Sunday, April 23, 2006 | 7:24 a.m.
Thirty years after Howard Hughes' death, the reclusive billionaire who changed the course of Las Vegas' history remains larger than life - at times more myth than man, more conjecture than fact.
When Hughes died on April 5, 1976, on a plane from Mexico to his hometown of Houston, he left a legacy in Las Vegas nearly as rich as the legend that surrounded him.
His short tenure here - 1966-70 - gave birth to the corporate age of gaming. And he left vast land holdings upon which thousands of homes would be built, not to mention rich mining and ranching interests.
But his eccentricity and elaborate schemes for secrecy are what live on in the public's imagination.
He was the character of a neon desert city filled with characters. His physical appearance and local business intentions have remained the subject of much debate .
Did Hughes really live like a hermit, naked, with long hair and unclipped, curled fingernails?
Did he thumb a ride from a brothel and sign over millions in his will to the man who picked him up?
Was his stay in Las Vegas the cunning of a brilliant billionaire or the happenstance of a rich recluse?
His contemporaries disagree. Credible stories support nearly every version of the Hughes myth because people close to him were only allowed a slight glimpse at his life.
Take, for instance, Robert Maheu, the man who ran Hughes' operation for most of his stay in Las Vegas. Maheu never saw Hughes, instead communicating over the phone or through notes and memos.
Writing during Hughes' Las Vegas stay, Joan Didion explores the "folklore" of Howard Hughes in her 1967 piece, "7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38." What she wrote has remained true in the years since.
Titillating details abound, but there's not much insight into the man who stamped a large imprint in the desert.
By the time an ailing Hughes was spirited out of the valley by plane on Nov. 5, 1970 - never to return - he owned much of what he flew over.
At that time, Hughes' Las Vegas empire was worth $300 million and included several casinos, most of the vacant lots on the Strip, 25,000 acres of prime real estate where Summerlin now stands, thousands of acres around McCarran International Airport, an airline, several ranches and 2,000 mining claims.
There's no doubt that Hughes brought legitimacy to Las Vegas, paving the way for other corporations to buy Southern Nevada hotel-casinos and sparking a population boom that attracted hundreds of thousands of residents and eventually the mega-resorts that now guard the Strip.
It's a big legacy for a man who remains largely unknown.
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