Las Vegas Still Feels Impact of Howard Hughes

On a chilly Thanksgiving morning 20 years ago, a private train halted at a desert crossing north of town. A scraggly, bearded man on a stretcher barked orders to several underlings as they loaded him in a van and headed for a Strip hotel.

Howard Hughes, pursued by legal problems, wracked with pain from injuries and illness, and dogged by an ever-growing number of phobias, had returned home to the Nevada he loved for what his associates thought would be his last stand.

On a Thanksgiving eve four years later, the elusive, reclusive billionaire would leave Las Vegas for good. But the HH brand would be forever stamped on this gaming capital, just as it is on cities across America, from Los Angeles to Houston to Washington.

The death of Hughes on a frantic flight from Acapulco to Houston 10 years ago this month was hardly the final chapter in the saga of a man who parlayed a teen-age fortune into a power base that had an impact on movies, aviation, medical research, gaming, the military, space technology--and the Oval Office.

Nowhere is Hughes’ impact still felt more significantly than in Las Vegas. It was here he romped as a playboy billionaire in the 1940s and 1950s, caught up in the 24-hour ambiance, cruising the casinos and scouting for showgirl companions.

And nowhere are the incongruities of the man more apparent than in Nevada. Hughes, whose companies provided hardware for three American wars and ranked among the Top 10 in Defense Department contractors, feared that nuclear testing would destroy his adopted state. He sent an emissary to the White House in 1968 in a futile effort to halt a nuclear test in the Nevada desert--a test with an explosive punch 100 times the Hiroshima bomb.

He didn’t drink, smoke or gamble, and discouraged it among his employees. But his voracious appetite for buying Nevada casinos had to be quenched by a Justice Department edict that he fought vigorously by providing hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to a laundry list of politicians.

Hughes had a significant impact on America from 1966 to 1970 while he held himself captive, never leaving a darkened ninth-floor, three-room penthouse atop the Desert Inn Hotel, isolated from the clamor and glamour of the Strip just a few feet away. It was here, associates say, that he cemented relations with then-President Richard M. Nixon that led to Watergate.

Considered the richest man in America, Hughes was estimated to be worth more than $2 billion when he died at age 70.

Today the legacy of Howard Robard Hughes can be found around the globe--from spy satellites that circle the Earth to vast property holdings.

Officials at Las Vegas-based Summa Corp., the umbrella company for the vast holdings that evolved from the Hughes empire, declined to elaborate on the properties now owned by Summa, Howard Hughes Properties and Howard Hughes Real Estate.

But some of the many holdings are known to include:

- Four hotels and six casinos in Las Vegas and Reno;

- Nearly every piece of vacant land along the lucrative Las Vegas Strip;

- About 25,000 acres of prime land west of Las Vegas, where Summa officials plan an entire city on land once envisioned for guided-missile production;

- Thousands of acres of land around Las Vegas’ two airports, housing industrial parks and commercial developments;

- A giant new Summa headquarters building now under construction just off the Las Vegas Strip;

- One of the largest undeveloped parcels of land on the California coast, including prime property in the Marina del Rey area where Summa is planning a large residential/office/hotel/restaurant complex;

- The Howard Hughes Center in the Westchester section of Los Angeles, where a hotel/office complex is planned.

“You’d have to be an awfully good lawyer to figure out everything they own,” said one knowledgeable source who asked not to be identified.

Hughes inherited Hughes Tool Co. in 1923 at the age of 19. The company thrived on a drill bit that clawed through rock as easily as mud, a drill bit invented by his father and a partner in 1909. His inheritance included $871,000 plus all patent rights to the drill bit. In later years the company would become known as “the cash register,” providing Hughes with profits of $50 million to $60 million a year.

Hughes moved into the movie industry in the 1920s, buying RKO and selling it a short time later at a substantial profit.

His appetite for aviation nearly killed him. He survived three plane crashes--in 1928 while filming “Hell’s Angels,” a 1943 crash landing on Lake Mead southeast of Las Vegas and a 1946 crash on Whittier Boulevard in Los Angeles, which left him critically injured.

By the mid-50s Hughes had tired of the Hollywood scene, saying it had grown “too complicated” for him. He retreated to Las Vegas, a town of 30,000, and began running his business empire by phone. Few people would ever see the reclusive billionaire in person again.

His wanderlust took him from California to Nevada, the Bahamas, Canada and Massachusetts over the next decade.

In 1966 he sold his share in Trans World Airlines for more than $546 million--a staggering return on his original $80-million investment.

Flush with cash and obsessed with a desire for privacy, Hughes checked out of a Boston hospital in November, 1966, and headed back to Las Vegas, calling on longtime associate Bob Maheu to handle the details. Hughes told Maheu he would be settling at North Lake Tahoe but switched to Las Vegas at the last minute for some unexplained reason, Maheu said.

“He said his interest was to come here and buy properties,” Maheu recalled in a recent interview at his Las Vegas home. “He didn’t have any desire to become involved in gaming properties. He felt this was going to be his last stand. In Los Angeles he was one of many, many people who were big. But in Nevada he could be a big fish in a small pond.”

Maheu’s first brush with Hughes was in 1954. The former FBI agent had been given an assignment to check out the husband of actress Jean Peters. Hughes later married the actress, eloping to the tiny Nevada town of Tonopah in 1957. That marriage ended in divorce 14 years later in Hawthorne, Nev.

Maheu charged $167.40 for that first background check but would be paid millions more by Hughes before their bitter split in December, 1970.

It was one of many assignments for Maheu, who has been linked to the CIA plot to assassinate Cuban Premier Fidel Castro and cash contributions to a long list of politicians.

“I was in the troubled world,” Maheu said. “Wherever there was a problem, it was my duty to identify the problem. If Mr. Hughes were interested in certain candidates, I’d prepare their campaigns.”

Maheu worked for Hughes for 16 years, the last four running his Nevada empire and handling the billionaire’s myriad problems. But he never met the man personally, and saw him only twice.

“I caught a glimpse of him getting on an elevator one time in the Bahamas,” Maheu recalled.

The other time was equally as fleeting, when Hughes left the special train north of Las Vegas, and headed for the Desert Inn.

The rest of the time Hughes and Maheu would communicate by phone and written message.

Hughes’ settling in Las Vegas could not have happened at a better time.

“I remember going down Las Vegas Boulevard (the Strip) and seeing empty stores, broken glass, partially finished buildings that had been left standing,” recalled Perry Lieber, a longtime Hughes friend and associate. Lieber is now a Summa consultant.

“When Mr. Hughes stepped in and bought all these hotels, it gave Las Vegas an immediate legitimate feeling, that an honest man had taken over the town,” Lieber said.

Prior to Hughes’ buying binge, many of the state’s casinos had been funded with organized crime money or Teamsters loans, leaving a trail of problems.

Hughes’ open-checkbook approach to Nevada gave the state “the Good Housekeeping seal of approval” and helped improve its national image, said then-Gov. Paul Laxalt, now the state’s senior senator.

Maheu said he is still surprised Hughes ever got into gaming.

“I was betting 10 to 1 he would never put his name to a gaming license,” Maheu recalled. “Then when he did, he wanted to be the biggest.”

Hughes bought the Desert Inn, Frontier, Sands, Castaways and Landmark hotels and casinos and the Silver Slipper Casino in Las Vegas, plus Harold’s Club in Reno. Maheu said he negotiated for the Stardust, Caesars Palace, Riviera and Dunes in Las Vegas, Harrah’s in Reno and Lake Tahoe and Harvey’s in Lake Tahoe, but never closed those deals because of pressure from the federal government to halt his gaming purchases. Summa has since sold the Landmark.

He bought ranches around the state, picked up 2,000 mining claims and Air West airlines.

His $300-million Nevada empire was built by Maheu without Hughes ever leaving the penthouse.

But Hughes could not buy the one thing he wanted most--a halt to nuclear testing. Despite pleas, protests and political payoffs, 80 tests were detonated at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, between mid-1968 and the end of 1970.

Beset by dashed dreams that he could control Nevada’s destiny through the political due bills he’d collected over the past quarter-century, Hughes was no match for the power struggle that developed in late 1970.

Top brass of his empire, upset with Maheu’s growing power, decided to spirit Hughes away from Nevada.

On Thanksgiving Eve, 1970, four years to the day after he arrived in Las Vegas for his “last stand,” Hughes’ people walked him down nine flights of an outdoor fire escape while a capacity crowd in the Desert Inn’s showroom watched Bob Newhart and Edie Adams.

A decoy caravan of limousines headed for McCarran International Airport to throw any media off the trail. Minutes later a van containing Hughes headed for Nellis Air Force Base, where the billionaire was loaded on a private jet for a flight to the Bahamas.

It was a week before the media learned of Hughes’ departure. Civil war broke out in the Hughes empire and Maheu was deposed as the mystery man’s alter ego.

State officials were fearful that the new Hughes commanders would pull out of Nevada, where the billionaire controlled 17% of the state’s lifeblood gaming industry. It would be three weeks before Hughes would reach Laxalt in a pre-dawn phone call to confirm he would remain true to the state.

“It was the wildest three weeks imaginable,” said Laxalt, just four weeks shy of finishing up his term in the governor’s mansion.

In the 5 1/2 years that followed, Hughes continued to lose control of his empire, watched the Nixon Administration fold under the weight of Watergate and hop-scotched to the Bahamas, Canada, England, Nicaragua and finally Acapulco.

There were always plans to come home to Las Vegas, but a growing list of lawsuits blocked his return.

On Monday morning, April 5, 1976, his Mormon assistants loaded Hughes’ shriveled, comatose, drug-racked 94-pound body on a stretcher, sneaked out of the Acapulco Princess Hotel and boarded a private jet.

Hughes died 2 1/2 hours later as the jet descended through 3,000 feet, half an hour away from his hometown of Houston. Death was attributed to kidney failure.

Gone was a giant who, in Maheu’s words, wished to control history.

“I think it’s very, very sad that his many accomplishments have been diminished by the problems he went through in his final years,” Maheu said.

Lieber, the old friend from the Hollywood era, put it this way:

“If ever there was a true American, it was Howard Hughes. Here was a man who would do anything for his country.”