Word: summa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Meanwhile, with their customary secretiveness, Summa executives and Hughes' former aides and doctors are ducking subpoena servers sent out by Rhoden. Among other things, the lawyer is trying to establish whether Hughes actually could have left the Desert Inn and ended up some 150 miles from Las Vegas, where Dummar says he found him. So far, Rhoden has managed to collar only two executive assistants for depositions. Testifying under oath, the two gave contradictory accounts...
Under questioning, Holmes made an admission that may haunt the Summa lawyers once the trial begins. Holmes recalled that Hughes told him that he had written a holographic will, a last testament whose unwitnessed authenticity rests on identifying the handwriting of the author...
Finally one of the aides remembered that a man on duty at the Summa office in Las Vegas, John Larsen, spoke Spanish. "So they set up a conference call with Larsen, which took further time," Margulis said. "Dr. Chaffin was on the phone in The Office, the nurse was on an extension in Eric Bundy's telephone room, and they were both connected with Larsen in Las Vegas. The doctor would tell Larsen in English what he wanted done. Larsen would question him until he was sure he understood the instructions. Then he would translate them into Spanish and relay...
...decision to hospitalize Hughes had come too late; his heart gave out while the jet raced toward Houston. According to Dr. Thain, he died at 1:27 p.m., a half-hour out of Houston airport. Late in the day of the death, [Arelo] Sederberg [the Summa spokesman] was authorized to state that Hughes had died of a "cerebral vascular accident," medicalese for a stroke. But the official autopsy attributed his death to renal (kidney) failure and said nothing about a stroke. The Summa officials did not reconcile this contradiction...
They were Hughes' so-called Mormon Mafia, the six gentlemen in waiting who were recruited by Summa Corp. Vizier Bill Gay, himself a Mormon, and attended the anchoritic Croesus day and night, in eight-hour shifts. They were assisted by four physicians on 24-hour call and five lesser functionaries, including Gordon Margulis and Mell Stewart. For their services the six senior aides were (and apparently still are) paid as much as $110,000 a year each. They equipped his various hideaways, decided which messages would reach him, censored his reading matter. In short, they controlled Howard Hughes...