Lawyer, bodyguard skeptical of author’s story

Wednesday, June 14, 2006 | 7:14 a.m.

Is it revisionist history or an attempt to right a wrong done to a simple truck driver who says he picked up a disheveled Howard Hughes in the Nevada desert and drove him home 39 years ago?

Twenty-eight years after a Las Vegas jury threw out the infamous Mormon will that would have given Melvin Dummar a 16th of the reclusive Hughes' estate - then valued at $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion - the Utah truck driver has filed a lawsuit saying he has new evidence.

But Hughes' longtime bodyguard and one of Dummar's former attorneys question the validity of the new evidence that was published in a book "The Investigation" by former FBI agent Gary Magnesen, and briefly recounted in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal. (See adjacent story.)

The two men doubt that Las Vegas pilot Robert Deiro flew Hughes to the Cottontail Ranch brothel in Nye County shortly after Christmas 1967. Deiro said he fell asleep at the brothel and woke up to find that Hughes left after visiting a diamond-toothed prostitute named Sunny.

Later that night, Dummar supposedly picked Hughes up along the highway near the brothel.

Hughes bodyguard Gordon Margulis said in a November interview that the Deiro story cannot be true. During Hughes' stay in Las Vegas from 1966 to 1970, Margulis said, he never left his room at the Desert Inn - the first hotel Hughes purchased en route to building his gaming and real estate empire.

Margulis testified to that in the Mormon will trial, and has called Deiro's story "utterly ridiculous."

"Why didn't he figure out in 1977 what had happened?" Margulis said. "He could have gone to Dummar's attorney George Parnum and told him his story then. He could have been put on the witness stand to testify about it under oath, and that testimony would have made Dummar one rich young man."

Parnum, who practices law in Houston, said in November that if there was a flight to a brothel at the time leading up to the trial, he couldn't find a record of it:

"I turned the distance between Las Vegas and Tonopah upside down looking for someone like that (Deiro). I jumped through hoops looking for information that a pilot had came through. I went to airfields looking for records of flights in that area that night. Nothing."

Magnesen said last year that Deiro didn't put two and two together until after reading an Associated Press story two years ago mentioning the road from the brothel Hughes was walking on, and the date.

"It hit him (Deiro) in the head like a hammer, and he put it all together," Magnesen said.

Deiro told the Sun on Tuesday that the events must be put into perspective, noting that after he left his post as director of aviation facilities for Howard Hughes Tool Co. Nevada, he got married, fathered five children, built a career in aviation in California and in gaming in Nevada as an executive at the Holiday Casino.

"I was busy making a living and, although I was aware of the Mormon will, such things were not important to me," Deiro said. "I never even saw the movie."

When Deiro read the news story in April 2004, and, for the first time saw the date and the reference to the Cottontail Ranch, he contacted Dummar, questioned him and determined by Dummar's description of Hughes that he was telling the truth.

"I have built a reputation as a successful businessman," he said. "I am taking a risk by telling what happened."

Margulis said that if Hughes had wanted hookers he did not have to fly to brothels to get them because Las Vegas was not exactly short of them.

"When he (Hughes) wanted orange juice, he'd have me make a call to get a plane to fly the orange juice into Las Vegas fresh from California," Margulis said. "If he was willing to spend that kind of money just to bring in a bottle of orange juice, he could just as easily have asked me to fly in hookers for him. He wouldn't fly to a brothel."

Asked whether he ever got prostitutes for Hughes, Margulis laughed and said, "Blimey no. He never brought it up."

So why have romanticized stories of Hughes' supposed later-life exploits surfaced in the years since his 1976 death?

"Almost everybody has died," Margulis said. "There are fewer of us out there to dispute these stories."