Author paid in currency of gratitude

It's been almost a year now since his book hit the shelves, and he still hasn't made any money or found his name on any best-seller lists.

But that's OK with FBI agent-turned-author Gary Magnesen, who says he has not only already been well compensated with currency of another kind — in the form of unending gratitude from Melvin Dummar — but how many writers can say that their book launched a multimillion-dollar lawsuit?

Magnesen, a retired FBI agent who lives in St. George, wrote "The Investigation," released last fall by Barricade, an independent non-fiction publishing house in New Jersey.

The book details the results of Magnesen's investigation into Dummar's story that he picked up stranded billionaire Howard Hughes in the Nevada desert in 1967, a kind deed that resulted, apparently, in Dummar's name appearing in a disputed last will and testament that surfaced after Hughes died in 1976.

The will was ruled a fraud by a Las Vegas jury in 1978, and Dummar's name became a synonym for "con man."

And that was that until Magnesen came along.

He spent more than two years researching and writing "The Investigation," a process that uncovered new witnesses who independently corroborated Dummar's story.

These witnesses — including an airplane pilot, a Hughes operative and the husband of a brothel owner — placed Hughes precisely in the remote Nevada location where Dummar said he found the eccentric billionaire's nearly lifeless body 39 years ago this December.

Their testimony spurred a lawsuit filed in June by Dummar, a Nevada native who now lives in Brigham City, against two Hughes heirs — Bill Gay and William Lummis — charging that they withheld evidence in 1978 that denied Dummar a fair trial.

At stake are hundreds of millions of dollars.

Not bad for a book that has so far sold only about 5,000 copies.

And almost didn't get published.

"Getting the book in print was actually one of the most difficult parts of the whole process," says Magnesen. "Book publishing is a very tough business. At first I wondered if anyone would take it."

He hired a literary agent who he says "didn't do much. I was a new author and it was an old story. It was very difficult. A lot of young kids just out of college read the manuscript who didn't even know who Howard Hughes was."

It wasn't until Magnesen turned to a friend in Las Vegas, newspaper columnist John L. Smith, that