Reply #5: The Sins of Robert Maheu

[Octafish]

Excellent background from the good folks at Education Forum:

The Sins of Robert Maheu

By Pat Speer
The Education Forum
Feb. 17, 2005

I think Robert Maheu is perhaps the smelliest fish in the whole post WW2 ocean.

Consider:

Maheu investigated the case of an OSS officer accused of killing his superior in Italy during the war. The officer was convicted in Italian courts but the case was thrown out in the U.S. when Maheu's long-time crony Edward Bennett Williams pulled a rabbit out of his hat. That Maheu was able to get a drunken Italian communist to inexplicably confess to the crime may have been a factor.

Maheu was hired to scuttle Ari Onassis's deal with the Saudi's by Ari's brother-in-law and ended up meeting with VP Nixon and convincing the CIA to foot the bill. After wiretapping Ari's phone calls he was able to pressure the Saudi's to back out of the deal.

Maheu made a soft-core porno film featuring lookalikes of Indonesian President Sukarno and a Russian woman. The more-believable frames were distributed in Indonesia to discredit Sukarno. The director of the film???? Bing Crosby.

Maheu was tied to the kidnapping and murder of a Dominican Republic dissident when his company was revealed to have paid for the plane used to fly the man out of the country and he was seen in the company of a Dominican agent. This was within a few years of CIA puppet Carlos Castillo-Armas of Guatemala agreeing to murder dissidents in Guatemala in exchange for financial backing from the Dominican dictator Trujillo. One might wonder then what Maheu or the CIA received in exchange for the death of Galindez (the dissident).

Maheu was the first man the CIA thought of when the idea was brought up of killing Castro in 1960. That one of Maheu's partners was traveling with Richard Nixon on the campaign trail couldn't have had anything to do with it, could it? While ostensibly a middleman and cut-out he quickly blew the CIA's cover with the mob and gave Johnny Rosselli and Sam Giancana blackmail-ability over the CIA, which Rosselli at least tried to use. Maheu himself used his connection to the hits and his relationship to the CIA to evade legal difficulties related to his wiretapping Sam Giancana's girlfriend's room.

The wiretap charges stemmed from Maheu's hiring of men to bug the room of Phyllis McGuire so Sam could tell what she was up to. In what was clearly a cover story to evade prosecution, Maheu told the FBI he was bugging her to see if she was leaking details about the CIA/Mafia hits on Castro. Details she presumably would not have known. He therefore compromised the whole operation to save his butt since he knew Hoover hated the CIA and might very well talk. If Sam had actually been talking to his girlfriend, this again reflects badly on Maheu since it was at his urging that Giancana was brought into the loop as "back-up" to Rosselli. He also told Howard Hughes about the attempts on Castro, in order to get time off from his ongoing operations for Hughes, which included signing beauty queens to exclusive personal contracts.

In Robert F Kennedy and His Times, Arthur Schlesinger recounts that Maheu's buddy Edward Bennett Williams was told about the assassination attempts by Giancana, while Giancana was attempting to engage him as his lawyer for a fight against the Government. When asked by Williams to confirm Giancana's role, Maheu confirmed, thereby giving his buddy Giancana (and his buddy Williams) a shot at blackmailing the government. Some cut-out!

Maheu arranged for Howard Hughes to buy up Las Vegas, rewarding his friends and members of the mob with substantial "finder's fees." Finder's fees went to people such as lawyer Edward P. Morgan, newspaper publisher Hank Greenspun, and Johnny Rosselli.

Maheu's buddy Greenspun printed the first "Bobby tried to kill Castro but it backfired" story some time before the infamous Drew Pearson story.

The Drew Pearson story went to print of course right after Bobby came out against the Vietnam war. Morgan told the story to Pearson a few months earlier. Morgan testified that his source for the story was not Rosselli, but Maheu, and that Maheu had told him so that Morgan could pressure the government to kill an investigation of Maheu's wiretapping.

When James Phelan infiltrated Jim Garrison's office and gained access to documents he thought could blow Garrison's case against Clay Shaw, he turned to a trusted ally, Robert Maheu, to help him make copies of the documents.

Phelan would eventually write a book about Howard Hughes using inside sources, including Maheu. One might wonder then if Phelan's exposure of Garrison wasn't done on behalf of Maheu, and that Maheu paid him back with the book on Hughes. Due to Maheu's long-time relationship to the CIA, and the CIA's interest in the Clay Shaw trial, this is not so far-fetched.

Maheu delivered cash to various political figures on behalf of Hughes, including Richard Nixon. Maheu also hired Larry O'Brien (the future basketball commissioner) to represent Hughes in Washington.

When Hughes fired Maheu, accusing him of conspiring with the mob to rob him blind, O'Brien, who had since become chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was also let go. This led the paranoid Nixon to assume that Maheu had told O'Brien about the illegal cash contributions. Howard Hunt, who was, strangely enough, working for both Nixon and Hughes, proposed a joint White House/Hughes break-in into Hank Greenspun's safe to see what kind of dirt Maheu might have given Greenspun. In an attempt to find out exactly what O'Brien knew, some guys broke into the Watergate Hotel and bugged O'Brien's phone. The result: Watergate and the downfall of Richard Nixon. The one man on the scene to escape without prosecution? Lou Russell, a former employee of Maheu's. ( I'm gonna double-check this.)

The lawyer hired by the Democratic Party to keep the break-in in the news and assure the fall of Nixon????? Maheu's buddy Edward Bennett Williams...

Former Warren Commission member Gerald Ford's first pick as the new CIA Director after firing Colby for talking too much--a position eventually handed over to George HW Bush--Edward Bennett Williams.

Jimmy Hoffa's, Richard Helms', and John Connally's attorney??? (All possibly connected to the JFK assassination) Edward Bennett Williams.

And who hired up Robert Kennedy's secretary, Angie Novello, the last person known to have JFK's missing brain, after he was killed? Edward Bennett Williams.


This really makes me scratch my head. Isn't it time someone really digs into Maheu and Williams and their ties to both the CIA and the mob? With their resumes, I continue to view them as top suspects in the JFK assassination.

This post has been edited by Pat Speer: Feb 26 2005, 04:01 PM


http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=3253&pid=23423&mode=threaded&start=

For those new to the subject: Maheu was the guy who was supposed to give the ''green light'' to the internal Cuban uprising that would support the Bay of Pigs Op in 1961. Maheu's contact would, in turn, notify his network in Cuba who were to poison Fidel with cyanide pills provided by CIA. Unfortunately, the person he was supposed to notify had been sequestered by other CIA agents and that part of the plan never took off because no one in Maheu's part of CIA knew where.

Thank you, MinM. Your posts are required reading. Big Business, Texas Oil, NAZI henchmen, the CIA and the Mafia all come together in Hughes. For some, there's safety in numbers.