Investigative Reporting

April 15, 2007

Howard Hughes in the 1940s with his new Boeing Army Pursuit Plane in Inglewood, California.

In the early years of the Nixon presidency, billionaire Howard Hughes bribed Nixon with $100,000 in cash. When Hughes's secret lobbyist Larry O'Brien became Democratic Party chairman, Nixon had O'Brien's phone at the Watergate tapped to find out if he knew about the bribe.

by Don Fulsom

"I am determined to elect a president of our choosing this year and one who will be deeply indebted, and who will recognize his indebtedness. Since I am willing to go beyond all limitations on this, I think we should be able to select a candidate and a party who knows the facts of political life … If we select Nixon, then he, I know for sure knows the facts of life." – Howard Hughes, early in the 1968 presidential campaign.

In the annals of disastrous U.S. political payoffs, nothing is ever likely to top Howard Hughes's $100,000 gift to President Richard Nixon. That's because Nixon's subsequent paranoia over the illegal contribution led, in large measure, to the Watergate burglary and its cover-up – which, of course, ultimately forced Nixon to evacuate the White House just steps ahead of his eviction in August 1974. One month later, a presidential pardon from his handpicked successor and loyal old friend, Gerald Ford, likely saved Nixon himself (some 40 Nixon administration officials were jailed for Watergate crimes) from spending any time behind bars.

In the early years of Nixon's presidency, power-hungry, episodically nutty billionaire Howard Hughes secretly bribed his favorite corrupt politician with $100,000 in cold cash. The money was skimmed from a Hughes gambling casino in Las Vegas – "siphoned like a sip of champagne from the Silver Slipper," according to a later account by columnist Jack Anderson.

South Kansas City Blast Site

Five innocent people were convicted in February 1997 in the deaths of six Kansas City firefighters in 1988.  These two stories run a total length of 20,000 words, and won the Missouri Bar Association's annual "Excellence in Legal Journalism" award. On Oct. 30, 1998, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied the appeal in the Kansas City Firefighters case. Read the full opinion here and our analysis of the opinion. On Oct. 4, 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to grant certiorari in the case.

by J.J. Maloney

[Editor's Note: to read more about this case go to http://kcfirefighterscase.com ]

Indictment and Trial

The ATF has four "National Response Teams" - teams which respond to disasters such as the Oklahoma City bombing - and Special Agent Dave True was leader of the Midwest team. He is a distinguished looking man with silver hair and mustache.

With 26 years of government service under his belt, True, who was in his early 50s, was ready to take retirement from the ATF and open the next chapter in his life, possibly as a consultant or a security executive for a corporation. There was a hitch, though. For more than eight years, the unsolved firefighters case had dogged him. As the ATF's top special agent in Kansas City, True didn't want to retire with the biggest case of his life hanging over his head, unsolved.

According to True's testimony at trial, the firefighter investigation was dead in the water by November, 1993. (For five years, True had maintained steadfastly that organized labor was responsible for the explosion.) Then he testified that he got a call from Captain Joe Galetti of the Kansas City Fire Department, who wanted True's help in getting the case on the "Unsolved Mysteries" television show, a last-ditch effort to solve the case.

In November, 1994, as the "Unsolved Mysteries" segment on the case was being prepared, True said he received a call from a witness saying Richard Brown had admitted to being involved in the explosion. "If there was a starting point for investigating the Marlborough area," True testified, "that was probably it."