IVIV: Golden Fang/Howard Hughes

[Joseph Tracy]

Thanks Robin , a rich vein, and much more substantial than my  
thoughts. But I do like the dentist's drill, oil drill, gold  
connection. I had never heard the term the Mormon Mob, though I  
remember that B Goldwater was connected to Vegas, Mormons and the mob.
On Nov 3, 2009, at 9:14 PM, Robin Landseadel wrote:

> 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.