IVIV: Golden Fang/Howard Hughes

[Robin Landseadel]

On Nov 3, 2009, at 4:58 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:

> Was gonna briefly mention Hughes before from one of the Hughes Nixon  
> Rebozo connections I read about while following the GF leads. Rebozo  
> was a banker connected to the mob and Cuba and was Nixons best  
> friend and they met on a boat and hung out on his boat. If I  
> remember right Rebozo carried money from Hughes to Nixon and was  
> caught but wiggled  out of it. So are you connecting the drill bit  
> to the Dentistry gig in IV?

Ah, no . . .

Though those are other connections. Thanks, I'll look those up.

I was specifically thinking of Chapter four of Inherent Vice:

	Today, after a deceptively sunny and uneventful spin through
	the Hughes Company property—a kind of smorgasbord of
	potential U.S. combat zones, terrain specimens ranging from
	mountains and deserts to swamp and jungle and so forth, all
	there, according to local paranoia, for fine tuning battle radar
	systems on  . . .

Leading us a little later to mentions of the former employees of  
Howard Hughes, Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldridge, who  co-joined the  
Thompson Products Company, creating TRW, the company who helped  
created Arpanet and the network of world-wide spy satellites.

These threads necessarily lead to Las Vegas, where Hughes holed up on   
November 24, 1966 (Thanksgiving Day, taking over the Desert Inn,  
moving into the eight floor and eventually buying the hotel in early  
1967. Howard Hughes and his mob created the nightmare Las Vegas of  
Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas." HST gave us the  
POV of Las Vegas when it was all over, showing us the place where the  
tide reached its peak and you could look back and see the high water  
mark. Pynchon is showing us the MOMENT when it all turned into shit.  
Which was somewhere between the time that Masnon's cohorts went on  
their killing spree and when Howard Hughes split Las Vegas, abruptly,  
on Thanksgiving Eve 1970.

>  Hughes also connects us to Hollywood.

And Raymond Chandler's "Bay City." Unstated in Chandler's mysteries is  
the fact that "Bay City" was the center of military bases and in large  
part the center of Hughes Military Industrial Empire. By the time Doc  
Sportello is attempt to pull off his version of "My Name Is Earl,"  
Hughes' center of activities is in Las Vegas. This is a center of the  
real mob, the Mormon Mob, not that "handjob" mob that gets the press— 
If you've got real power, you manage to keep your name out of the  
papers, or at least see to it that there's enough misdirection on the  
front page and enough distraction on the media outlets to continue to  
have "business as usual" on the front burner.