IVing IV, The Plastic Nickel

[Robin Landseadel]

On Dec 5, 2009, at 5:20 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> So, give me 100 words on money in Inherent Vice.

When I think of the Nixon "Funny Money" in Inherent Vice—those twenty  
dollar bills with Richard Nixon's face instead of Andrew Jackson's  
that was found on the Golden Fang—the problem at the bottom of the  
Watergate Hotel break-in and aftermath comes to mind.

I've been reading "Citizen Hughes" by Michael Drosnin. Rather bad  
writing but very interesting reporting. In brief, the bulk of the book  
concerns a set of handwritten communications from Howard Hughes to his  
primary henchman and fixer, Bob Maheu. Bob previously was in the  
employ of the FBI and worked off the books for the CIA. A lot of Mr.  
Maheu's activities were illegal, by way of example; one of his jobs  
was distribution of bribes. Hughes had his minions deliver something  
on the order of $400,000 to Bebe Rebozo in order to funnel the cash to  
Tricky Dick. Some of that money went to remodeling Nixon's beach-house  
in Key Biscayne, Fl.

Nixon, knowing that DNC chairman Larry O'Brien was on retainer as  
Howard Hughes' lawyer,  got real paranoid that the de-facto head of  
the Democratic party had the goods on dozen of Hughes-related scams  
and bribes. Funny money from Hughes tripped up Nixon before. In the  
1960 election, word of an unsecured $200,000 loan to Donald Nixon,  
Dick's brother, got into the headlines. Nixon assumed that was the  
primary cause of his loss to JFK in the 1960 presidential election. So  
on June 17, 1972, the plumbers, led by former CIA operative E. Howard  
Hunt and toxic neo-Nazi G. Gordon Liddy, were rummaging through the  
DNC headquarters looking for any evidence of any of the Hughes Bribes  
to Nixon.

An interesting feature concerning those bribes was that they were  
delivered in the form of $100 bills.

Sorry, realize that was more than 100 words . . .