‘This means something. This is important.’

Do you remember in Close Encounters of the Third Kind when Richard Dreyfuss was passionately sculpting his mashed potato rendition of Devil’s Tower at the dinner table as his family looked on in horror? That’s the moment he delivered his classic line, more to himself than to anyone else: “This means something. This is important.”  I can so relate. The only difference is that my Devil’s Tower is the phrase “366 m hau” and my mashed potatoes are two FBI records that the phrase is scribbled on—one Ron Tammen’s and one involving a car bomb that was placed under Ash Resnick’s Lincoln in the parking lot of Caesars Palace. 

In my most recent post, I introduced a new theory that the notation may be in reference to an informant in Las Vegas whom the FBI gave the official designation LV 366-PC, where LV stands for Las Vegas and PC stands for potential criminal informant. I also suggested that the letters “m hau” could refer to the informant’s actual name, cryptically scribbled in so that nosy onlookers like us wouldn’t be able to figure out his or her identity. Granted, every bit of my theory is a wild guess, but, if it’s OK with you, this is a question worth obsessing about for a while. I think it could be important. Although there’s always a chance that I may be wrong about who “m hau” is, I don’t think it would offend anyone if I told you where my head is at this moment, would it? 

You want to try to do this as a Q&A this time? 

Who do you think ‘m hau’ is?

I think “m hau” may have been Robert Maheu.

Who’s that?

Robert Aime Maheu was Howard Hughes’ right-hand man—his go-to. He’d been working for Hughes on an on-call basis since the 1950s, but by 1966, at the start of Hughes’ Las Vegas years, Maheu’s full-time job was to be the face of Hughes to the rest of the world. His official title was manager of Hughes Nevada Operations, and he oversaw the purchase and management of Hughes’ casinos and other Las Vegas properties. But the relationship went deeper than that. Hughes considered Maheu to be his alter-ego. While Hughes was busy being a recluse, doing reclusey things in his penthouse in the Desert Inn, Maheu was carrying out Hughes’ wishes and conducting business in Hughes’ name, generally cosplaying Howard Hughes. Look, I don’t mean to make fun of Howard Hughes. It’s widely believed that he had obsessive-compulsive disorder and was living a hell that gradually manifested in a number of ways, including those for which he’s most well-known: the hair, the nails, and the urine jars. Weirdly, it’s been reported that Maheu had never met Hughes face to face, although they communicated all the time, primarily by telephone and memos.

Wasn’t Howard Hughes married to Jean Peters at that time?

Good! Another old movie buff. Yes, Howard Hughes was married to Jean Peters while he was holed up in the penthouse at the Desert Inn. She wasn’t living there with him though. She was still in Los Angeles in the Bel Air home they’d lived in after they’d gotten married. I’m not sure how well their marriage was going when he moved to Las Vegas, but I can’t imagine that things were great. I’m sure she was having doubts by then, what with Howard’s aversion to leaving the apartment and basic self-care like taking showers and brushing his teeth.

Something you may not know is that Jean Peters grew up in East Canton, Ohio. In fact, she was my husband’s babysitter when he was young. My husband’s grandparents, who lived next door to the Peters family, received Christmas cards each year from the famous couple when they were still living in LA. The cards were signed “Love, Jean and Howard.” Here’s what her family’s former home looks like today:

Robert Maheu was the guy who made that marriage happen. According to Spooks author James Hougan, Hughes was enamored with Peters, who was beautiful, smart, talented, and soon-to-be married. With Maheu as his accomplice, Hughes hired someone to spy on the couple during their honeymoon, and he arranged for additional surveillance on the husband afterward. When her husband was conveniently away on business in Washington, DC, Robert Maheu arranged a meet-up between Hughes and Peters so Hughes could make his move. She divorced the guy in December 1956 and married Hughes that spring.

What’s your favorite Jean Peters film?

Niagara, hands down. If it’s ever playing on one of the classic movie channels, I encourage you to record it. Not only is it a great film noir but it’s fun to see the town of Niagara Falls (the Canadian one) while it was small and undeveloped—more outdoorsy and less glitzy.

How did Robert Maheu meet Howard Hughes?

According to Hougan, Robert Maheu had been recommended to Howard Hughes by a mutual friend soon after Maheu had begun making a name for himself in the private investigative field. He’d been a special agent with the FBI beginning in 1940 and, during WWII, he served in the FBI’s counterespionage program known as COCASE out of the New York City Field Office. Although he was doing well in the Bureau, in 1947, Maheu’s wife’s health prevented him from moving his young family to his new field office assignment, so he resigned. Over the next several years, he tried his hand at a few other jobs in business and government.

One red flag concerning Maheu’s character popped up in January 1953 when he was seeking investors in a dairy company he’d started. A lawyer in Maine wrote an impassioned letter to J. Edgar Hoover telling him of Maheu’s dishonesty and unethical behavior and warning him that the good name of the FBI was being sullied because Maheu liked to brag about his former employer. In 1954, Maheu opened his private investigative firm, Robert A. Maheu Associates, in Washington, DC. Almost immediately, he began approaching current and former special agents with job offers, which didn’t exactly win him any points with the big boss. Although Maheu attempted to keep the lines of communication open with the FBI, he was known to veer out of his lane at times. For the above reasons, J. Edgar Hoover had issued this warning to all special agents regarding Maheu and his new business venture:

“I want all Special Agents advised of the existence of this organization and instructed that they must be most circumspect in all dealings with Maheu or any of his representatives. In the event any investigative personnel should receive any information regarding the activities of this organization, or if any investigative personnel are contacted by representatives of this organization the Bureau should be immediately advised.”

Because he ran a private business, Maheu could take on jobs that were unconstrained by governmental rules, regs, ethics, and principles. His specialty was jobs that were tricky and/or dangerous and maybe even a little unsavory. According to Hougan, the TV show Mission: Impossible was based on Maheu’s agency. When I think about that show, I think of actor Greg Morris always crouching in some tight space as he installed a listening device into someone’s telephone or air vent. Bugging devices and illegal wiretaps were the sorts of things that Maheu’s firm excelled at.

The CIA was one of Maheu’s first long-term contracts, which should also tell you something about the kinds of jobs he would accept. 

Your theory that ‘m hau’ is Maheu is interesting…but that’s not how he spelled his name.

I know. One reason could be that FBI agents struggled with the spelling of Maheu’s name, which was French in origin. (Because his parents were both French-Canadian, he was fluent in that language.) I’ve seen his name spelled Mayhew, Mahew, Mayheu, and even Mahieu. There may have been other iterations as well. It could have been that the agent who’d written the note had no idea how to spell his name plus, like I said before, he wanted to be cryptic. Both things could be true. 

Also, is it me, or does the “a” in “m hau” on Ron’s record look like a cross between an “a” and an “e,” as if the person was having trouble deciding what to put?

Incidentally, I think the person who made the notation on Ron’s record was the same person who made the notation on Ash’s record. That’s wild to think about too.

What else can you tell us about Robert Maheu?

He had a commanding presence. He compensated his average-sized frame with a big personality, he had a voice that people paid attention to, he was generally likeable in most people’s estimation, and he was a snazzy dresser. I’m going to say it: I think he was pretty dang hot when he was in his 20s and just starting out with the FBI. But by the 1970s, when he was in his 50s, most of the hair in the middle of his head had vanished and he was unapologetically embracing his male pattern baldness like a trooper.

Robert Maheu led an outwardly respectable life that included all the things that people are frequently measured by: a wife, kids, money, and prestige. (I’m sorry to report that people are rarely measured by what’s in their heart, which would be so much better for this world.) He was living the dream in the most amped-up way possible. His friendships occupied a broad spectrum ranging from those at the highest places in society to those populating the seamy underworld. One day he might be having drinks and hors d’oeuvres with the governor of Nevada and the next day he might be bailing famed mobster Johnny Roselli out of jail. In short, Robert Maheu knew a LOT of people.

What makes you think Robert Maheu was FBI informant LV 336-PC?

I have six main reasons:

1) He’d be perfect.

Robert Maheu would have been the perfect informant because of all the people he knew and all the information he was undoubtedly privy to. He was close friends with mobster John Roselli, aka “Handsome Johnny,” who also knew a lot of people, and he was the confidant of one of the richest men in the world. He also had contacts at the FBI and CIA. The FBI’s Las Vegas Field Office would have been crazy not to approach him.

2) He’d been an unofficial informant in the past.

In 1952, Maheu was working in Washington, DC, as the director for the Office of Compliance and Security in the Small Defense Plants Administration (SDPA), a precursor to the Small Business Administration during the Korean War. Maheu had taken it upon himself to write a 2 ½ page, single-spaced letter to Hoover discussing an incident in which an SDPA employee had struck up a conversation in a park with a Russian man who worked at the Soviet Embassy. The conversation was benign, focusing on hard-hitting questions such as “how does America compare to Russia?”, and nothing else happened. Maheu filled Hoover in on as many details as he had access to in the event they might be useful to the FBI. Indeed, the Washington Field Office followed up on the lead to determine who the Russian might be and whether the SDPA employee might one day be pursued as a double agent. In the write-up, the word “Informant” was written next to Maheu’s name. So I have to ask: if he played that role in the past, would he ever consider playing it again?

3) LV 366-PC knew Ash Resnick and so did Robert Maheu.

If Robert Maheu was LV 366-PC, then he would’ve had to know Ash Resnick well enough to hear something worth sharing about that car bomb plot. Well, how does next-door neighbor sound? That’s right. From the latter part of the 1960s to 1976, Ash Resnick and Robert Maheu were next-door neighbors in one of the newest, swankiest neighborhoods Las Vegas had to offer at that time: Paradise Palms. Ash lived at 3515 Cochise Lane until 1976 and Robert lived at 3525 Cochise Lane until he died in 2008. You just know that they used to shoot the breeze together when they bumped into one another picking up their newspapers or collecting their mail. You just do.

I’m still trying to learn more about that car bomb plot. One interesting thing I’ve learned is that Ash was in on the sting. In July 1974, UPI reported that the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department had “set up the incident on an informant’s tip in an effort to produce a lead in the unsolved bombing death of Las Vegas attorney William Coulthard,” a case that is still unsolved. In a 1978 article, an LVMPD detective said that Ash Resnick had “agreed to be a ‘pigeon,’ putting his life in danger so that police could gather additional information” about the Coulthard bombing. But here’s what I find most confusing: in another 1974 article, the officers said that they’d found “dummy dynamite with some detonator caps” at the scene. So the alleged bomb wasn’t even allegedly real, and yet a guy named Donald Lee Wayton was allegedly sent to prison for six years for it. As I said, I’m still trying to learn more. And, what the hey, I’m attempting to learn more about the Coulthard bombing too. 

Can’t you just picture Ash Resnick standing at his mailbox telling Robert about his role in the sting? It sounds like quite a story. If so, then I can also see Robert feeling the need to let the FBI know what the LVMPD had cooked up with Ash. Incidentally, I don’t think that Robert was the informant who tipped off the LVMPD about the car bomb in the first place. I think that informant likely belonged to the LVMPD.

4) Robert Maheu had two possible sources for a tip LV 366-PC made in February 1970.

In February 1970, the informant identified as LV 366-PC had provided info to the FBI concerning a mobster named Marty Fenster. The information he shared was:

MARTY FENSTER is now working for FRANK ROGER MILANO at the Clark County Vending Company, Las Vegas, Nevada. This target stated that at one time, FENSTER operated the Grace Ranch near Tucson, Arizona for PETE LICAVOLI. The target stated that FENSTER left the Grace Ranch about a year ago, moved to Los Angeles, California and about a month ago came to Las Vegas at the invitation of MILANO.

In my earlier post, I said that the informant likely picked up this information because he had business ties with the Clark County Vending Company and/or Frank Roger Milano, its owner. As it so happens Frank Milano had an interest in obtaining the vending contract of the Frontier Hotel as well as another hotel called The Plainsman. In May 1967, he and other related players went through the necessary Mob channels to do so. According to an FBI report, “A source said that these efforts were successful.” Interestingly, Howard Hughes purchased the Frontier Hotel in December 1967, with Robert Maheu now directly overseeing that property. So it’s possible that Maheu learned about Marty Fenster’s whereabouts through his business ties with the Clark County Vending Company.

But there’s another possible link, Pete Licavoli. As I mentioned briefly in another post, Robert Maheu had been the CIA’s liaison to organized crime for the Castro assassination plots. It was Maheu who’d recruited John Roselli, who, in turn, rounded up other mafia members, most famously Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante. However, according to a man with Mob and CIA ties named Chauncey Holt and the website Spartacus Educational, Pete Licavoli was a mobster who was purportedly friends with Sam Giancana and John Roselli. Licavoli owned the Grace Ranch in Arizona, that, according to Holt, had been used as a training ground for Operation Mongoose, one of the CIA’s Castro assassination projects. While Roselli, Giancana, and Trafficante were the big-ticket names who have always been associated with those plots, Holt asserts that Licavoli was involved too.

If Chauncey Holt is to be believed, then Robert Maheu had a direct connection to Pete Licavoli through their days preparing for Project Mongoose (which obviously never came to pass). It’s possible that it was either through that direct connection or through his friend Johnny Roselli that Robert Maheu could have learned of the whereabouts of Marty Fenster.

5) Robert Maheu had strong connections with the CIA’s Office of Security, the same office that ran Project Artichoke.

If Robert Maheu, LV 366-PC, and “m hau” were the same person, then Robert Maheu must have had knowledge about Ron Tammen’s whereabouts at some point after he disappeared. But how? As it turns out, Robert Maheu had strong ties to the same people who were involved with Project Artichoke: the CIA’s Office of Security. As we’ve discussed often on this site, it’s my theory that Ron Tammen was a victim of Project Artichoke’s hypnosis experiments, having first been exposed to them through his psychology professor, St. Clair Switzer.

Robert Maheu had been helping the Security guys out since he opened his business in 1954, when Project Artichoke was at the top of their list of priorities. Do you know who else was employed by the CIA’s Office of Security during that time? James W. McCord, Jr., the only other person who shares the same ST-109, REC-19 stamp combination as Ron Tammen on his FBI records. 

In 1960, Sheffield Edwards, director of the Office of Security, approached Maheu seeking access to his criminal connections to assassinate Fidel Castro, and Maheu immediately went straight to Roselli’s doorstep. As for the question of whether Robert Maheu has ever been directly linked to the Office of Security’s mind-control tactics used in Project Artichoke and MKULTRA, including hypnosis, the answer is yes. In her book A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, acclaimed author Lisa Pease provides compelling evidence that Sirhan Sirhan couldn’t possibly have killed RFK, since, among other reasons, the bullets that had struck victims in the pantry where Kennedy was shot didn’t match Sirhan’s gun. What’s more, Sirhan was found to be highly hypnotizable and has no memory of the event. According to Pease, Sirhan was hypnotized to serve as the patsy in the crime by hypnosis experts affiliated with the CIA’s MKULTRA program. She also asserts that Robert Maheu is “the most credible high-level suspect for the planner of Robert Kennedy’s assassination,” drawing bold arrows to, among other things: his background in assassination planning; his ties to investigators in the LAPD, DA’s office, and sheriff’s office; and his connections to the men who were at ground zero of the CIA’s hypnosis experiments, the Office of Security.

6) It would have been the perfect time for him to become an FBI informant.

You might ask why Robert Maheu would have wanted to become an FBI informant. Wouldn’t he be giving up the goods on his friends or even himself? Also, guys in intelligence are known for their secrecy. They’re as close-lipped as they come.

But Maheu had been experiencing a rough patch at precisely the time that Ron Tammen’s, Ash Resnick’s, and Marty Fenster’s names had been brought up to the FBI. In December 1970, he was abruptly fired from his position with Hughes Nevada Operations for reasons that seemed flimsy and unsubstantiated. The month prior, on Thanksgiving eve, Hughes had been whisked out of the Desert Inn on a gurney—Mahue preferred to use the word “kidnapped”—and flown to the Bahamas to live, even though Hughes had ruled out the Bahamas as a possible home after reading a negative report. An internal power struggle within the Hughes empire was the reason for the upheaval. A team of executives had staged the takeover with a newly created private intelligence service, known as Intertel, stealing Hughes and ousting Maheu and several others. 

Later, in a phoned-in press conference, Hughes or perhaps someone imitating Hughes said that he fired Maheu “Because he’s a no good, dishonest son of a bitch, and he stole me blind.” Maheu filed a defamation lawsuit against Hughes’ corporation, which he won. In 1972, Maheu found himself under the microscope over the Hughes memos that likely implicated Richard Nixon in accepting illegal campaign funds, memos that were being stored in Bob Maheu’s friend Hank Greenspun’s safe. Those memos were a key reason behind the Watergate scandal. In December 1973, he was indicted with Hughes and a few others over the charges that they’d manipulated Air West’s stock prices so that Hughes could acquire the airline in 1970. In 1975, he was testifying before the Church Committee about the Castro assassination plots. He had a lot going on during those years, most of it bad. Karma was closing in and jail was probably even a possibility.

Perhaps most notably, there’d been a falling out between Maheu and the CIA. According to author Jim Hougan, the CIA may have played a role in Maheu’s ouster. Intertel was run by former intelligence officials, including those in the National Security Agency and the CIA. It seems to me that, by that point, the one relatively solid relationship Maheu still had was with the FBI. If there was a good time to be a paid informant, maybe the years 1970 through 1974 would have been it. 

How can we find out if you’re right?

I’m still trying to find evidence concerning informant LV 366-PC to see if that person continues to fit my theory. 

On May 27, 2026, I filed a FOIA request for the forms (called FD-209s) that field agents filled out every time they interacted with a confidential informant. I was requesting all of LV 366-PC’s FD-209 forms for 1970 through 1974. They responded quickly, on June 2. Here’s what they said:

The material you requested is exempt from disclosure pursuant to FOIA exemptions (b)(7)(D) and (b)(7)(E) [5 U.S.C. §552 (b)(7)(D) and (b)(7)(E)]. Release of records responsive to your request would reveal confidential informant identities and information, expose law enforcement techniques, and endanger the life or physical safety of individuals.

Additionally, the release of these records could reasonably be expected to disclose procedures or guidelines for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions and risk circumvention of the law. Therefore, your request is being closed. 

They provided an email address that I could write to if I wished to dispute their response, and I did so. I included 12 pages of FD-209 forms that had already been released to the public as examples of FBI precedent that they appeared to be ignoring. Some had redactions over the exempt portions. Others were almost fully unredacted. In an attempt at being empathetic to their concerns, I asked them to redact the portions that were exempt from disclosure and to release the rest of the info. 

I received my answer yesterday and that answer was no. 

Will I appeal? Oh, sure. I’ll continue going through the motions. But I have a strong feeling that I’m not going to be seeing those FD-209s anytime ever.

Do I believe that the release of LV 366-PC’s FD-209s would endanger the life or physical safety of individuals? That seems unlikely, since I’m pretty sure LV 366-PC is no longer with us, especially if it turns out to be Robert Maheu. Neither are the people that LV 366-PC was informing the FBI about. 

Just fyi, here’s a link to an example of a fully unredacted FD-209 that’s been released on an informant known as CG 6606-C.The CG stands for Chicago. I’m guessing no lives were lost when that FD-209 was released.

I don’t know, maybe we’re getting close to finding out something new about Ron Tammen—maybe something meaningful. Maybe something important.