Dummar's defender has 'no dog in this fight'

LAS VEGAS — The man who has emerged as the missing link in the long and twisting Melvin Dummar-Howard Hughes saga wanted to make one thing perfectly clear as he consented to an interview in his Italian-style villa on the northwest edge of the Las Vegas valley's urban sprawl.

"I have never met Melvin Dummar and I've only talked to him for two minutes on the phone," said Guido Deiro (pronounced Day-Row). "I have no dog in this fight. I have nothing to gain. I want to keep it that way."

Deiro, 68, was sitting in the same chair he sat in three years ago when he picked up his April 12, 2004, copy of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and a headline caught his eye:

"Melvin Still Swears by Encounter With Hughes"

As he read the Associated Press article about Dummar's insistence that he rescued Howard Hughes, then America's richest man, off a remote desert road in west Nevada the night of Dec. 29, 1967, and drove him to Las Vegas, Deiro remembers shouting out incredulously to his wife Joan, "He's telling the truth!"

Although Dummar's story had been told countless times, typically in scorn, after Hughes died in 1976 and a mysterious will, soon to be discredited in court, appeared that left $156 million to Dummar, it was the first time Deiro had paid attention to the details of what Dummar claimed.

Those details answered a question Deiro had been carrying around since the 1960s when he was a pilot in Hughes' employ. Namely, how did Mr. Hughes, which is how Deiro referred to his boss, get back to Las Vegas on Dec. 29, 1967?

Deiro had flown Hughes from Las Vegas to a west Nevada brothel called the Cottontail Ranch, "smack in the middle of nowhere," that night. Then the pilot fell asleep. When he awoke, Hughes was gone, and no one knew where he went.

Now, Guido Deiro knew.

He tossed aside the newspaper and dialed information for Gabbs, Nev., Dummar's hometown. A sister-in-law explained Melvin lived in Willard, Utah, and agreed to call him with Deiro's number.

Five minutes later, Deiro's phone rang.

"I asked him one question," remembered Deiro of his one and only conversation with Melvin Dummar. "What did Hughes look like?"

Dummar described the same long-haired unshaven 62-year-old man Deiro had flown to the desert.