Obituary: Robert Maheu (original) (raw)

As the alter ego of the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, Robert Maheu was the conduit through whom Hughes faced the world and bought up a string of Las Vegas casinos. According to Vegas lore, he helped Hughes "rid the town of mob influence", but Maheu, who has died aged 90, was a product of the intelligence community, closely connected to mafia figures. The same contacts and skills that proved invaluable to Hughes placed Maheu in the tangled webs surrounding both the assassination of President Kennedy and the Watergate break-in.

Maheu (pronounced May-hew) was born in Waterville, Maine, to French-Canadian parents who ran a grocery business. After graduating from the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, he left Georgetown University law school to join the wartime FBI as a translator. Given an identity as a Nazi-sympathising Canadian, he infiltrated New York's German-American Bund, passing disinformation to spies who were eventually arrested. After the war, and a brief spell with the Small Business Administration, he opened his own private investigative agency. He was soon put on a retainer by the fledgling CIA, where some of his former FBI colleagues had moved. He provided services to them while allowing the CIA to deny any link with him. His greatest success may have been scuttling, presumably through blackmail, Aristotle Onassis's attempt to obtain a monopoly on Saudi Arabia's oil shipping.

In 1954, Maheu was hired to deal with a starlet attempting to blackmail Hughes after their relationship had soured. Hughes had him spy on other women too, including Ava Gardner, and to undertake industrial espionage, before asking him, in 1957, to become his public intermediary. "Whenever I spoke, it was Howard Hughes speaking," Maheu recalled. However he never actually met his employer.

When Maheu was hired to serve a subpoena on an elusive Las Vegas casino owner, the legendary Washington fixer Edward Bennett Williams introduced him to Johnny Roselli, the mob's frontman in Las Vegas. Maheu and Roselli became close friends, and, in 1960, when the CIA decided to use the mafia to try to assassinate Fidel Castro, they turned to Maheu. Maheu and Roselli brought the CIA together with mob bosses Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante, who initiated the series of attempts on Castro's life. The conjunction of mobsters and CIA agents, disaffected after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, in 1961, is often cited as the root of the many conspiracies to kill President Kennedy.

Giancana hired Maheu to spy on his mistress, singer Phyllis McGuire, whom he suspected of having an affair with comedian Dan Rowan. When Maheu's operatives were caught in the act, they claimed they were worried McGuire would reveal "national security" secrets about the Castro plan. Roselli later confirmed the deal while plea-bargaining after his arrest for cheating members of Hollywood's Friars Club out of $400,000 in a crooked card game. This made Maheu's protestations that his country had "thrown him in front of a bus" when he testified at the Senate hearings in 1975 ring hollow, as both Giancana and Roselli were murdered before giving testimony.

In 1966 Maheu moved to Las Vegas to work full-time for Hughes, who decided to buy the Desert Inn, rather than move out. Using the money from Hughes's sale of Trans World Airlines, he acquired more casinos, including the Sands, thus enabling Hughes to become Nevada's third-largest landowner. "He was the King of Vegas," Maheu said, "and as his surrogate, I wore the crown."

It didn't last long. Maheu found himself at odds with the "Mormon mafia", corporate employees who surrounded Hughes. In 1970 he was fired, and Hughes was taken off to the Bahamas, never to return. When Clifford Irving's fake biography of Hughes appeared in 1972, Hughes held a telephone press conference to deny any connection with the book. He denounced Maheu as "a no-good son of a bitch who robbed me blind", and Maheu sued for defamation. He won a $2.8m judgment, overturned on appeal, and later settled out of court.

Maheu served as Hughes's bagman, and among those who received cash was Richard Nixon's sidekick Bebe Rebozo. Hughes had also bailed out Nixon's brother Donald when his business failed in the 1950s. Nixon was worried this might be made public. In 1972, the Watergate burglars may have been looking to see if Democratic party head Larry O'Brien (one of Hughes's Washington lawyers) possessed incriminating evidence of illegal contributions from Hughes. Maheu claimed Hughes got him to offer both Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Nixon a million dollars if they would stop nuclear testing in the Nevada desert, a bribe both turned down.

After his time with Hughes, Maheu returned to his detective agency and became one of Las Vegas's leading citizens. He died of cancer and congestive heart failure. His wife of 62 years, Yvette, died in 2003. He is survived by three sons; his daughter predeceased him.

· Robert Aime Maheu, fixer, born October 30 1917; died August 4 2008