For those of us living in Las Vegas, the name Howard Hughes still sends emotions through the old timers here. They talk about Hughes with reverence, an almost romantic look at the man, yet they don't remember the feelings of the town, of the dealers and other casino workers when they found out Hughes bought the Desert Inn and was looking for other casinos to gobble up, other jobs to take from the locals. Hughes had a fierce reputation and the other casino owners didn't want to go head-to-head in a competition war with him. They knew he was straight and since all the casinos were mobbed up, the Stardust, the Riviera, Silver Slipper, Frontier, The Thunderbird were all built by Hoffa's Teamster Union Funds and although they loved owning casinos, when Hughes came around with a huge sucker sticking out of his mouth the mob figured rather than skim a few thousand here and there from the counting rooms, why not just sell the damn casino for millions more than they paid and skim Howard Hughes instead. Much more profitable in one lump sum, but he didn't stop at one or two, he bought them all, literally buying the mob out of Las Vegas.

Hughes felt the same way; he didn't want the mob anywhere around him or his properties and was glad to be rid of the boys from back east. Still left from the Hughes days is the Summa Corporation located on Howard Hughes Dr. here in town. The casinos he amassed are all gone. The Landmark, the Desert Inn, Silver Slipper, Castaways, they're all gone now. But sitting through the movie The Aviator sent us into deep conversations that would last well into the night. Most of us that were here back then hated Hughes. He bought casinos like someone going out for a six pack of Bud. With no regard he ran roughshod over six casinos and never caring who had jobs and who didn't. He put more people out of work than any other casino owner before or since. He already had the properties built so he wasn't going out hiring new employees, he'd just fire the old ones and rehire some cheap part timers to take their place. He never kept the casinos up often ignoring simple things like broken air conditioners in the summers and heaters in the winters. They'd let the golf courses go, let the rooms get old with no regard to the customers. He had disdain of everyone below him which meant he had no respect for anyone. This we knew in 1966 when Howard Hughes came to Las Vegas to get away from the Texas and California abusive Taxation laws. He built his hangers here, his homes here, started the Summa Corporation which still is the principal private land owners here in Southern Nevada. And though no one ever saw him, we knew he was here, living on the top floor of the Desert Inn, and every time we drove by we'd mention something we heard about him lately. He was so private that Richard Nixon, the President that personally had Hughes's stamp of approval (meaning he probably paid for most of Nixon's Presidential runs in 1964 and 1968 and we know was caught paying homeless people in large cities like L.A. and Chicago to vote for Nixon.)

In 1966 Howard Hughes entourage came to Las Vegas to secure a place for him to stay for the brief time he was going to be here. It was just meant to be a stop over for Hughes. His corporation was moving to Las Vegas to escape the taxation he was experiencing in Southern California and Texas where Hughes Tool Corp. originated. He was going to relocate his corporations here and only needed a few weeks here and he'd be off for London. He required several large rooms. Two used as just a buffer zone between the hallway and himself. Then rooms for his entourage, a room to show movies, a room to eat in, and several bathrooms as Hughes was insistent that there always be a germ free bathroom ready after he used the last one. So the Desert Inn just offered him the entire sixth floor, the top floor then and one of the taller hotels back then. They thought they'd see tons of money with Hughes staying at their hotel. But weeks passed and he never even came down to the casino, never talked to anyone. Three weeks turned into six weeks. The owner of the Desert Inn was growing increasingly stressed about Hughes taking the entire top floor, his best suites for himself and never gambled or spent a dime in the hotel or casino. Yet he was spending a couple million on his private terminal at McCarran Airport which is still there in its original condition. All his food was prepared in the room. After six weeks they went to his entourage and told them Mr. Hughes would have to move out of the hotel. Just hours later he was contacted with an offer to buy the Desert Inn. He offered almost twice what they would consider a reasonable offer and they grabbed the deal. The papers were signed two days later and when the Desert Inn was in Mr. Hughes possession he fired all of the management.

He remained there until 1976, but during those years he let it be known that he'd buy any casino hotel that was offered to him at a reasonable price. By then most of the casinos were owned by the mob. Built on the back of the Labor Union thanks to Jimmy Hoffa that put $64 million of the Teamsters pension fund money to build the Las Vegas casinos (what nobody remembers is that Hoffa also built Sunrise Hospital, called Sunrise Children's Hospital back then to care for the cities children for free) When the mob was feeling the pinch of all the skimming years catching up to them as the casinos businesses were heading for the cellar as people knew for sure the mob owned most of Vegas and didn't want to do business with them. The gamblers knew the mob was skimming, laundering their dirty money with the gamblers hard earned money. When Hughes made the offer in '68 the mob owners jumped on the bandwagon. First the Chicago family that owned the Landmark Hotel called; he paid almost three times what it cost to build it. Then when they heard of that deal every casino was for sale for the right price. But by then Hughes was having a hard time with reality. Most people were realizing the person they were doing business with was a full blown peanut. Though he was never seen we always assumed he was just a recluse, but after years of that it was hard to ignore the fact that he probably wasn't making any deals, that his dealings were being done in his name by his people. What their motive was is still unclear. Hughes that could have been in any business chose the casino business, something entirely foreign to him, something he probably had little or no interest in, little or no use for a casino.

Still feeling the pain of his failures to his country, having screwed the United States armed forces by taking over $53 million dollars back in the 40's to build special aircraft and failed time after time to produce anything more than working models. Two of which he crashed before even one plane came off the assembly line. One killing two innocent people on the ground. The final straw to the military was the Hercules, a wooden plane, the largest in the world to this day, which he promised to the military to avoid having to pass over the Atlantic Ocean which by then was full of German submarines. It would carry a thousand troops, armored carriers and tanks in a single trip. Finally finished at twice the price for the first model, Hughes attempted flight in 1947. Sitting in Long Beach Harbor, Hughes took the controls. Its eight huge Rolls Royce engines spit and shook until it was almost impossible to read the gauges thanks to all the shaking. He got it to 70 knots across the harbor and rotated in ground control to a height of around 70 ft. at 75 knots. For whatever reason the military called the flight a success and being a pilot I watched the film of the actual flight. The flight lasts less than two minutes and if you know a pilot, ask them if flying in ground effect is actual flight and every one will tell you no. Ground effect is attained at a less-than-rotation speed as a cushion of air is built up between the ground and the aircraft as the aircraft rises just above the cushion. Once rotation speed is reached the plane can climb out of ground effect and make a controlled turn. The controlled turn is the difference between flying in ground effect and actual flight. You can't turn a plane in ground effect; it will just stall and settle back to the ground, or crash, whichever you want to call it. So it was apparent almost immediately that the military was as embarrassed as Hughes and so called it a flight and credited him with building the largest aircraft ever. However everyone else knew it was a lemon and rather that refer to it as the Hercules, everyone called it the Spruce Goose. It sat in Long Beach Harbor under the name Spruce Goose until it was purchased in the late 90's by a town in Oregon, and Long Beach was actually glad to be rid of it, having to spend tons of money for upkeep of the spruce wood.

Hughes's brilliance was masked by his insanity and though full of great ideas was actually a failure at keeping things at a budget and never really lived in a realistic world as everyone ripped him off left and right knowing Hughes was too far gone to ever catch them cheating him, nor did he really care when costs were doubled when they heard it was part of a Hughes project. The same happened here in Las Vegas; prices of anything Hughes ever wanted were doubled or tripled for him only. He was so rich he would often walk away from almost completed projects complaining of boredom in the project and would either abandon them or leave them for his team to clean up the loose ends and pay whoever was asking for money to finish the project and go onto the next one. His existence was sad and lonely and nobody could save him from himself. It was said it was the crash of his favorite racing plane that almost took his life in the early 40's and did take the life of two people living in the house he crashed into, paid the family off and walked away almost burned to death with several internal injuries, but it was said he was never the same after the accidents and slipped into insanity. His doctor would keep him on pain and sleeping medications for years trying to keep his insanity a secret and did a good job until the very end.

In 1976 it was apparent that Hughes was dying. He only had weeks left and they had to get him out of town. While leaving the Desert Inn a reporter that often staked out the hotel just waiting for this moment managed to snap off one picture that made it into the newspaper. But it was almost unrecognizable. They could have said it was anyone and we would never have known. He looked like a homeless person with a long white scraggly beard, a dirty white shirt and white gym shoes. Long, long nails unkempt by his people he was seen with broken syringes hanging from his arms, open lesions on his arms, the odor of urine coming from his body. He was still alive, his eyes barely moving. They rushed him to the Hughes private terminal and from there onto the plane where he was declared dead in Puerto Rico.

He was a private man, respected for his privacy here in Las Vegas. Perhaps he stayed here because of that. In Southern California he was constantly hounded for his picture, his autograph, and people seeking money which was a never-ending problem. He hated photographers and would often buy their cameras and break them on the ground in front of them. He hated public gatherings knowing that everyone wanted a piece of him. He never knew real love and was constantly paranoid of anyone who approached him for love or money. Katherine Hepburn was the only woman to get through the barrier, Hughes himself admitted to that, but wanted and needed too much of her attention. He was the richest man in the world and would never know something as simple as a kiss. Anyone that paid any attention to him would come under immediate scrutiny. He would have their homes bugged, have them followed, hire detectives to dwell into their pasts and report every move they made when not with him. It was that paranoia that carried into every aspect of his life. And not without reason. J. Edgar Hoover who ran the FBI often had Hughes followed, every business deal was looked at for any wrong doing that they could nail Hughes on. They followed him and his women trying to find something they could use as an excuse to hold him. But any time they could secure a warrant to search him or his dwellings they were crushed before the cops could even knock on the door. His money served him well to keep his life personal, but the time he spent in Las Vegas is crucial in knowing Howard Hughes and there's where the movie "The Aviator" ends. Hughes was crushed when Congress launched hearings into finding exactly where he spent all the millions of dollars the government gave Hughes. He gave them whatever he wanted to but never gave them all the information and we know that he couldn't have spent all the money on the few aircraft he built. Having crashed most of his models millions were wasted as Hughes, not much of a pilot having received his license on the set of Hell's Angels and only having a few hundred hours of actual flight time he decided to take a very high powered airplane he wasn't rated for and crashed it. Hughes was embarrassed and at the Congressional hearings he really had no excuses, only his money. He couldn't explain why he took another experimental aircraft he also wasn't rated to fly and crashed that one but now he had taken two lives in a home on the ground that the airplane had crashed into.

What is known is that Hughes had the family of the deceased paid off and although the NTSB looked into the crash as they do every airplane crash, no charges were ever brought against Hughes as they should have been since a pilot is flying illegally if they are not rated and signed off by an FAA approved CFI to fly the plane. Nowhere in Hughes's logs does the plane exist. In every other case of this type the pilot is held liable by the law if anyone is hurt. And so Hughes decided then to leave Los Angeles and move to Las Vegas and that's where the movie fades to black leaving out the most important parts of the man's life and death. He had a profound effect on Las Vegas that lasts to this day. And although his properties are all demolished now he showed what real money in a town built on money can assume total power. A lesson to be learned when dealing with these people now like the MGM/Mirage power brokers and the few other casino owners, that left unchecked they'll do whatever they want to, and that if you insist on using money to speak to human beings, they're going to simmer and stew in that money until they cook up enough hatred for the string pullers that they can no longer just stand by and take it and the money will mean nothing to them by then and they'll just turn their backs on you like they did to Howard Hughes who was despised by the end of his life. And at the end everyone in Las Vegas gathered around the televisions to hear the news that Hughes was finally dead. And a deep sigh came over everyone, and then clapping broke out in the casino, happy to be rid of The Aviator. But deep inside we all felt a little bit sad, a little bit sorry that all the Kings horses and all the Kings men couldn't put Howard together again.

-Ken Pearlman