzer, Howard Hughes, Columbia Studios mogul Harry Cohn, and Kane’s secretary, Josephine “Pat” Paterson. Kane was on the road to recovery when Bautzer learned that he had been listed as sole beneficiary in Kane’s will.
“I was amazed,” said Bautzer. “I can’t understand it.” Kane’s suicide note read: “I am sorry to check out like this, but there really isn’t any other course to take. I hope you know, Greg, that I am very grateful to you for your friendship and so very grateful to W.R.W. [Billy Wilkerson]. If the following fellows would just sort of get together and have a drink on me, I would like it: [boxer] Jack Dempsey, [singing idol and actor] Rudy Vallee, [socialite] Jonah Jones, Harry Cohn, Howard, and by all means you and Billy.” Kane was being sued at the time by a grocery store for $632, so financial difficulties may have had something to do with his attempted suicide, although Bautzer denied it. Kane recovered and continued to serve as one of Hughes’s closest advisers.
Regardless of how Bautzer met Hughes, his earliest known legal work for the billionaire occurred in July 1952. Jean Simmons, a twenty-one-year-old British actress, and Stewart Granger, her movie-star husband, were suing Hughes to get out of an acting contract. She had signed the contract, but Hughes and RKO had not. Since then, he had neither given her work nor let her work elsewhere. Simmons asserted that she wasn’t bound by the contract. Hughes asserted that they had a binding deal, and that his reason for not signing the document itself was that it included an illegal term.
The offending provision involved tax issues related to a side deal that Hughes made with the couple. In addition to containing the agreement for acting services, the contract Simmons and Granger signed sold Hughes their Bel Air house and motion picture rights to a book owned by Granger. They were trying to report amounts for the house and book as capital gains rather than as income from Simmons’s RKO work. Capital gains were taxed at a lower rate than regular income. In order to avoid high taxes on the sale of their home and book rights, the Grangers needed Hughes to agree that the side deal was not part of Simmons’s acting contract. Hughes refused to agree to this, claiming it was part of the payment for her acting work, and therefore they would have to pay taxes at the higher rate.
In truth, Hughes was simply inventing an excuse for never having signed the contract. If he had wanted to, he could easily have agreed that the house sale and book rights were a separate deal and allowed them to pay less in taxes. Hughes wanted to hold her to the contract even though he had not cast her in a picture. The trial went on for seventeen days, then it was halted for settlement talks. Bautzer negotiated an arrangement in which Simmons would be under contract to RKO for three more years. In addition, Hughes would pay her $250,000 and her legal fees and would allow her to work for other studios at higher salaries.
Even though Bautzer sat across the table from Simmons in this dispute, he became friends with her after she divorced Granger. Bautzer attended her wedding to director Richard Brooks in November 1960 and he and Dana Wynter threw a party for them. Billy and Audrey Wilder, David Selznick, and Dean Martin attended.
After Simmons’s lawsuit was resolved, Hughes kept Bautzer on a monthly retainer. For Bautzer, it was a dream come true. Having Hughes as a client elevated Bautzer’s career to a new level. “When Howard Hughes all of a sudden says, ‘This is my lawyer,’ it makes you kind of important,” Bautzer said. But he also knew that keeping Hughes as a client would require more than just good lawyering. He would have to provide services like no other lawyer. He would need to be more aggressive and more creative, work harder, and cater to Hughes’s whims, whether business-related or personal. It was an all-consuming task, yet the hardships were worth it. The title “Howard Hughes’s lawyer” was priceless. Representing the richest man in the world gave him the kind of prestige few lawyers enjoyed. When Bautzer walked into a room, his standing was unquestioned. When he wanted to get important people on the phone, no matter who they were, they took his calls. Few if any lawyers could claim to have more clout. And the longer his relationship with Hughes lasted, the more powerful Bautzer became.
In the fall of 1952, Bautzer worked on his first major corporate transaction involving Hughes. It was an odd one, almost as odd as the billionaire himself. After only four years of owning RKO, Hughes wanted to sell it. He said that he wanted out because he was under attack by minority shareholders and felt that Hollywood had “grown too complicated.” In truth, the company was having the only good year since he had arrived, mostly because independent producers were releasing their pictures through RKO, which was earning Hughes a fee at virtually no up-front cost. When Hughes bought RKO, it was the smallest of the five major studios, yet it was known for brilliant, quirky projects like Citizen Kane, Cat People, Out of the Past, Crossfire, and Murder, My Sweet. Most of these movies made money, and there was an esprit de corps at the corner of Gower and Melrose where the studio was located. Hughes changed that, first with his paranoia of Communists and then with a purge. Within two years he had decimated the staff, turning the studio into a cross between a ghost town and a bomb crater. He had promised not to interfere with productions, then broken every promise. He meddled in casting and script revisions, and called for endless reshoots. The executives and producers who had not been fired quit. “RKO’s contract list is down to three actors and 127 lawyers,” said former RKO star Dick Powell.
A group of investors wanted to purchase RKO, and Hughes saw his chance to get his money out of the failing studio. Strangely, Bautzer was retained to represent the buyers in the transaction, not Hughes. Today such representation would be deemed a conflict of interest and would require informed written consent of both parties. Perhaps Hughes suggested that the sale would go more smoothly if his own lawyer handled it. Perhaps there was another reason that was less innocent.
The group of investors was headed by Ralph E. Stolkin, a thirty-four-year-old Chicago financier and industrialist who had reportedly gotten rich by setting up a $15,000 mail-order business and then, after two years, selling it at a profit of $1 million. Other investors included Edward Burke and Ray Ryan of San Antonio, Texas, and Stolkin’s father-in-law, Abe Koolish, who was president of the Chicago-based Empire Industries, another mail-order house, and vice president of National Video Corp., which manufactured television tubes. Koolish was also involved with Screen Associates Inc., which financed a Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis film, At War with the Army. A cursory glance of these men revealed nothing of concern.
Papers were signed on September 23, 1952, pursuant to which the syndicate purchased 1,012,420 shares of Hughes RKO stock at a price of $7 per share, for a total of $7,086,940. In reality, however, this was only an option contract. The group was paying Hughes just $1.25 million up front. The balance was payable over a two-year period. If the group defaulted, Hughes would get his studio back—and keep the $1.25 million.
Following the transfer of RKO, Bautzer’s firm—which at the time was still Bautzer, Grant, Youngman & Silbert—was appointed counsel for the new corporation. Arnold Grant was chosen chairman of the board. Gordon Youngman was appointed to the board. Other members included the investors Ryan, Koolish, and Burke, and Sherill Corwin, director of the Theater Owners of America. Stolkin was named president. Then came the surprise. Chicago lawyer Sidney Korshak was retained as labor counsel for RKO. Korshak would theoretically help resolve union disputes like the recent one with the Writers Guild of America over Hughes’s refusal to credit writer Paul Jarrico on The Las Vegas Story (1952) because of alleged Communist ties. But Korshak wasn’t just a labor lawyer. He was a well-known lawyer for mobsters, and his presence was worrisome.
Sure enough, the Wall Street Journal published articles in October that linked board members to the underworld. Ryan was connected to Frank Costello’s bookie operation in Florida. Stolkin sold mail-order punchboards, a bogus cardboard lottery game used by con men. Koolish had been indicted in 1949 by the Federal Trade Commission for mail fraud, but the charges had been dropped. He was also accused of bilking the Disabled American Veterans out of charity proceeds, claiming that his hefty withdrawals were “expenses.” Minority shareholders of the studio threatened to sue the dubious new administration, asserting they were unfit to run a publicly traded company. To make matters worse, RKO was losing $100,000 a week.
Some think that Bautzer was aware of the mob connection. According to them, Hughes asked Bautzer to have Korshak use his mob ties to set up a syndicate of investors. However, this is very unlikely. For one thing, although Bautzer would later become friends with Korshak, at the time of the RKO sale he barely knew him. Furthermore, Bautzer’s law partners would not have willingly served on a board of directors with criminals, and Bautzer would never have put them in such a position had he known about the investors’ backgrounds.
On October 23, Stolkin and Koolish resigned from the RKO board. They had no desire to have their past activities brought to light in a court of law or investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. By mid-November, Korshak and the remaining members had resigned as well. By February, the investors defaulted on the balance owed to purchase the studio and Hughes regained control of RKO. He pocketed the initial $1.25 million, which the Wall Street Journal called “the financial feat of the year.” While Bautzer was probably uninformed about the personal history of the purchasers, Hughes likely knew exactly with whom he was dealing. For the rest of his life, Korshak believed that Hughes had leaked the story about the investor’s backgrounds in order to induce the default. His suspicions had merit, given that Hughes had pulled a similar ploy on Ingrid Bergman, when he leaked news of her secret pregnancy in order to build ticket sales for her RKO film Stromboli.
After the aborted sale of RKO, Hughes kept Bautzer busy with legal work. There was a flurry of lawsuits by minority stockholders alleging Hughes had mishandled the company. There were also numerous contracts to draw up. Hughes had a penchant for doing deals that reduced his tax liability. Bautzer came up with a way to structure talent agreements with actresses that satisfied Hughes’s needs. These contracts allowed Hughes to pay sums of money to talent in monthly installments over a long period of time and deduct the amortized cost against other corporate profits. Since Hughes habitually put actresses under contract without using them, the resulting tax break was so great that their contracts cost him almost nothing.
One actress to sign such a deal was Gina Lollobrigida. The Italian beauty came to the United States in 1950 and danced nightly with Hughes for weeks. At one point during her visit, he had her sign a contract. When she got tired of waiting for a screen test, she went home. In September 1954, Hedda Hopper announced that Lollobrigida would work with Gary Cooper in a picture titled The Wastrel, an American production to be shot in Italy. Hopper mentioned that her contract with Hughes prevented her from working in Hollywood; in all likelihood, Hopper was repeating what Hughes had told her about their arrangement. Lollobrigida disagreed with Hughes’s position, insisting that document she had signed with him was just an option and that they had no true agreement. In the past, Hughes had threatened to sue any studio that wanted to hire her, and fear of a lawsuit from Hughes had successfully prevented anyone from doing so.
But now Hughes had a problem. He needed Lollobrigida to sign a real contract in order to get the favorable tax treatment. When she came to New York for the premiere of her Italian film Pane, Amore e Gelosia (US title: Bread, Love and Dreams), Bautzer flew to New York and tried to get her to sign an agreement. He also threatened to sue her if she made the Cooper picture. The dispute seemed unsolvable. Then, in 1955, someone recommended that Bautzer hire a New York contact named Bernard “Bernie” Schwartz to help get Lollobrigida to sign the agreement. Schwartz was a television producer who had a reputation for connections to people who could solve virtually any problem. Schwartz went to Italy and within six weeks had found a way to convince the actress to come to terms. Thanks to Schwartz, Bautzer was able to negotiate a new contract. Lollobrigida would star in four pictures at $280,000 each. A payment of $2,000 per week would continue for ten years. She accepted the deal and stayed in Europe, and everyone was happy. Bautzer and Hughes were so impressed with Schwartz’s problem-solving abilities that he was offered a position in Bautzer’s firm. Schwartz was flattered, but he couldn’t accept; he was not an attorney. Bautzer had assumed that he was. Bautzer admired talented businessmen, and he offered to find other work for Schwartz. One day he would make good on that promise.
By 1958, Hughes’s Toolco had increased its holdings in TWA to 78 percent and was controlling the airline’s day-to-day operations. Since the introduction of jet engines in the 1950s, it was only a matter of time before propeller-engine planes were phased out. The only question for a company was which jet to purchase. Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8 jets were already on order for Pan American Airlines, United Airlines, and American Airlines. Hughes delayed making a decision, trying to find the most profitable alternative. Hughes finally ordered Boeing 707s, but then threatened to cancel, hinting that Hughes Aircraft might be designing a better plane. He let the Boeing order stand and then placed an order with another manufacturer called Convair for thirty 880 jetliners. The total cost came to $400 million, more than he had in reserve. He would need to borrow much of the money to purchase the planes. Normally, this would not be a problem, but Hughes had complicated matters by insisting that Toolco purchase the planes rather than TWA itself. His game was to lease the planes to TWA so that Toolco could write off the costs of the jets. This would deprive TWA of its own tax advantage and increase the net cost to the airline. Hughes’s Toolco would receive a huge financial benefit from tax avoidance, and TWA would be saddled with the real debt.
As the jets were being delivered, Hughes agreed in principle to a partial financing plan devised by investment bankers Dillon, Read & Company. A consortium of banks and insurance companies would furnish $165 million and Hughes would arrange other financing in the amount of $100 million, for a total of $265 million. However, there was a catch. The bankers didn’t trust Hughes to manage the airlines. As a condition of making the loan, they required Hughes to place his airline stock in a ten-year voting trust—and allow the lenders to select the majority of a board of directors. Hughes was loath to give up control of TWA. The terms started to gnaw at him. He wanted to find another way.
When it came time to close the deal, Hughes delayed. His longtime Houston attorney Raymond Cook tried repeatedly to get Hughes to answer questions and give instructions, but Hughes would not return calls. Then, on three separate occasions, Hughes tried to back out of the Dillon, Read plan. In response, the lenders imposed stiffer terms, including the insulting stipulation that Hughes sign papers personally. They didn’t want there to be any question about whether the man signing had the authority to do so. Hughes, of course, became infuriated by their distrust, and refused to agree to this. He took out his frustration on Cook and fired him. Hughes sent Bautzer in his place to handle the transaction. Bautzer immediately got on a flight to New York and tried to renegotiate the deal and remove the voting trust, but the lenders refused. Bautzer reported back to Hughes that he had no choice—he had to agree to the lenders’ terms. In early December 1960, Bautzer announced to the press that Hughes had signed the letters of agreement and he got back on a plane to Los Angeles. This should have been the end of the transaction, but Hughes took his time transferring his stock to the voting trust. After all, he had until December 30. Then the fun began.
On December 28, Raymond Holliday, Hughes’s proxy, was to travel to Wilmington, Delaware, to sign over Hughes’s stock. Holliday did not appear. He telephoned from New York to say that he was awaiting authorization. The lenders suspected that Hughes was buying time to try to find a way out and warned Bautzer that they would go to court if Hughes reneged on the agreement. They were right; Hughes had not given up hope of retaining control of the airlines. “Mr. Bautzer worked clear through for twenty-four hours,” recalled secretary Lea Sullivan. “Then he got on a plane and went to New York. He was there overnight and still on the phone with Hughes in Hollywood the next day and half the night. So for two days he didn’t get any sleep.” Then Hughes stopped answering his phone. Bautzer frantically tried to get him to answer. “Howard, this is a red alert!” said Bautzer to the answering service. “Mr. Bautzer would call in to the office for his messages,” recalled Sullivan. “He sounded very bad. He would call, and he wouldn’t be talking. He would be yelling.”
December 30 was the last business day of 1960. The lenders threatened that if the documents were not signed, a new set would have to be drafted and approved by all parties. “It was a bad time for us in that office, a very bad time,” said Sullivan. “Mr. Bautzer was under such pressure. He felt as if he had the world on top of him.” Sullivan tried to get through to him. “If you don’t stop and take a deep breath,” she yelled at him, “you could get a heart attack.”
“Mind your own business!” he snapped back.
“Well, I won’t have a job if you get a heart attack and die, so it is my own business!”
On the morning of December 30 Bautzer finally reached Hughes and got his approval for the stock transfer. The deal seemed to be complete. Then, Hughes managed to create another roadblock. At three in the afternoon on December 30, Holliday entered the conference room of the Chemical Bank in New York—and refused to sign the papers. He said he needed a lawyer to review the voluminous documents. The lenders believed this was another stall. They were right. Hughes was still maneuvering for time, thinking he might yet be able to find a way to retain control of the airlines. The bankers called Bautzer’s suite at the Hampshire House Hotel. He was not there. He had been taken to Roosevelt Hospital with severe chest pains. Bautzer thought he was having a heart attack. The pressure was too much. Holliday begged for a postponement. The bankers held firm. The deal had to be closed that day. Bautzer called Hughes from the hospital, and convinced him that it was time to close the deal. There were no other alternatives. If Hughes didn’t complete the transaction, the airline would go bankrupt.
At seven-fifteen that evening, Holliday announced that Bautzer had obtained Hughes’s authority to transfer the stock. Holliday signed the papers. In convincing Hughes to give up control of TWA, Bautzer saved the airline. He had managed the unmanageable, although it nearly killed him.
Unfortunately, TWA’s legal troubles had just begun. Using TWA to get a tax break for Toolco led to major litigation. On June 30, 1961, TWA filed a complaint in New York federal court on behalf of the minority shareholders, charging that Hughes had violated antitrust laws by simultaneously owning jets and leasing them to TWA. Hughes had Bautzer hire New York attorney Chester C. Davis of Simpson, Thatcher & Bartlett to defend the case. Davis got the job after every major New York law firm turned it down due to conflicts of interest. Simpson, Thatcher & Bartlett had done work for TWA and was conflicted also, but Davis agreed to leave the firm in order to handle the case. Hughes instructed Bautzer to settle the lawsuit, but the Wall Street lawyer wanted to litigate. Hughes sent Davis on a three-day trip to Houston to get him out of the way. “I want no divided responsibility about these negotiations,” said Hughes. “I am placing the matter completely in your hands, Gregson, with the simple request that you make the best deal you can.”
When Davis realized that he had been hijacked, he grew angry and told Hughes that a good settlement could not be reached unless he was prepared to fight. Hughes ignored him. By late July Bautzer had reached a tentative agreement with TWA. As part of the deal, Hughes would invest $150 million in the airline over the next two years. TWA in turn would purchase thirteen more Convair jets that Hughes had previously ordered for Toolco, which would of course remove Toolco’s obligation to pay for them. Hughes signed the settlement papers and gave them to Bautzer, telling him not to transmit them until some minor points were changed. Davis didn’t like the agreement, saying it would lead to more litigation and asked Hughes to reconsider.
In early August, without consulting Bautzer, Hughes had a change of heart and decided to fight the lawsuit “to the hilt.” The litigation would continue for decades, eventually making its way to the US Supreme Court. According to Hughes’s head of operations, Robert Maheu, Davis had promised Hughes that an adverse judgment would award no more than $5 million. In the end, the plaintiffs got $146 million. The case established legal precedents allowing minority shareholders to sue a board of directors for making harmful business decisions, especially if they benefit another company owned by the majority shareholder.
By delaying, Hughes paid Chester Davis untold legal fees—but when he had other concerns, it was Bautzer he trusted to attend to them. While their relationship was sometimes strained, Hughes would remain Bautzer’s client until the day he died. Hughes knew that Bautzer was willing to put his interests first and make great personal sacrifices on his behalf. According to secretary Lea Sullivan, Bautzer went overboard for his biggest client. “Other than being his lawyer, I think that Greg was Hughes’s best friend. He must have recognized that. There was nobody else Mr. Hughes could have gotten to do the things for him that Greg did.” In fact, when it came to serving Hughes, Bautzer would do virtually anything.