A FEW minutes before 10 o'clock on Thanksgiving Eve, Howard Hughes pulled an old sweater over the white shirt that he wore open at the neck, donned a fedora and walked to the rear of the penthouse atop the Desert Inn in Las Vegas where he had lived for the past four years. Avoiding the private detectives who guarded the elevator around the clock, Hughes eased his tall, thin frame through a long-unused fire door and walked the nine stories down an interior fire escape to the hotel parking lot. He could be reasonably sure of leaving unrecognized. No one but his closest aides and his estranged wife had seen him in more than a decade.
Hughes was in good spirits, and appeared to be enjoying the escapade. Two autos were waiting to drive him and four aides to the North Las Vegas Airport, which he owns. There he boarded a Lockheed jet belonging to his Hughes Tool Co. and took off for the Bahamas. By the next day, Hughes was ensconced in a ninth-floor suite of the Britannia Beach Hotel on Paradise Island−with a 24-hour guard at the door.
The flight had been secretly planned for more than two months. The Paradise Island suite had been held for Hughes for more than a year at a cost of upwards of $1,000 a day. and equipped with a direct telephone line to the U.S. Back at the Desert Inn, 84 hours passed before the guards discovered that he was gone.
Mormon Mafia. From his tropical headquarters, Hughes kept watch over−while staying out of the direct line of fire−an epic struggle that broke into the open last week among his lieutenants in Las Vegas. At stake was control of Hughes' $300 million Nevada empire, including five Las Vegas hotels−the Desert Inn, the Sands, the Landmark, the Frontier, the Castaways−and two other gambling houses, the Silver Slipper and Harolds Club in Reno. As with almost everything concerning Hughes, the fight was redolent with mystery, suspense and litigation.
At 64−he will be 65 on Christmas Eve−Hughes is quite possibly the richest living American. His holdings in oil-drilling equipment, aerospace, electronics, airlines, communications and real estate are worth anywhere from $1.4 billion to $2 billion. They are rivaled only by the sums amassed by Oilman J. Paul Getty, another notable eccentric. Hughes' major holdings are entirely privately owned and thus exempt from the laws that require public reports. Hughes exercises his sole control in the manner of an autocratic ruler, telephoning his orders and never deigning to appear among his subordinates.
His obsession for privacy is all-devouring. In the 1950s, he stopped seeing anyone except a handful of business associates and his "Mormon mafia"−half a dozen men chosen by him because they do not drink, smoke, womanize or have liberal ideas. They act as combination nurses, cooks, bodyguards, advisers and messengers to the outside world. For the past four years, Hughes had never been known to move out of his Las Vegas aerie. Then he decamped for Paradise Island, leaving behind some of his executives to wield the knives in the messy corporate fight.