I had just posted this in the other thread..the article by Peter Evanshe listened politely as I confronted him with the evidence to the contrary, .............he smiled and smiled and denied Just as he had stated in another interview, can't remember the exact words but the gist of it was ... Admit to nothing, deny ALL.- Conversations with Robert A. Maheu by Mark FaulkMark Faulk’s first book, entitled The Naked Truth: Investing in the Stock Play of a Lifetime, is now available at
www.thenakedtruthbook.com.
Conversations with Robert A. Maheu
March 8, 2007; March 11, 2007; June 12, 2007; January 18, 2008
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Because of the significance that shareholders attached to Bob Maheu’s involvement in the CMKX saga, I decided, with Bob’s permission, to release the entire portion of my interviews with him pertaining to CMKX. That way, the shareholders of the company and the readers of The Naked Truth: Investing in the Stock Play of a Lifetime can decide for themselves the extent of Maheu’s involvement with the company, or any so-called “sting operation.”
On a personal note, I have to say that my conversations with Bob Maheu were a highlight of this project. As I told him during my conversations with him, I have the utmost respect for Bob Maheu, both as a person of integrity, and for his countless accomplishments over a long and productive life.
After first insisting that I call him “Bob” instead of Mr. Maheu, he led me down a fascinating path through some of his many achievements, including his involvement in the attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro, his years as the alter-ego of Howard Hughes, and his role in aborting a contract between Aristotle Onassis and the King of Saudi Arabia that would have given much of the control of the world’s oil to Onassis. At the time of our conversations, Maheu was involved in extensive interviews covering his entire life, which will eventually be turned into a documentary on the Bay of Pigs and a movie script based on Maheu’s life.
This entire written transcript has been viewed and approved for accuracy by Bob Maheu.
MARCH 8, 2007 INTERVIEW:
BOB MAHEU: Hello.
MARK FAULK: Hello, this is Mark Faulk. How are you doing?
MAHEU: Fine, thank you, how are you?
FAULK: I’m doing well, back working on the book after delays waiting for everything to play out. I know you said you’d tell me the entire story of your involvement with CMKX, and I was hoping to take a few minutes of your time and hear your story.
MAHEU: Well, you know, it’s well over a year now since I’ve been out of it.
FAULK: So you haven’t had any involvement in the past year?
MAHEU: No, no. I stayed on the task force until we came up with the recommendation that they get an attorney, a trial attorney, and go to court… and I’ve not had anything else to do with it, and as I’ve told you, when I resigned over…about a year and a half ago now, I forfeited all my back salary and everything.
Unfortunately…or fortunately, I started handling impossible assignments when I was eleven years old, and I’ve always been challenged. And as you know… you can’t make them all.
FAULK: And once you make one, you’re expected to do it every time.
MAHEU: Exactly.
FAULK: And you’ve done it several times, so you have a good track record in that regard.
MAHEU: Well, at age eleven, Mark, I came home and told my Mom that I had just met the little girl that I was going to marry. True story. And after she said it was impossible for the third time, I said “Mom, I love you very dearly, but I’m going to prove you wrong.” And I married that little girl not once, but four times. We were remarried on our 25th, on our 50th, and on our 60th without telling the kids we eloped to Seattle, just the two of us, and we were remarried in the same little church where we had first been married sixty years earlier. And all through my life… when I was in school, if someone said we have to drop this program, I’d say “Why?” In college it was the same thing.
But this one…this one was a mistake. It was an impossible deal.
FAULK: Everyone I’ve talked to about this, they all have one thing in common; they had no idea how complicated it was. I had no idea how complicated it was when I was first contracted to write this story. You have no idea what you’re getting into when you get into the middle of CMKX.
MAHEU: That’s right. I was not sure what we could do about the past, but I felt certain that somewhere they had to have numbers enabling us to conform.
(At this point, Maheu asked to consult his attorney first before we did the full interview, and I agreed. We set up a date to tell the full story, which Maheu said would be “very simple.”)
MARCH 11, 2007 INTERVIEW:
FAULK: Hello Bob, this is Mark Faulk. I hope I’m not calling too early.
MAHEU: Well, you’re disturbing my lunch, but that’s okay. Not really…but I’ve always said that if you go to bed with a clear conscience you don’t need much sleep.
(I have omitted a preliminary conversation about Bob Maheu’s background and history unrelated to CMKX. Maheu intro'd his comments about CMKX with an explanation of "forced communication".)
MAHEU: A good example of forced communication is the Apollo 12. The mission was to walk to Surveyor II on the moon, Surveyor II was a Hughes aircraft, it was a soft landing vehicle, which upon instructions from Earth would send back information to Earth. The mission was, they were going to walk to the Surveyor and at the last minute Hughes decided he wanted his name connected to the mission. So we knew the astronauts, we were very close to them. My son would take them fishing, they came here to break the ribbon for one of our projects… And came here also for a cancer society fundraiser that my son was chairman of. They brought things that had been on the moon, moon rocks. We had a great relationship with the astronauts. So I sent Peter this tape and he calls me back and says “Dad, it’s not negotiable. NASA will not allow any name of a manufacturer to be identified with the mission.” I said “Peter, that’s not our assignment.”
Ok, so what did we do? We ordered 20 miniature gold modules of the Surveyor; we ordered 4,000 badges, great big white badges, with black letters “Hello Halo”. I got a yacht out of Ft. Lauderdale, my wife and I flew down there to the suite of the hotel and had one of the best chef’s available out of Miami aboard the yacht. Now I’m having lunch with Walter Cronkite and Hugh Downs and on the way out I give them a couple of these little miniatures. And they say “What’s this?” I said “this is where the guys are going to go on the moon; it’s a module of the Surveyor II.” All of a sudden there are 3 or 4 thousand people at the gate walking around the gate with badges and the miniatures and people are beginning to ask, "What’s Halo? "Halo is Hughes Aircraft Lunar Observer." By that time NASA couldn’t stop it, and not only that they finally joined us.
That’s forced communications.
FAULK: You put people in a position where they did what you wanted; they obviously didn’t know what they were doing for you when they are carrying these things around.
MAHEU: Exactly, sooner or later it’s obvious what we’re doing… they’re getting these things for free and they don’t look too bad…
Anyway, I’m glad we’re on this vein of conversation because I think you’ll understand better why I became involved why I became involved in what may be the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in business.
FAULK: I think maybe we’ll begin by just letting you tell how you got involved in CMKX. I’ve heard so many different things and obviously you know that too, this thing lives on rumors.
MAHEU: And they can’t seem to be convinced that I’m not still involved.
FAULK: Exactly. It wouldn’t matter if we put out an actual word for word interview with you, there will still be people who will say “but yeah, he can’t tell you…” I’ve always said, “If Bob Maheu can’t tell you something, he’s just going to say ‘I can’t tell you.’ He won’t lie, he’ll just say ‘I can’t tell you.’”
MAHEU: yes, exactly.
FAULK: That’s why I have been very confident in that whatever you tell me, you’ll say what you can and otherwise you’re not gonna say “I’ll go out and deceive everybody.” You’ll just say “well, I can’t talk about that.”
MAHEU: That’s right. Fortuitously, when I told the attorneys that you were willing to give us an advance copy they said “go ahead.”
Anyway, for the sake of being repetitious, I told you that I have always been intrigued with impossible assignments. I think I told you the story about coming home at age 11 and telling my mom I’d met the girl I was going to marry. When Mom mentioned the word impossible for the third time I said “Mom, I love you dearly, but I’m going to prove you wrong.” I didn’t marry Evette to prove my mom wrong but it happened.
FAULK: I think there are things in your life that you would call defining moments, and I’ve heard you bring that up two or three times. Do you think that’s one of the moments where your resolve was set, where you said “ok, if you tell me I can’t do something, then I’m gonna go do it”?
MAHEU: Exactly! It was there and everywhere in high school, there were things in high school that would happen and people would say “It’s impossible, give it to Bob.” It’s always been the same way.
The only time that my love was really in great jeopardy, even before we were married, I was a freshman in college and they tell me that they are going to stop having the monthly dance.
And I said “why?”
And they said “we can’t get dates.”
“Let me handle that.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to start a dating bureau.” Which I did. Evette would come to the dances and that’s when she found out about the dating bureau.
Some guy walked up and said “Great date, Bob, how the hell did you fix me up with this girl?”
FAULK: I think that’s what’s known as creative problem solving.
MAHEU: Everyone…well not everyone because some guys didn’t… but most guys liked their dates, but Evette didn’t like that at all.
It was the same thing in the FBI, when I got in the bureau, one of the first assignments I had I created myself. I ended up getting a meritorious raise. That’s been my story, give me an assignment… Anyway, I took this one (CMKX) on with the same enthusiasm; I should’ve checked it out a hell of a lot more carefully before I did.
FAULK: Now originally, was it Stoecklein that came to you with this?
MAHEU: No. I was the one who brought Stoecklein in.
FAULK: Oh really? So where did you first hear of this?
MAHEU: I got a phone call from a guy…I can’t remember his name; he wanted to know if he could stop by the house with Urban Casavant.
FAULK: It wasn’t Mike Williams, was it?
MAHEU: Yes… yes, I had forgotten his last name.
FAULK: So….you knew Urban then?
MAHEU: No, I did not.
FAULK: You did not, but you knew Mike Williams?
MAHEU: Yes.
FAULK: And where did you know him from?
MAHEU: He kept popping up now and then with ideas and we never ended up doing anything of the business sort. He kept popping up with ideas, but nothing ever came to fruition that I can think of except this one.
FAULK: Does it make you glad that you didn’t do other deals with him?
MAHEU: Well, yes.
FAULK: What did you know about Williams?
MAHEU: Not anything really.
FAULK: How did you meet him?
MAHEU: That I cannot remember. So many of these things, a lot of them go back to the Hughes days. I get so d*mn many of those, Mark. People come up with ideas and very seldom are they worth following.
FAULK: And because of your name and reputation obviously anybody who has an idea goes “ok, I’ve got something, let’s go pitch it to Bob Maheu.” I’m sure you’ve been in great demand your whole life because of your reputation and your ability to make things happen. So, Mike Williams brought Urban over to your house, or your office…
MAHEU: To my house, I operate out of my house, although all my email goes to my son Peter’s office.
FAULK: Okay… Do you remember when that was approximately?
MAHEU: Quite a while ago and then I didn’t hear from him for a long time. Then they showed up again and I said ok, providing you let me bring in the attorneys. And they agreed, so I brought in Don.
FAULK: What were they telling you when they were coming over?
MAHEU: They had all this stuff and they needed someone to…they had not… well, I’m trying to think of exactly how they said it … they needed someone to put all of these problems together. They’d had some problems, they did have some regulatory problems, they wanted to know if I would help them take care of the past, and also, I made it very clear that I couldn’t guarantee what I could do about the past. But I would insist that from hence forward that they would be in compliance.
FAULK: Did they talk at all about the so called kind of bad guys that were in?
MAHEU: No
FAULK: So it was really just compliance issues and straightening up the regulatory mess.
MAHEU: Right. The deal that I have recollection of making is right along those same lines. I would do the best I could to rectify the past and that I would insist that everything had to be in the realm of compliance for the future.
FAULK: I was actually looking at a few of your quotes this morning and almost every one of them spoke of compliance and the regulatory agencies and how that’s what you appeared to brought in for, corporate compliance.
MAHEU: That’s right. Now, it didn’t take very long. First of all, Mark, when that hearing took place in Los Angeles I was so d*mned embarrassed because they ended up asking me the same questions that I’d been asking without getting any answers for about two plus months. Frankly, like Urban I was tempted to take the Fifth Amendment but that’s not my style. And for the sake of the stockholders I didn’t want to allow the only two directors to both take the Fifth Amendment.
FAULK: And obviously you had nothing to hide, you just didn’t have the knowledge that you wanted.
MAHEU: That’s right. I didn’t have the information, it was d*mned embarrassing. As I say, some of the questions were repetitious of what I’d been asking and then I realized that there were decisions made, or non-decisions made, with which I was not contacted or appraised. Anyway, then I really started putting the heat on the law firm. And you know “crunch out the numbers that I need here.” I kept getting reports that they could not crunch the numbers. Finally I told Don, “Don, when and if you are absolutely convinced that we cannot crunch the numbers enabling us to be compliant, I want you to tell me.” And when he did is when I submitted my resignation.
FAULK: Did he tell you why?
MAHEU: They kept trying to get the numbers; that I know. They’d get the accounting group, and then their own people and they’d asked for numbers, and there was always some kind of delay. They just flat could not come up with the numbers.
FAULK: So really you think that they were trying to dig up past information and people weren’t providing it to them.
MAHEU: Not only that, but current enough to comply with… Take the two separately for a moment, take the past …. They could not seem to put them together. But they couldn’t not keep the numbers that we needed from our entry into the organization up until the moment that I’m talking about. When Don said to me categorically, he said “Bob, there’s no doubt about it, we’re not going to be able to get the numbers together enabling us to comply.” That’s the day I submitted my resignation.
FAULK: Obviously the are so many stories that came out of this, that they brought you in to catch the bad guys, to orchestrate this big sting, and I guess the rumors, I can understand them because of your background.
MAHEU: Right.
FAULK: But that really wasn’t it at all.
MAHEU: Not at all. I made it very clear that …. And I testified before the judge at the same hearing, he said “is it possible they brought you in because of…” and I said “yes, that’s very possible.”
FAULK: That they brought you in because of your name.
MAHEU: That’s right.
FAULK: And that’s something that obviously you can only speculate on the reasons for that. Is it possible… and I guess this maybe goes into Urban, which we’ll get into that in a little bit anyway, but what are your feelings about him…Do you really believe he had the best interests of the shareholders at heart in this?
MAHEU: As strange as it may seem, I do. I think he’s very naïve and shoots from the hip. And truly… many times I feel sorry for him.
FAULK: I’ve heard that same thing from other people that have been involved with him that they believe that maybe he obviously made some mistakes along the way, and I have records that show that he made a lot of mistakes along the way. But that because of his own issues, whatever they may be, that maybe he wasn’t equipped to deal with a lot of things that happened.
MAHEU: Mark, how many people in your life have you seen, who without even realizing, live in a world of wishful thinking?
FAULK: A lot. There are a lot of shareholders in CMKX who are like that.
MAHEU: Reality does not exist in their world. I have been kinda weaned in that world because when Hughes… I was his alter ego for 15 years. When he went to the point of isolation I saw what lack of reality can do; it causes a lot of problems. It gets to the point where if they remove themselves from reality, unfortunately from that aspect reality exists in their minds… luckily, reality still exists outside. That happens, unfortunately.
FAULK: Do you think that happened with Urban to a degree then too?
MAHEU: Exactly.
FAULK: Honestly, unfortunately, I’ve known a lot of people in my life that I would describe as good hearts and bad habits. And from what I’ve learned about Urban it’s possible that he’s in that category.
MAHEU: Very much so.
FAULK: I know he dealt with, whether it’s gambling issues or drinking issues, I don’t even know what all… But the stories kinda point to that a little bit and that begins to cloud your judgment after a while to a large degree.
MAHEU: That’s right.
FAULK: Ok so, as you’re dealing with these people who did you come into contact along the way?
MAHEU: Not very many…that’s the uh… not every many. I was left out of a lot of things, like the decision to… I kept saying “When are you going to get an office?” Decisions were made without consulting with me.
FAULK: Did that lead you to believe that maybe they were kinda using you in name only to lend credibility to the company?
MAHEU: I had to have that feeling. I answered affirmatively when the judge asked me that question at the hearing. That was at the inception at this whole deal. I was what? Two plus months aboard at the time of the hearing, and not a hell of a lot longer.
FAULK: You’d been asking these same questions that the judge asked and not getting answers.
MAHEU: Right…
FAULK: And Stoecklein too then I assume was asking those questions.
MAHEU: Right.
FAULK: Ok, along the way, I’m trying to see what else we have here. There are a few other things that I could go over that were rumors but I could pretty much write them off. One was that there was a lot of talk about your son Peter being involved in Operation Bermuda Short.
MAHEU: Peter was not involved at all.
FAULK: I saw where that came from, there’s a Google search where he appeared at a convention and spoke with a guy who was involved in that. So somehow in that Google search they distorted the fact that Peter spoke at the same convention with a guy who was sheriff from Florida who was involved. And then they went “oh, Peter was involved in it.” But that’s the way the Google search showed up.
MAHEU: Peter does a lot of speeches on the Russian Mafia, and also on law enforcement as it applies to gaming.
FAULK: That’s exactly what this was; he was speaking on law enforcement and gaming at that one.
MAHEU: It’s a long distance to connect those two though.
FAULK: Yeah, exactly. They made some pretty good leaps on some of this stuff.
(Maheu and Faulk exchanged other contact numbers, etc.)
FAULK: Did you ever hear about John Edwards?
MAHEU: Yes
FAULK: What have you heard about him?
MAHEU: I may even have met him once, I’m not sure. Just that he was involved… he was buying stock or selling stock… Again, a lot of these things were never passed by me.
FAULK: Right. Well, as it turns out he was obviously selling stock and a lot of it. I don’t know if you’ve followed any of this since this. The NASD filed charges against a company called NevWest Securities, where John Edwards ran 250 billion shares of stock through NevWest.
cont'd
