Sunday, Oct. 14, 2007 | 1:28 a.m.
A few years ago I was privileged to meet and befriend a man who provides a valuable link between Las Vegas' storied past and its present-day climb to corporate and cultural respectability.
Every time I get together with Bob Maheu, I feel as though I'm attending a free seminar on modern Las Vegas history. Bob's recall is succinct and detailed about the time before and after his boss Howard Hughes bought a half dozen financially troubled Strip hotels and unintentionally prepared the city's major industry for the eventual takeover by publicly traded companies.
Maheu turns 90 this month, but neither age nor cancer nor heart scares have noticeably slowed him. As you read this he is on a two-week cruise with his friend Virginia Richardson - she's of the same generation, but of course we would never divulge a lady's age - and my guess is they are the focus of attention from the crowd huddled around the shuffleboard court
I mean who wouldn't want to listen to stories about the amazing Mr. Hughes, and how he would phone Maheu at all hours of the night from his sequestered ninth-floor suite at the top of the Desert Inn and say, "Fasten your seat belt, Bob, this is going to be a big one."
At other times, Hughes would pen five- and six-page letters requesting that Maheu try to solve monumentally difficult problems that would require dozens of phone calls to important people. Hughes would then micromanage the solution or change his mind after all the groundwork had been laid, leaving Maheu to clean up the mess and implement his strategies in a totally different direction.
In his years as an FBI agent, and later running Robert A. Maheu and Associates in Washington, D.C., Bob specialized in solving big problems for even bigger clients. He performed special cutout assignments for the CIA when the agency didn't want to be connected in any way, including formulating a plan to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro. And he consulted with clients such as Westinghouse, the United Steel Workers of America and Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos.
"I had an early disdain for the word 'impossible,' " Maheu told me last week. "That word stuck in my head when I told my mother at age 11 that I had just met the girl I was going to marry, and she told me that was impossible. Well, I married that girl some years later, and I married her not once, but in four different ceremonies commemorating milestone anniversaries."
Bob and Yvette Maheu had four children and were wed for more than 60 years until her death in 2003.
Maheu started working for Hughes in 1957, eventually agreeing to spend summers with his wife and children in Los Angeles to be at Hughes' beck and call. However, Maheu proved so valuable strategizing and carrying out Hughes' many intricate dealings that in 1961 Hughes insisted that Maheu move permanently to the West Coast.
Through those years, Maheu functioned as Hughes' alter ego, appearing at all public hearings and meetings in Hughes' place, because the billionaire had made it clear to Bob that he never again wanted to appear in public. Hughes' paranoia and agoraphobic behavior had increasingly manifested itself over the previous decade, and he grew dependent on Maheu's ability to carry out "impossible" tasks. It seems unimaginable that the two never once met face to face.
After Hughes had sold all his controlling stock in Trans World Airlines for $571 million, "which was a lot of money back in the '60s," Maheu says with a smile, "he needed a way to put that money into action."
Because the IRS taxed passive income at a higher rate than active income, Hughes needed to get that new money into play. However, it wasn't with the intention of buying up Las Vegas hotels that he moved to the desert.
"Howard had grown tired of Los Angeles, and he was no longer interested in the movie business," Maheu said. "He actually told me he was tired of being a small fish in a big pond, and wanted to be a big fish in a small pond. So after I'd arranged with the presidents of three different national railroads to help me secretly transport Howard from Boston to Las Vegas, we snuck him into the penthouses at the DI with very little attention over Thanksgiving weekend of 1966."
Maheu says the only rumors that circulated were about a "mystery train departing Boston."
Despite being pushed out of the Hughes' Las Vegas empire in 1970 by the group of aides and attendants who surrounded Hughes (a group often referred to as the Mormon Mafia), when Maheu shares information about his celebrated employer he prefers to dwell on the Hughes who accomplished so much before his mental and physical health deteriorated.
"I've had a belly ful of the long hair and the long fingernails associated with Howard," Maheu says. "I prefer to remember that, as a young man, he had the most international reputation of anyone in the oil industry. We should remember Howard Hughes' contributions in the world of aviation, the world records he established. We have to remember that the first soft-landed vehicle on the moon was a Hughes Aircraft vehicle."
So how does Maheu explain the condition Hughes was found in at the time of his death in 1976?
"It's so sad," he says, taking a moment to gather his emotions. "I had occasion recently to talk to Dr. Michael DeBakey. He's 98 years old and has recall that you would not believe. During our conversation he mentioned to me that the Howard Hughes Medical Foundation has found new vistas in medicine, and that it was an honor today for any doctor to have the most remote affiliation with this foundation. And then you think how ironic it is that the man who built this great medical foundation was taken off this plane in Houston a virtual skeleton.
"Dr. DeBakey was one of the doctors selected to try and keep him alive. What they saw was a man who had sores oozing through his head and a bone protruding through his shoulder. An autopsy revealed six broken hypodermic needles in his arm. When I tell this story, to this day, I want to cry."
When people approach Maheu during his frequent evenings out for dinner or socializing, and thank him for his contributions to Las Vegas, he responds by giving credit to the visionaries and builders of recent times, and he mentions by name Kirk Kerkorian, Parry Thomas, Steve Wynn and Irwin Molasky.
"If Hughes were alive today, there would be no Summerlin, there would be no Treasure Island, no Bellagio," he says. "All the growth would not have happened the way it has. Hughes was a buyer, not a builder. He was a buyer, not a seller. He would not have sold any of those properties that previously existed where these spectacular new properties now stand.
"It's sad, but Howard Hughes had to die so that his empire could be saved."
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