The Mormon Mafia

Hello and welcome to Inside Out. I'm Ian Wilkes, your co-host, and I'm here with Jim Bennett. Welcome, Jim Bennett.

Thank you, Ian Wilkes. How are you, sir?

I'm doing really well. Uh, let's get into this cuz we have limited time. You posted something very recently, I think in the last 24 hours, about something I know very little about, but which has piqued my interest and the interest of what appears to be over 50,000 people and growing. And that is something you've titled called The Mormon Mafia. What is that? I've read some of your posts. I've seen some of your answers, some of the responses. Take us through it. What is it? Give us some background and we'll get into it from there.

Well, so this is coming up because of Candace Owens, who is a conspiracy theorist and a podcaster. She initially burst onto the scene. Uh, no, I'm thinking of somebody else that was on The Apprentice. That was— anyway, she has since sort of broken with Donald Trump, but she's still very conservative and very conspiratorial. And she has started talking about the Mormon Mafia that is ultimately responsible for the death of Charlie Kirk. Now, when she started talking about this, a lot of members of the church just thought this was the funniest thing in the world. The Mormon Mafia. What is the Mormon Mafia? And I saw somebody posts something like, yeah, the Mormon Mafia is, is people who come to your house and say, that's a lovely couch you have there. It'd be a shame. It'd be a shame if somebody helped you move it to your new house. You know, I mean, that's the kind of thing a Mormon Mafia would do. And I posted, and it's true, that the Mormon Mafia was 100% real. Particularly the thing that Candace Owens is talking about, because she's making reference to Howard Hughes. Now, you, do you know who Howard Hughes is? Is that name—

I've heard the name. Please tell me who Howard Hughes is.

Howard Hughes was the Elon Musk of his day. He was the first billionaire in the history of the planet. He inherited a family fortune from an oil drill bit company started by his parents, and his parents passed away when he was fairly young. And he parlayed that into a massive fortune, beginning with a career in Hollywood. He made a whole bunch of movies, produced a whole bunch of movies. And made a lot of money that way. And then he bought TWA, Trans World Airlines, and made a whole lot of money that way. But he himself— there's a wonderful movie. Have you ever seen the movie The Aviator starring Leonardo DiCaprio?

I've seen that movie. Yeah.

Yeah. That's Howard Hughes. That's Howard Hughes's, uh, story. Um, it takes you all the way through, um, Howard Hughes building what he called the flying boat or the H-4 Hercules, which was the largest airplane ever built. And he built it for World War II because he was hearing about all of these, all of these Allied ships being sunk by U-boats. And so he envisioned the idea of transports being, I mean, just this massive, massive airplane that would take ships across the Atlantic so they wouldn't have to cross on the water. This boat, this flying boat flew precisely one time., and to prove that it could fly, because Howard Hughes was dragged before Congress for wasting all of this money on this boondoggle project, and he proved that it actually could fly. And the end of the movie The Aviator ends with Howard Hughes triumphantly flying the Spruce Goose, which was the nickname that the media had given this plane. Howard Hughes hated that name, and that figures into the story a little bit later. But it ends with this massive triumph and Howard Hughes wins. Well, it gets a whole lot more tragic from there because you see in the movie sort of the beginnings of Howard Hughes's mental deterioration. They actually accelerate it beyond what the historical record can indicate. In the movie, Leonardo DiCaprio is holed up in a hotel room watching movies peeing into bottles and, and doing all these things. And I remember asking my father, who is, is the star of the story I'm about to tell, was that accurate? And he says, yes, that's accurate, but it's compressed by time. That all happened later. Howard Hughes lost his mind, genuinely went completely insane. He had obsessive compulsive disorder that got to the point where he was in complete isolation with nobody but a handful of people around him to cater to his every whim. He would write them 20-page notes about how they should serve him his canned chicken noodle soup. He was, he would watch movies. 24 hours a day, often the same movie over and over and over again. Uh, he walked around with his feet in Kleenex boxes to protect himself from germs. He allowed his hair and his fingernails to grow. Have you ever, you ever seen the Guinness Book of World Records, the guy with the big long fingernails? Uh, Howard Hughes did exactly that. He never cut his nails. When he died, and, and that's part of the story too, he weighed less than 90 pounds. Now, he was a man over 6 feet tall weighing less than 90 pounds. He had just shriveled away into nothing. He— it was just a really sad, tragic story. So one of the figures in the story, and I will show you a video here where Candace Owens starts talking about this, and Candace Owens draws— go ahead, did you say something? No. No, okay. Uh, well, Candace Owens draws a line from between Howard Hughes and what she termed the Mormon Mafia to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and I'm gonna just sort of lay out why that's ridiculous.. But, um, one of the characters she talks about, I'm just going to bring her up here. This is the video where she laid all this out and she talks about a man named Frank William Gay. And I am going to play this video so that you see what she's saying.

I should also mention that Frank William Gay, the, uh, trusted Mormon, he had a son, Robert Gay, who became the managing director of Mitt Romney's Bain Capital for 16 years. So why am I telling you that? Because the story is interesting. It's just interesting to think about that. A man who lives his life and then, uh, we are told in the end that he kind of reversed course on everything that he was. He becomes a drug addict, his empire gets smashed, divided, and the articles reflect that he was infiltrated, or heavily imply this Mormon mafia, as they termed it. That's where the term literally comes from. And it's interesting. And the reason why I came across this guy's name, truly, I am not a movie person, was because when I was researching one of the Maroon Boys, Maroon Boys, um, I, who I'm not naming at this time.

Okay, I'll stop there. But she, she brings up the Mormon mafia there and talks about Howard Hughes. That is in fact where the term Mormon Mafia comes from. And, and so the Mormon Mafia was very much real. And the man she mentioned there at the beginning, Frank William Gay, he went by Bill Gay, and he was my father's missionary companion in Scotland. My father also served in Scotland, served in the British Mission, and the British Mission had the Scottish District. This is in the early 1950s. I think he was there from 1950 to 1952. But Stephen Covey also served in the same mission, and there were a couple of other people that, that came out of this mission. But my father served all of his time in the British Mission in Scotland, and Bill Gay was one of his missionary companions. When Bill Gay came home from his mission, he got a job as a chauffeur, essentially as a driver was his title, and he was a driver for Howard Hughes. And at this point, Howard Hughes is still functional. Howard Hughes is out in the world, but his OCD is starting to develop and his paranoia is starting to develop. And Bill Gay ends up sort of starting as a driver and working his way up the corporate ladder in the Hughes organization and becomes Howard Hughes's right-hand man and most trusted executive. And as part of Howard Hughes's OCD, he decides that there are only— the only people he can trust are Mormons. So Howard Hughes starts surrounding himself with Mormons. He starts hiring Mormons. And the term that these Mormons give themselves— and I have to keep using the term Mormon if you're angry that I'm violating President Nelson's counsel— they called themselves the Mormon Mafia. That's the name they gave themselves. They were not killing anybody. They were not running drugs. They were not doing anything. It was just a fun name that they gave to themselves. I don't know if they actually— if they gave it to themselves or the people outside of— but they just started to be known as the Mormon Mafia. And these were just people who worked for Howard Hughes. Now, my father had begun his career, um, You know, my father was elected to the United States Senate when he was 59 years old, which I thought was really, really old. I turn 58 next month, so I don't know. But he had planned on running for office a whole lot earlier than that. His father was a United States senator, served from 1950 to 1974, and my father served as his father's chief of staff. At one point. You can't do that anymore. Nepotism laws won't allow you to do that. But, uh, he did that back then and he ended up getting hired as the Undersecretary of Transportation in the Nixon administration. So he worked in the Nixon administration and he was laying the groundwork to run for office himself. And he ended up buying a public relations firm., and one of the employees of the public relations firm was a man named E. Howard Hunt. E. Howard Hunt was one of the Watergate burglars. Um, and how much do people outside of the United States know or think about Watergate?

Not much.

Not much.

I don't think so. It's big in American political history, and we know a little bit about it, but I don't come across it very much.

Yeah. Uh, well, and it's, it's being talked about now again because JD Vance said recently that if Watergate came out now, uh, it would be a 12-hour story and then go away. And I think he's probably right because that's an indictment of the corruption of the Trump administration. The amount of corruption that you're seeing now just dwarfs what happened in Watergate. But Watergate, essentially, you had a bunch of burglars who broke into the Democratic National Committee office in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. and planted listening devices. So they bugged the, the DNC. One of those burglars was E. Howard Hunt, who worked for my father's PR firm. Uh, when the Watergate story broke,, the White House tried to pin it on my father, tried to say, no, no, no, no, no, this had nothing to do with the White House. This was this Nixon zealot, Bob Bennett and his PR firm. And look, the guy who works for him was one of the burglars. This was all Bob Bennett that did this. I mean, this is very early on in the process. Have you ever seen the movie All the President's Men?

Yes. A long time ago.

Yes. Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman. Play Woodward and Bernstein, who are the Washington Post reporters that blew open the whole scandal on Watergate. And if you watch the movie, Robert Redford is working the phones and he's calling people and he flips through his piece of paper and there's a name on the paper and it says Bob Bennett. And then there's a phone number and it was my father's actual work phone number. My mother said that she watched that movie and just went, What? Your phone number is on the screen. So Robert Redford calls Bob Bennett, or Bob Woodward, the character calls Bob Bennett, the character Bob Bennett, and says, we want to know about Howard Hunt. What do you know about Howard Hunt? And he says, well, you know, he works for the CIA too, don't you? And Robert Redford's eyes get wide. You know, it's what? And that sort of starts to blow open the whole thing. And my father actually had an association with the CIA. This becomes— I mean, there are all these tentacles of this. My father, when he bought the Mullen Company, the Robert R. Mullen Company, a lot of names here. I don't even know who Robert R. Mullen was, but that was the name of the company. That's who my father bought it from. He found out that part of the package was the fact that they had a contract with the CIA for people to be able to go overseas and pretend they worked for the Robert R. Mullen Company. The Robert R. Mullen Company was a CIA front. So spies overseas would say, no, no, I'm not with the CIA. I'm just an operative for the Robert R. Mullen Company. And so that gave the whole taint of possible involvement of my father in Watergate extra, um, momentum, or, you know, it tied him all into all of this. So Watergate breaks and my father is sort of dragged through the mud on this and ends up losing his, uh, the, the company goes bankrupt. The, he was investigated. He was interviewed before grand juries. They all gave him a clean bill of health, but nobody wanted to be a client of a company that had all of this taint of Watergate on it. Yeah. And possible scandal around it. And one of his clients during all of this was Howard Hughes. And this story is kind of interesting here because my father had worked for the Department of Transportation. He got a call, I think it was from Bill Gay, but it might have been from somebody else in the Hughes organization. I don't know this specifically, but just for fun, I'm going to pretend it's Bill Gay. Bill Gay calls my father and said, okay, Hughes is flying again. Howard Hughes considered himself an aviator. That's the name of the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio. That's, that's how he saw himself. Created a lot of innovations in the aviation industry and did a lot of these things and loved to fly. And at one point was flying an experimental jet that ended up crashing in the Beverly Hills Country Club in Los Angeles. And that put him in the hospital. He almost died, but that got him addicted to painkillers. For the rest of his life. He was a drug addict for the rest of his life. Uh, but, uh, Bill Gay calls my father— this, this would have been either late '60s or early '70s— and said, um, Howard Hughes is flying again and he's flying to London, but he doesn't have a passport. And so what we need you to do is call your old buddies at the Department of Transportation and smooth this over and allow him to land in London without a passport. And time is of the essence. We need you to do this right now. So Dad calls the Department of Transportation, talks to them for a while and discusses the situation, and calls Bill Gay back and says, yeah, Bill, I'm sorry. There's nothing they can do. He can't land in London without a passport. He's, he's not going to be able to fly to London. And they said, no, Bob, you don't understand. He is flying to London. As we talk, he is flying the airplane to London and he's going to land. And you need to make sure that he can get, that he can do that and he can get into London and get into the UK. Without a passport, uh, you have to do this. So Dad calls back and talks to the Department of Transportation and then calls Bill Gay back and said, okay, this is as far as they're willing to go. He can land in London, but at 9 AM tomorrow morning, he needs to be on the doorstep of the American Embassy and get himself a passport, or he will never be able to reenter the United States ever again. If he leaves the country without a passport and doesn't get a passport in 24 hours, he will not be allowed reentry. I don't know if it's that he wouldn't be considered a citizen anymore. I mean, I looked into this now. I was on Ward Radio a couple of nights ago telling all of these stories, and I've gone now and relooked into it. And essentially, it would be as if he were not a citizen. He would probably be able to get back into the country after a whole lot of difficult things to try to prove his citizenship. But the fact that he was living outside the country without a passport would have been de facto evidence that he was no longer a United States citizen. And when you give up your citizenship, you have to surrender your passport. And so that's essentially what they were saying anyway. So, um, that's the deal. He has to go and show up at the American embassy, get a passport, or he'll never be able to return to the United States. For the rest of his life, Howard Hughes never returned to the United States. He wouldn't show up. He was so weird and secretive, he wouldn't go get a passport. He wouldn't do anything that required him to interact with any degree of the public. And he spent the rest of his life in exile as a result. And so all of this is going on in, in 1974.

Was that in the UK, Jim? He was stuck in the UK essentially.

No, he was not. Well, I don't know if he was stuck in the UK and UK territory. But he essentially spent the rest of his life in the Bahamas. Now, aren't the Bahamas, don't they have some connection to the UK?

Yes, they do. Yes, very much so. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

They're part of the Commonwealth, I think. There was a, there was a relationship there for sure. Yep.

That's where, that's where Howard Hughes spent the rest of his life. He was in this weird compound in the Bahamas and he was surrounded by the Mormon Mafia. They were essentially kids who were his domestic help. I mean, they lived out there with him. So during all of this, this is a little bit of a tangent, but during all of this, there's a guy named Clifford Irving who was a failed novelist. He had tried to publish a bunch of books and was deeply in debt., and there's a movie about this called Hoax starring Richard Gere. I don't know if you've ever heard of that. So Clifford Irving gets this idea and he says, well, he— no, let me back up. So Clifford Irving, as a failed novelist, is looking for work and he meets Noah Dietrich. Who is one of Howard Hughes's right-hand men. I don't think he was a Mormon though, so I'm not sure how that works. But Noah Dietrich had written a memoir about his life with Hughes, and he said, hey, Clifford Irving, you're a writer, could you review this for me and tell me what you think of this? And Clifford Irving starts to read it, and he gets this idea that he said, I could take the information in this book and I can forge the autobiography of Howard Hughes. I can pretend that I've been meeting secretly with Howard Hughes and Howard Hughes has been giving me this information, uh, so that I can help him write his autobiography. And he says, and Howard Hughes is out of the country and is weird enough that people would think that this is something he might do.. And the fact that Howard Hughes would deny doing it would just sort of add fuel to the fire, uh, that it would be part of this, that this— he's a crazy person. I mean, it, it, it actually flew for a while. Um, so he made a copy of this, this memoir, and he starts to write this autobiography, and he gets the largest advance in the history of American publishing., made out to, uh, a million dollars. And the check is made out to H. Hughes. So the check is a million dollars to Howard Hughes, but actually to H. Hughes. And, um, and Howard Hughes is— the organization, uh, is vigorously denying that this happened. My father was the PR guy for Hughes at this point and said, this is not happening. Nobody is meeting with Howard Hughes anywhere. His entire life is completely documented. And but Clifford Irving says, no, I'm on the phone with him all the time. He has this big elaborate story of how he met him and Howard Hughes offered him a single date and how that was— that piece of fruit was symbolic of some— I mean, it was just this whole elaborate story and fiction. And it starts to unravel. When the Swiss bank that gets the check made out to H. Hughes reports that the check was deposited by a woman calling herself Helga Hughes. Here we go. And so that's how he was able to do all this. He was also very good at forging Howard Hughes's signature. When this went to trial, he actually wrote, forged, wrote Howard Hughes's signature and gave it to the prosecuting attorney who framed it. It was just so amazing that he was so good at this. But so because he would forge letters from Howard Hughes when they're telling him, no, this is all— this is— you're wrong. This is a hoax. He'd say, well, then how do you explain this letter I just got from Howard Hughes?

Right.

You know, and I was just on the phone with Howard Hughes. And he says, yeah, Howard Hughes is eccentric and Howard Hughes doesn't want people to realize this until, you know, so, um, uh, finally at one point Howard Hughes calls a press conference. Now this is in the era before, uh, speakerphones are a thing and remote press conferences are a thing.

Where is the press release? Sorry, is it in the Bahamas?

No, no. The press conference is in Los Angeles.

Okay. Right.

Howard Hughes is in the Bahamas and he conducts the press conference by speakerphone. Gotcha.

Right.

Nobody sees him. Uh, there, you know, no, no. And they get some journalists that knew Howard Hughes back when Howard Hughes was in public and they ask him questions that only Howard Hughes would be able to answer. They verify that it's him. Howard Hughes categorically denies that this is his autobiography. Dad talks about all of this in his book about the Book of Mormon because he talks about how, um, the farther away you get from a forgery, the more ridiculous it looks. And, um, and you look at the forgery and there were a lot of things that were in there that certified, people said, yeah, this has to be authentic because he had details from this, this memoir that he'd stolen, uh, that, that he wouldn't have been able to know otherwise. But there are other things in the book that don't pass the smell test and that are, are kind of strange. And as you look back on it now, uh, it's, it's very clear that it's a forgery. And there was another forgery in the Hughes thing that dad talks about that comes up later in the story. So when Dad's company goes belly up, uh, Bill Gay, his old missionary buddy, gives him a call and says, well, what if you came to work for Howard Hughes full-time? You, uh, we, you can come and work as his PR director. So my dad, this is what brought me to Southern California. I was born in Washington, DC.. And one of my early memories is sitting on mover boxes in my house. They're packing up my house to move. I was 6 years old and I was watching Richard Nixon resign on television. We were all gathered around to watch this moment. I didn't really understand why it was such a big deal, but I remember very distinctly that happening. So we were moving to Southern California. Which is where the Hughes organization was based. Dad was hired as the PR director for the Summa Corporation, was the name of the company. It was sort of a holding company or a management company. Howard Hughes had a whole bunch of different companies. There was Hughes Airwest, which was the airline at that point. There was a sort of a movie-making arm to it still., that my uncle was involved in. My uncle that we've talked about on the podcast, Howard Anderson. Um, Greg Prince knows him quite well. Uh, and he ended up being the LA stake president at one point. That's long after he was working for Hughes. But my uncle was working for Howard Hughes. Dad works for Howard Hughes as his PR guy during all this time. Uh, My father is the head PR guy of Howard Hughes. Never once met him. Never once spoke to him. Uh, my father had no contact with Howard Hughes ever. I mean, can you imagine being the head of a company and your PR guy never speaks to you? I mean, why, why was that?

Why didn't they meet?

Howard Hughes didn't speak to anybody.

Right. So very recluse and very isolated individual, right?

Yeah. He's in the Bahamas.

In the Bahamas.

Bill Gay still spoke to him.

Yep.

Um, I, there were just a handful of people, uh, because for my father to meet him, he would've had to go out to the Bahamas and nobody did that.

There was still, so prior to the Bahamas and during the Bahamas, so just making sure I connect the dots. You still had this, uh, self-named, uh, Mormon Mafia group of Mormons that Howard used. Preferred Mormons. You said that earlier, right? Trusted Mormons. Did, uh, that—

two questions.

Did the Mormon Mafia continue, uh, into the Bahamas meeting with him and working with him directly? And also, was your dad considered to be part of the Mormon the so-called Mormon Mafia group.

Uh, yes and yes. Uh, but again, the phrase Mormon Mafia, uh, was a nickname. I mean, it was just—

that's all it was, just a nickname.

That's all it was. And, and there was nothing secretive about it.

Nothing insidious, no malicious.

Weren't killing people. Sure, we weren't, uh, you know it— everybody knew who was in it. You know, it was just, oh, look, Howard Hughes has all these Mormons working for him. They're kind of like— they're the Mormon Mafia, you know. And so one of the other things— I mean, this was consistent with just Howard Hughes's weird, eccentric behavior. So in, like, in 1960, I think it's 1966, which is before my father, um, I think even had Howard Hughes as a client, but my uncle, I think at that point, was working for him. Um, Howard Hughes wanted to go to Las Vegas. When Howard Hughes died, uh, he owned a bunch of property in Vegas, and the Howard Hughes Foundation, which is really the only part of Howard Hughes's empire that still survives today, Um, is based in Las Vegas, but the reason why Howard Hughes started buying property in Vegas is bizarre. He wanted to just visit Vegas. He had never been to Las Vegas. He thought it would be fun to go to Las Vegas. So he goes to the Desert Inn Hotel in Las Vegas, and because he doesn't want anybody to bother him, he rents out the entire top floor. He has his own suite, but he rents the entire top floor so that he never has to come in contact with another human being that he doesn't know. And, uh, while he's up there, he's living in absolute squalor. Uh, he does not clean himself. Uh, he gets a screening room up there and he starts watching movies and they're the same movies over and over and over again. They're movies that he made. Uh, I don't even remember the names of some of them, but, uh, uh, they, a lot of them, uh, you know, if you watch the Leonardo DiCaprio movie, he made this one movie that was all ridiculously expensive and it was all up in the air and they had a final product, product of the movie. And he went, oh, that doesn't look right. Let's make it again. I mean, he was just nuts. And so the, the, the upper room of the Desert Inn is filthy. The Desert Inn doesn't know what to do with this guy because he won't leave. He's there for months and months. And they start the process of trying to evict him, get him out of it. And so to avoid that, Howard Hughes bought the Desert Inn. He just bought the hotel. He's like, you want— no, you don't have to kick me out. I'll just Buy it. And then he decides, hey, this is nice. And he starts buying. He bought a number of properties there. Didn't know anything about the casino business. Didn't know anything about any of this. He just, he just did weird things. The one story my uncle told, um, at one point he, he decided the only thing he wanted to eat was banana nut ice cream. From Baskin-Robbins. And, uh, Baskin-Robbins, you know, 31 Flavors is what they call themselves, and they rotate the flavors around. It's, it's 31 flavors and they're different flavors. And so they discontinue some of the flavors as they swap out other ones. And at one point they're about to discontinue banana nut ice cream, which is the only thing that Howard Hughes will eat. And he, um, so The Hughes organization buys up the entire stock of Baskin-Robbins's Banana Nut ice cream and hundreds and hundreds of gallons of ice cream that they put in storage because, and then at some point Howard Hughes went, oh, you know, I like vanilla instead and just stopped eating. And so, and so my uncle says that all the executives have free— had freezers full of banana nut ice cream because they had all this ice cream they didn't know what to do with. And so they all took it home, as much as they could. And but hundreds of gallons of it just go to waste. I mean, this, this, this guy is genuinely insane. Yeah.

More than eccentric.

More than eccentric. I mean, it's an illness. It's a— I mean, he, he was debilitated.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He entered with billions of dollars to spend. I mean, yeah.

Yeah, he was the richest man in the world when he died in 1976. His estate was worth $2.5 billion, which in today's money would have been at least 10 times that. So Elon still is much wealthier than he was, but, but he— and it's amazing that that was even possible because he was incapacitated for, for a huge chunk of his life. It's a testament to how brilliant he was, I think, because all of his businesses he had set up and had them moving, that they were able to sort of proceed and go on without him. But, but yeah, so the Mormon Mafia is very much a thing and my father is very much in the center of it. But there's nothing illegal about it. There's nothing untoward about it. I think sinister. Yeah, nothing sinister about it. Now, one of— so Candace Owens, that's where I want to go.

Yeah, what's the connect— what, what is her connection there? What is, what is she trying to connect? You mentioned she's conspiratorial. Yeah, she's trying to achieve— what's her objective there? What's she doing?

So Candace Owens lays out the Mormon Mafia and says, look, there was this wild Mormon Mafia connected to the Hughes organization. And when Howard Hughes died, he did not leave a will. And the conspiratorialists say, or Candace Owens, I mean, I think even in that clip I just played at the beginning, said that's, you know, can you imagine a man like this with this much money not having a will? You know, and the Mormons must have had something to do with that. Well, the answer is yes. I can imagine Howard Hughes not having a will because Howard Hughes was insane. Howard Hughes had no children. He had been married a number of times. When he went into exile, he was still married to Jean Peters. She had to make appointments to go see him., and they ended up getting divorced. He had no children. Um, and he just, uh, you know, yeah, I can imagine him not leaving a will. Now I told you about the movie Hoax with Richard Gere. Have you ever heard of the movie Melvin and Howard?

No, I have not.

Uh, I can't, I've never seen it and I want to see it, but it's not streaming anywhere. It has kind of gone into It's a kind of a hidden movie. I've never been able to find it. It was a very popular movie at the time and well regarded. Mary Steenburgen won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance in it as Melvin's wife. And it tells the story and treats it as a true story —of a guy named Melvin Dumar, who was a gas station attendant in Nevada outside of Las Vegas, and at one point picks up a hitchhiker, a bedraggled old man, and the man identifies himself as Howard Hughes. In the movie, he's played by Jason Robards. I think he was nominated for an Oscar for that movie. And he takes him into Vegas and essentially saves his life. I don't know if he's a hitchhiker or if he's just like by the side of the road, just this bedraggled mess. And Melvin Dumar cleans him up, takes him to Vegas, and the man identified himself as Howard Hughes. And I don't know what the movie story is, but none of that actually happened. And we'll get— we're getting that. So when Howard Hughes dies at the church office building in Salt Lake City, a will shows up on Spencer W. Kimball's desk. There's a will, Howard Hughes' will. And they started calling it the Mormon will because it left $156 million to the church. But it also left 1/16 of Howard Hughes's estate to Melvin Dumar. And everybody went, who, who's Melvin Dumar? And, and, uh, the will goes for, for, for, I don't know how long it is, but it's considered genuine. It's the only will. But it's very clearly a forgery. There are misspellings in the will. Noah Dietrich ends up— is assigned to be the executor of the will. And that didn't make sense because Howard Hughes' Noah Dietrich, the guy who wrote the memoir that Clifford Irving had stolen— I mean, a lot of names here, so I don't Anyway, he and Howard Hughes, Noah Dietrich and Howard Hughes, had had a huge falling out. And, and there was no way Howard Hughes would have made him his, the executor of his will. The other thing, but the thing that stood out to my father is that it talks about the Spruce Goose, you know, this flying boat. And it, it refers in the will to the Spruce Goose. Well, Howard Hughes hated the name the Spruce Goose. He would never have called it the Spruce Goose in his own will. And so, and then it comes to be known that the way it ended up on Spencer W. Kimball's desk is that Melvin Dumar had put, had put it there. Melvin Dumar died probably about 8 years ago and insisted up until that point that the will was genuine, but didn't have any real explanation for how he came to have it and to be able to put it on the church office building's desk. It was very clearly a forgery and, and didn't go anywhere. So, so here's where Candace Owens completely falls apart, because with no will, Howard Hughes's estate went into probate and it ended up being just divvied up among distant cousins. Howard Hughes had no siblings, um, and, and the Hughes family— so it went to people that probably never met Howard Hughes, didn't know Howard Hughes, and had no interest in perpetuating Howard Hughes's businesses. So, uh, the, the Desert Inn and all of the Vegas properties get sold at fire sale prices. You know, they're just liquidating the entire estate. The airline gets sold. I think it was incorporated and I don't know who bought it. Uh, but all, all of these pieces just get sold off and the management for all these pieces disappears entirely. The Mormon Mafia ends. My father loses his job. Uh, he went on and became the PR director for the Osmond family. During the Donny and Marie Show years. Uh, and then the Os— the Donny and Marie Show gets canceled and he loses his job then. I mean, my dad's career was really sh— when he was finally elected to the Senate, my mother said to him, you think he can stick it out for the full 6 years? Because he'd never held a job, uh, that long. Uh, he was hired as the Hughes guy in '74. Hughes died in '76. So he was only the PR director for 2 years. He had had Howard Hughes as a client for years before that. But, uh, and that, and that's why I, I took a dump in Howard Hughes's pool. I, I've told you that story, haven't I?

Remind us at home.

Well, when, when I was 3 years old, um, you were 3. I was 3 and We went to the— the whole family went to Florida for the Republican National Convention in 1972. And, and my Howard Hughes was one of my father's clients. And the Hughes organization allowed Howard Hughes or allowed Dad to use one of Howard Hughes's private homes. And we stayed in Howard Hughes's Florida house. This is 1972. Howard Hughes is already in the Bahamas. Howard Hughes has never seen this house. I have no idea and never did see this house. I have no idea why he owned this house, but he was weird and he owned a house in Florida and we got to stay there and the house had an indoor swimming pool. And my father, my brother. Was telling me, I remember he was telling me, he was explaining to me, he's like, these pools are so cool because they have this thing called chlorine in them. So it means that even if you pee in the pool, the chlorine makes the pee go away. And I'm 3 years old, but I'm scientifically minded. And I think I want to, I want to do an experiment because if it makes pee go away, what does it do? To number 2. And I mean, I remember very little. I was only 3, obviously, almost 4. I was almost 4 years old. I turned 4 in 1972. But, but I remember watching the turd float just a little bit away from me and just thinking, huh, doesn't work. It didn't, doesn't make poo go away. I'll make a note of that. And not even, you know, not even worried about it. Didn't tell anybody. And they discover this turd and it becomes Caddyshack. You know, they drain the pool and they're scrubbing the pool and it was just this huge deal. I felt terrible. Uh, I don't know how much trouble I got into. I don't remember any of that, but I do remember them scrubbing out the pool. Pool. So whenever we play, uh, Two Truths and a Lie, uh, I always— truth. Yeah, I'd say I always use, I took a dump in Howard Hughes's pool. Wow. As the one truth. Yes.

Uh, so anyway, that's quite a claim. No one else can claim that.

No one else can. I don't know if anybody else has done that. And Hughes being this huge germaphobe, I made sure that even if he wanted to come back, he wouldn't be able to because somebody had taken a dump in his pool.

He probably sold that property once he heard. Probably did.

He probably did. They probably did. Uh, but made loss. Uh, well, that didn't matter at this point, but Howard Hughes, what another interesting, and this is, this is a little bit of a true conspiracy. Because if you look at the records, the records say that Howard Hughes died midair flying from Acapulco to Houston, Texas, which is where he was from and where he's been buried. And my father said that that's a lie. That's not true. Howard Hughes died in— I don't know if he died in Acapulco or if he died in the Bahamas. I don't know why he was flying from Acapulco Poco. But he said Howard Hughes died before he got on the plane. Uh, but, um, uh, he did not want— the Hughes organization did not want Mexico to take possession of the body or to have— I mean, there would have been a whole bunch of— it wouldn't have been difficult, and they would have still been able to take his remains back to the United States., but, um, he, they just wanted to skip the bureaucracy. And so they, they put his dead body on the plane and flew him to Houston and saying that he was seeking emergency medical treatment. Well, he would never have sought emergency medical treatment in the United States because of he didn't have a passport and he would have had to go through all of this rigmarole to be able to reenter the United States. United States. So they put him on the plane dead, uh, knowing that there would be no problem bringing a dead body back to the United States. Uh, but my father insists that there's no way. I don't know if he knew for sure, but he was pretty sure. He— every time he would tell the story about getting Howard Hughes to land in London, he'd always tell the story of that he died before he got on the plane. So, so conspiracy theorists might say, oh, that's a conspiracy. But my father insists that was real and I believe it anyway. But yeah, the entire Mormon Mafia disappears. But so Candace Owens, though, says, okay, well, the people that bought Howard Hughes's casinos were, um, Steve Wynn was one of them, or Steve Wynn's, uh, father. Anyway, that organization buys it. Sheldon Adelson buys one of them. He was a big Republican donor. Um, and, and these are Jews that buy the Mormon Mafia property, and she insists that there is some kind of connecting thread between the Mormon mafia and the Jewish mafia. Candace Owens is a huge antisemite and the Jews are all part of— she, she just tries to sort of smooth over that transition. But if you look at the transition, this would be like me saying, I mean, Ian, do you remember who, who you bought your house from? Do you remember the person, or did you— but is your house new? Did you— are you the first people to live in it?

No, we, we, yeah, we've, we vaguely remember. It's a long time ago, right? Yeah, vaguely.

Yeah. Yeah. So the way I compare this is this blaming the Mormon Mafia for whatever it is that Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson did after they bought these properties. Would be like you being prosecuted for crimes committed by the guy you bought your house from. You know, I mean, you bought the house, it's now your house. There's no continuity between what happened there. Uh, uh, Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson bought these properties. Uh, they did not buy any management of the properties. They cleaned house. There wasn't any management. This was all dissolved. They just bought the real estate, got their own people to come and run these casinos. There is absolutely no through line from the Hughes organization to any existing business today. There's just, there's just no connection. None of Hughes's relatives wanted any of these businesses. They just wanted the money. And so Hughes's empire was liquidated. And, and these— I don't know what these Hughes people are doing with that money and what's happened with it, but Howard Hughes's footprint on the business world completely disappears overnight. The only thing that survives him is this charity, and that's still based in Las Vegas. And, um, and that's still doing some things. And I don't know if Candace Owens is trying somehow to connect the charity to the Mormon Mafia, but then Candace Owens starts talking about these Jews who are pro-Israel and they kill Charlie Kirk, uh, because, um, Charlie Kirk was going to renounce or change his position on Israel somehow. I mean, it doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense. I mean, as she talks about it, Ward Radio played pretty much the whole video and had me comment on it. As she talks about it, she says a lot of things that are 100% true. I mean, pretty much everything she had to say about the Mormon Mafia was true, but it's also irrelevant. It's like, then you have to make this huge leap. That the Mormon mafia is somehow still in cahoots with this Jewish mafia, and that the Jewish mafia reconnects with the Mormon mafia, uh, to kill Charlie Kirk. Uh, and Tyler Robinson, who is the guy who killed Charlie Kirk, the shooter, uh, I mean, allegedly, I mean, he's on trial, but there doesn't really seem to be much doubt that he did this. Uh, he was raised in a Mormon family, uh, had rejected Mormonism, uh, by the time his, his partner was transitioning, I think. Uh, anyway, but somehow Candace Owens is trying to say, well, look, the Mormons, they're everywhere. And she, and then she says, look, there are all these Mormons that work for Turning Point USA, which is, um, which is Charlie Kirk's organization. And she just lays all this out and says, and, and, and, and just kind of steps back and goes, it's just something to think about. It's just, you know, it's an interesting story. I mean, she can't draw a straight line, if that makes any sense, between any of these things. Yeah.

It's like, as I'm listening to you, uh, and, and trying to, I mean, you've obviously got a intimate knowledge or a lot of knowledge through your conversations with your father, um, who is a trustworthy, reliable source, no doubt. She seems, it sounds like Candace is somewhat accurate in conversations along those lines, you know, about these different people, different groups and what they did, et cetera. But in order to get a story, in order to make it exciting and scandalous and compelling, she has to connect the lines. Um, and so the internet is awash with people like Candace who are trying to take a, you know, a set of facts, if you like, that happened, um, but trying to connect them to something more scandalous and more, um, suspicious in order to have a story.

Otherwise, they haven't got a story, have they?

Right. So suggesting that the Church Mormon Mafia is something other than what you've described, and there's all these connections and the church is insidious and acting, um, covertly through the different people, different organizations, et cetera, et cetera. Because, and it's trying to control, I mean, this is one of the arguments of, um, the world-renowned, uh, cult recovery expert Steve, uh, Stephen Hassan, as you know. Yep. And it, it, it's interesting because. I can see how some people perceive the church, the Mormons, to be perhaps at times, uh, influential and over-influential, or appears to be connected to all kinds of individuals around the world, uh, politicians and as, you know, in, in, in the different, uh, um, uh, spheres of influence and power. I mean, the church does have that, right? I mean, the church has got formal relationships with prime ministers and presidents and the Pope and, and we know that that's no secret. We also know that the church, for lots of reasons I can think of, a lot of members of the church, they go into armed forces and they go into the CIA and they go into these jurisdictions. Professions and law enforcement, et cetera. And in law, you know, President Oaks, the prophet, is a Utah Supreme High Court, or was a Supreme High Court judge, right? So, you know, in the church, uh, you're encouraged to excel, get a great education, uh, excel in your profession, go right to the very top. And there are a lot of members of the church who do that, and they become really famous actors, singers, politicians, you know, like your father and your grandfather, you know, judges. And there are notable names from the Mormon community that have excelled. We know that. Is it insidious? Is it malicious? You know, that is obviously open to interpretation. I don't think it is. I'd go as far, you know, I have a lot of issues with the church and very critical of the church. I would go as far as to say that the church is, has been, and is actively influencing, uh, politics, right? And business. I, I don't think that's a secret. I don't think it broadcasts this stuff, but I don't think it's a secret at the same time. And the church has an agenda. And so what is that agenda? Well, the agenda is to advance and accelerate the teachings of the church. We know that he has a mission program. There's no secret of that. I think it does that in these private conversations with all kinds of influential people around the world. Another agenda is to make money. It acts and behaves and operates very much like a corporation. It invests, it makes money, right? I don't think the church likes to talk about that. I think it likes to keep things a little bit hidden on that. Well, quite a lot hidden, frankly. And I have issues with that. How, you know, how Much more beyond that. Um, you know, does the church, um, try to extend its influence? Um, I, I don't know, but I don't think it is insidious. I don't think it's, um, involved in anything criminal at all. I, I, I, I mean, other than the church trying to protect the institution around the child sex abuse claims, which are very serious and all the, all the failings of the church in regarding doing that, and that church could do a lot more than that. I don't think the church is as, um, dark and as insidious as some make out, but these people like Candace need a story, otherwise they haven't got an audience. So they get, you know, one and one and they try to make it add up to three and two and two equals five, and it's that that scannulous, that indirect, let's call it that relationship with buying a property. You know, if I bought this property from a, you know, the biggest drug mafia in the world, does, I know, am I complicit in that? Well, no, I just bought it in good faith. I mean, I probably wouldn't buy it if it was like that, right? But if it was bought by, you know, from somebody who was a criminal or ex-celebrity that, you know, did something scandalous. Well, that doesn't mean I am. It just means I just bought the property. But, you know, people like Candace, what, what you're saying then is Candace has got these, um, these facts in parallel and to connect them and to make a compelling scandalous story, she's inferring in her language, how she's couching it, that in the form of questions, that's a safe way to do it. You know, is there a connection? Why the church is, is the, is the, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, too much influence by the Mormon, uh, community in politics or in law enforcement or in the CIA or in, in economics. And have the Mormons got a stronghold because they're trying to, um, achieve the, um, you know, trying to take over like the Jews? You know, it's the same argument for the Jews. Uh, Jim, I had this in the UK where the Jews, um, own everything and they control everything and they control business and economics and politics. Well, same thing. How many Jewish people have been successful? Thousands. I mean, thousands.

Well, growing up in Southern California, I grew up in a Jewish community. I mean, all my friends that weren't members of the church were Jewish, right? And they were brilliant. I mean, they were wonderful people. Kind people, faithful people, and industrious, industrious entrepreneurs, investors, intelligent. You know, I've got nothing bad to say about them. Generalizing people, I don't know that it's good to generalize anybody, but the fact that you have a preponderance of Jewish people that are successful is a tribute to individually how good these people are. That's it. Yeah.

And this is my point because of the Mormon culture generally being, you know, excelling, go get it. I mean, I was taught this myself. Go get education, be the best. Is that, that's SEM, Scotland on a Mission saying, whatever they are at Grow Light Park, whatever you're doing, be the best, right? The church promotes education. It promotes intelligence. Promotes competency, promotes motivation-driven. Look at the mission, right? Get out there, get up, get out, knock on doors, convert people, bring them into the church. And the more people that you baptize, how great shall be your joy, right? That's the Mormon culture. So it drives you to excel. And that's a good thing. It's not a bad thing, as long as what you're doing is a good thing. The same, the same in the Jewish community. It's the same thing. It doesn't mean that the Jews are taking over or the Muslims are taking over. They might exert a little bit more influence than, um, than perhaps what you don't like. Um, but you know, the church has an agenda. The Jewish community have an agenda. And I think mostly it's, it's a, it's a good agenda. I don't think they're trying to—

well, I, I want a point of order on that in that when you talk about the Jewish community, there is a difference between how Mormons and the Jews, in the sense that the Mormons are tied to a singular hierarchical organization. Jewish people are not. You know, you— there is no president of the Jewish church that's an equivalent to Dallin H. Oaks. And you have, you know, my friends growing up, you, uh, I, I came to, there are 3 essential categories. You have the Orthodox Jews, which are the guys that wear the hats and have the beards. And, uh, I didn't really know anybody like that growing up. You have the Conservative Jews, uh, and I had some friends who were Conservative Jews, but most of my friends were Reform Jews, which really ended up being cultural Jews, that they didn't really subscribe to a lot of the, the teachings or the practices, although all of them had bar mitzvahs. And I was very jealous because I wanted a bar mitzvah because all of my friends made— got a whole bunch of money at their bar mitzvahs, and they used that money to go to school. They're like, well, you just use your bar mitzvah money. It's like, well, I don't have any bar mitzvah money. No. How do I get bar mitzvah money? You know, so, uh, it's so, so to say that the Jewish community has an agenda, uh, I think is really a stretch in and of itself because there isn't a sort of uniform. The church has an agenda because the church is something you can put in a box. And you could say this is the church. The church is its members and the church is what it owns. Uh, you don't have a comparable, uh, thing with Judaism.

So anyway, let me qualify the point of order. Uh, I think it'd be fair to say in the Jewish culture, okay, very much like the Mormon culture, I think it's reliable to say they, uh, deploy and behave and, and, and encourage and advance the same qualities as the Mormon Church. Right?

Yeah. Honestly, education, hard work. That's the—

yeah, that's what I just qualify that. And, and that is sure, the culture very much, I think, uh, encourages success.

Um, I, I think that's, that's probably very true.

That doesn't mean that they trying to take over everything. Right. And so, yeah. So Candace, who hopefully is listening to this without those connections and making those inferences, you really don't have a,, much of a leg to stand on really. Uh, we've got a few minutes here, Jim. This is compelling. Um, could you expound a little bit on some of the other main claims, allegations, if you like, that Candace is making in regards to the, the Charlie Kirk thing?

Uh, I, I don't know that there's a whole lot more than that. I mean, there probably is because she specifically starts to name people in Turning Point USA who are members of the church. Right. And she doesn't make a lot of overt claims. She sits there and she draws a picture and goes, hmm, interesting. Right. Does she say at the moment—

sorry, does she say the Mormon Mafia is still active? And is she saying— because I'm not seeing the whole video— that the Mormon Mafia were involved in Charlie Cook? Or is she saying that Mormon Mafia is you know, a church-funded, supported organization still active out there behaving covertly. Is she saying anything along those lines explicitly?

No. Implicitly, yes. Because if she were to start saying the Mormon Mafia is still active, then she'd have to back that up. Then you can ask her questions like, well, who's in it? Hmm. Uh, who's in the Mormon Mafia?

And that's liable, by the way. If, if she says she's in the Mormon Mafia, that's liable for defamation. The church has a case, right?

Right, right. But I, I mean, the, the implication that she's trying to make is that if you are a Mormon, then you are in the Mormon Mafia. But that doesn't make any sense because initially the Mormon Mafia is a term that was used for Hughes employees. And she makes that point explicitly. This is where the name comes from. These were the Mormon Mafia. Howard Hughes only trusted Mormons. And then it just kind of come— becomes— and look, this guy in Turning Point USA is a Mormon too. Well, if she's dragged before a judge, she can say, well, I never said he was in the Mormon Mafia. I just said there's the Mormon Mafia, and look, he's a Mormon too. And that's true. He's a Mormon too. I mean, this is, this is, uh, I think there has to be a level at which she knows she's full of crap.

It's just desperation. It's desperate for a story. I mean, that's the thing. Everybody's trying to compete for attention online, right? And the more scandalous, the more attention grabbing, the more spectacular the story is., and the inference and asking it in the form of questions, you know, without that, you know, a lot of these, conspiratorial claims, really fall apart. So she's been, you know, this conversation right now is clearly discrediting her inferences and her allegations and putting substance, you know, clarity, you know, cold eye clarity in those gray gaps that she's tried to connect between the facts. So, right. And, and, and what, why is she doing this? Well, she wants an audience, right?

She wants an audience. Um, she's making an awful lot of money on her. There we go.

We could learn from her. Follow the money, follow the dollars. That's what they say.

We need to start talking about ridiculous scandalous things.

We're not making a bean on this. Why? Uh, we're not, we're not.

Uh, but we could start. I just want to point out that—

or scandalous, we could say.

Well, no, I mean, I'm not going to say anything, but if you go to the Roswell, New Mexico aliens, all of them are kind of bald and pale. And I don't know if you've noticed. Uh, I'm not saying anything. Is that your real hair? Well, this is my real hair. I'm not an alien. Okay, uh, if you watch General Conference— all right, President Oaks is entirely bald. Yeah, has no hair. He's very pale. Oh, this is breaking news. Uh, it's, it's just, it's just something to think about, you know.

I wonder if President Oaks is a— been living amongst us and—

I'm not saying that. No, I never said that. Did I say that? No, I don't. And I'm just coming back with a question.

I don't know if he's, if he's an alien.

I just don't know. I, oh, I never said he was an alien. Where did you get that idea? No, I never said that. I mean, this, this is, this is the Candace Owens logic. I do not think President Oaks is an alien, I guess. But, but I mean, that, that, that's the level of reasoning you're dealing with here. Is, is, well, you got the more mafia, they're all money.

I just, I, I just couldn't do this. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, you turn your podcast off, you know, you end your podcast, you gotta go, you gotta go see your family, friends. You gotta live with yourself. You gotta have some integrity. You gotta sleep at night. Eventually you die. And especially Oaks, uh, has, has, you know, been accused of talking about this too many times by, by someone, but Um, you know, when he asked, you know, how I want to be remembered, well, that's an important question. How do you want to be remembered on this planet? Is it being, you know, conspiratorial, making stuff up? You know, who wants that? You know, eventually we all get forgotten, right? We, we'll all get forgotten. And, um, I think, you know, any memory that is left, I think hopefully that is tied to being, you know, being honest and having, you know, having some integrity at least, not by being a, a wacko online making all these inferences. I'm not saying Candace is a wacko, but there are people out there that push crazy, crazy stories which are not grounded in, in, in fact at all. And we don't want to be like that. And I agree, unless we change our financial model and we want to be scandalous, and that's different.

I'm looking forward to that.

That'll be fun. Me too. I can't wait. I can't wait. So. We are pretty much up against the clock here, Jim Bennett.

Yeah, I've got to head out. You led this.

Thank you so much. I introduce you, Kev. This has been fascinating. You got like 40 seconds to wrap it up.

Any final thoughts, comments? Well, you know, I just want people to think about what we've said here. You know, President Oaks. Has President Oaks ever denied being an alien? Ian? Has he ever? No, I don't know. Not on record. Just something to think. No, conspiratorial thinking is stupid. But, uh, the Mormon Mafia stuff, I just think there are a lot of really interesting, fun stories there. Uh, but none of them have anything to do with, with the death of Charlie Kirk, for heaven's sakes. Mormon Mafia died, uh, decades before Charlie Kirk was born. No, that's not true. But yeah, maybe it is. Anyway, it died before Charlie Kirk was born.

Right, right. Well, Jim, this has been fantastic. Thank you for, you know, just establishing the facts, giving us the context, the backstory, incredibly reliable source from you, from your father, of course, who you absolutely love and respect. And I'm sure there are many more anecdotes and stories to, you know, to to hear from you. Thank you for keeping us grounded and just qualifying, you know, and putting in context the comments and remarks from Candace. Always love doing this with you. It's just so much fun. And to all of our viewers and listeners, thank you for your support. If you like what we do, click like, subscribe. We're not asking for any money, nothing like that. Not yet. Joking. And so, Jim Bennett, as always, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you. And, uh, to everybody who's been with us, uh, thank you for being with us on Inside Out.

Thank you, Jim Bennett. Thank you, Ian Bennett.