John Katsilometes talks to Hughes’ right-hand man about the biography hoax perpetrated in the ‘70s

Tuesday, April 10, 2007 | 7:18 a.m.

If only someone had called Bob Maheu, the hoax and "The Hoax " would never have happened.

For 13 years Maheu, a former FBI agent, served as Howard Hughes' right-hand man and alter ego who held the reclusive billionaire's power of attorney. Maheu's affiliation with Hughes included the period from 1970 to 1972 when Clifford Irving (the James Frey of his time), with the assistance of friend and fellow author Richard Suskind, claimed he had collaborated with Hughes on a biography certain to send shock waves through the publishing world. Irving even provided what he claimed were Hughes' handwritten notes.

The publishing company McGraw-Hill, Life magazine (which published excerpts of the manuscript), Newsweek (which put Irving on its cover, replacing President Richard Nixon) and even Mike Wallace were seduced by the dazzling account of Hughes' life. Problem was, it was all an elaborate ruse, and Irving, Suskind and Irving's then-wife, Edith, all wound up in prison. A largely fictional account of this saga is told in "The Hoax," which stars Richard Gere and opens in wide release this weekend.

Maheu could have put a stop to all of this, like, real quick.

"It was so stupid. I could have told them it was a fake. I knew (darn) well he didn't have contact with Hughes. Nobody did," Maheu, still remarkably sharp at age 89, said Monday afternoon. "There was no validity at all to what (Irving) was claiming. ... (Hughes) didn't have any idea this was going on until the publicity started coming out in Life magazine." The incident did push Hughes back into the public eye, as he called a telephone news conference with a few reporters to denounce the book as a fraud.

But Maheu, who moved to Las Vegas from Los Angeles in 1966 as Hughes relocated to the top floor of the Desert Inn, praised Irving's brazen effort. "The amazing thing was, Irving did one hell of a job forging (Hughes') handwriting. It was a match. This guy was nobody's fool." Maheu also said the publishers were part ly to blame, chuckling that, "They had entered the world of wishful thinking."

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