Sinatra

by Anthony Summers

  This first teacher passed Frank on to John Quinlan, a former Metropolitan Opera singer who had been fired for drunkenness. A series of forty-five-minute sessions began, at a dollar a time. Frank consulted Quinlan on and off for years, and later they would collaborate on a slim volume called Tips on Popular Singing. Sinatra thought the coach “a great teacher.” Quinlan remembered Frank as “a boy who never stopped studying.”

  A business card Frank used about this time read:

  FRANK SINATRA

  VOCALIST

  RADIO—STAGE—RECORDING ARTIST

  The card carried the phone number Hoboken 3-0985, the same number pregnant women called to avail themselves of Dolly’s midwifery and abortion services. Few potential customers responded, however. For all the voice lessons, for all the days and nights listening to the music of others, success was as elusive as ever. At twenty-two, Frank was getting desperate. “I wasn’t going anywhere,” he remembered. “I was giving up.”

  5

  “Did I Know Those Guys?”

  IT WAS DOLLY, characteristically, who came to the rescue. One night, probably in early 1938, a dejected Frank told her he had been turned down for a singing job. She said she did not want him staying out to all hours in clubs anyway. He gave her a withering look and went upstairs to his room. Soon, through the door, his mother heard him crying. The sobbing went on for hours.

  “I suppose I realized then, for the first time, what singing really meant to Frankie,” Dolly said later. She had never been opposed to his becoming a singer the way her husband was, and resolved to help once again.

  The job he was after was at the Rustic Cabin, the nightspot near the George Washington Bridge where Frank had first hung out with the Three Flashes. Built to look like a log cabin, and advertised as having “true Western atmosphere,” it was a steak-and-chop house with a dance floor and band platform. The Rustic Cabin would attract several hundred people on a good weekend. Sinatra remembered it as a “sneak joint . . . all the married guys would be there with their girlfriends, because there were little cabins inside the room itself . . . very private.”

  Frank was eager to work there for two reasons. The management of Hoboken’s Union Club, where he sang sometimes, could not afford to install a link enabling radio stations to pick up and broadcast music played at distant venues. The Cabin did have a link, and bands performing there were featured Saturday nights on WNEW in New York.

  “Working with a good band,” Sinatra recalled, “was the end of the rainbow for any singer who wanted to make it.” This was, of course, the era of the big bands, of Goodman, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, Duke Ellington, and Guy Lombardo. The radio link ensured that the musicians and managers who mattered, just across the river in Manhattan, could hear the music played there. Its proximity to New York also made it accessible to scouts looking for fresh talent. When Frank had heard there was an opening at the Rustic Cabin, he had jumped at the chance.

  They were looking for someone who could wait tables and emcee on occasion—and sing. The job paid only $15 a week, but Frank wanted it. He badgered musicians who played at the Cabin to put in a word for him when he went for an audition, but bandleader Harold Arden, who remembered Frank from the days of the Three Flashes, did not like him. He was turned down flat.

  Years later, when the press got interested, Dolly explained that she had contacted her acquaintance Harry Steeper, who was head of the New Jersey branch of the American Federation of Musicians and close to the man soon to be its president. The union man was a public official in the township of North Bergen, five miles from Hoboken, and knew the Sinatras. “As fellow politicians we used to do favors for one another,” Dolly told a reporter. “I asked him to see to it that Frankie got another tryout. ‘And this time,’ I said, ‘see to it that he gets the job.’ ” Steeper also received a written request from Marty. He told the Sinatras they could tell Frank he was as good as hired, and he was.

  Some believed there was more to it. In a scathing article years later, New York Daily Mirror columnist Lee Mortimer wrote, “The mob got Sinatra a job at the Rustic Cabin.”

  “DID I KNOW THOSE GUYS?” Sinatra said late in life, referring to the Mafia. “Sure, I knew some . . . I spent a lot of time working in saloons. And saloons are not run by the Christian Brothers. There were a lot of guys around, and they came out of Prohibition, and they ran pretty good saloons. I was a kid. I worked in the places that were open. They paid you, and the checks didn’t bounce. I didn’t meet any Nobel Prize winners in saloons. But if Francis of Assisi was a singer and worked in saloons, he would’ve met the same guys. That doesn’t make him part of something. They said hello, you said hello. They came backstage. They thanked you. They offered you a drink. That was it. It doesn’t matter anymore, does it?”

  Far from merely having had incidental encounters with “some guys” in his youth, Sinatra had intimate relationships with vicious murderers, thieves, and vice czars. His business would be entwined with their rackets for fifty years.

  Sinatra avoided the mob issue whenever possible. In the mid-1960s, when he agreed to a CBS interview, he had his attorney stipulate that there were to be no questions about the Mafia. When Walter Cronkite broached the subject anyway Sinatra promptly interrupted the interview and, producer Don Hewitt remembered, “went ballistic.” Over nearly five decades, various congressional committees and state bodies sought to question Sinatra about his mob connections. When forced to testify he was often truculent, always evasive.

  In the wake of the attack by Lee Mortimer, Sinatra responded with a lengthy article of his own. “I’ve met many undesirable characters in my years of nightclub entertaining,” he wrote, “just as every nightclub star has at some time or other.” That was his standard defense, and it was true, so far as it went. Singers’ relations with the mob, however, sometimes had sinister consequences.

  Italian-American gangsters had tried to extort money from the great tenor Enrico Caruso as early as 1909. He reportedly resisted at first, but later placated them with a secret payment. Bing Crosby, according to FBI files, caved in to demands for money and once, when one element of the mob threatened him, turned for help to a Capone hit man. Mario Lanza endured underworld pressure throughout his career, most often when he was in financial trouble. East Coast mobsters once told Lanza they could help in various ways provided they received a cut of his earnings. If he did not go along, they threatened, they would kill him.

  Al Martino made a deal with criminals that he came to regret. “Underworld figures came to see my manager,” he said, “to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse. My manager stepped aside after he was threatened. So now these figures became my managers.” Martino eventually fled to Europe because of debts to the mob, not to return until seven years later, after his principal tormentor had died.

  “Serious business, giving yourself over to ‘the Boys,’ ” Mel Tormé recalled. “Their power in the entertainment field was indisputable. The price a performer had to pay, though, was almost certainly unacceptable.” Warned by his manager that the mobsters “would literally run your life,” Tormé said, he managed to work without them.

  Other entertainers close to Sinatra were manipulated by gangsters. Comedian Jimmy Durante had a tough guy and fringe underworld character as his manager, was bankrolled in a movie by Waxey Gordon, paid a fine for Mickey Cohen, and counted Bugsy Siegel as a friend. So did the actor George Raft, who had a good grounding for the gangster roles that brought him fame. He started out as a small-time hoodlum, riding shotgun on booze trucks being delivered to Dutch Schultz. Many years later, having fronted for organized crime as host and greeter at the Capri Casino in Havana, he was indicted for fraud. During the related IRS probe, the casino’s former treasurer was shot dead. The mob also used him to front as an investor at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas and at a gambling club in London, until he was barred from the United Kingdom.

  Joe E. Lewis, remembered as a comic, was also a good tenor until he defied the owne
rs of the Green Mill club in Chicago by leaving to perform at a rival nightspot. Assailants beat him senseless and slashed his face and throat with a hunting knife. Lewis’s singing days were over. His fame as a comedian was achieved with a voice described as sounding like “two pieces of sandpaper being rubbed together.” Lewis continued to work for gangsters even after that experience, a measure of the grip organized crime had on the nightclub business.

  The entertainer Sonny King, born Louis Schiavone in Brooklyn, partnered Durante onstage for years. He was also close to Sinatra, who became godfather to one of his children. “There wasn’t a nightclub in New York that wasn’t owned by the Boys,” King said. “Naturally you came into contact with them. They preferred Italian performers. If they liked you, you worked all the time. They dictated what you were paid. If they didn’t like you, you just didn’t work.”

  Just as mobsters sought out entertainers, so some entertainers sought out the mob, a pattern that continued for decades. “They want to be around mob people because they know the mob controls the better places,” said Vincent Teresa, the first high-ranking mafioso to turn informer, “so they come in, they get cozy with you and they ask your help in getting them a spot.”

  Club owners, meanwhile, might start off clean but find themselves drawn into the rackets. “Most of these clubs operate on a thin line,” said Teresa. “A mob guy finds out they’re in financial trouble, and pretty soon he makes an offer to lend the owner some money. Before the club owner realizes it, he’s in hock up to his eyes and suddenly he’s got a new silent partner.”

  By the late 1930s there were more than 200,000 jukeboxes in bars and taverns across the country. They represented a multimillion-dollar industry, and it was dominated by gangsters. The criminals largely controlled what records were played, and thus what songs made the weekly hit parade of most popular songs. That gave them another hold over musicians. “They would get to you and say, ‘We’re gonna put you on every jukebox in the eastern United States,’ ” Artie Shaw recalled. “It was very tempting. They were into everything, the Boys.”

  Five years after the end of Prohibition, the mob bosses had their hooks into every facet of the music industry, as well as theatrical agencies and Hollywood studios. Their operation was indeed now “organized” crime, with disciplined leadership and rules enforced nationwide.

  The acknowledged leader of this modernized crime network, with a personal interest in the entertainment world, was Lucky Luciano.

  THREE DECADES AFTER his poor parents had brought him from Lercara Friddi, Luciano was wealthy and wielded unprecedented power. His beginnings, however, had not been auspicious. He was a shoplifter as a child, and at eighteen was jailed for six months on a narcotics charge. He was arrested in New Jersey for carrying a loaded revolver. There was also a string of armed robbery, larceny, and gambling charges that he beat or escaped with only a fine.

  According to one of his biographers, Luciano progressed from beatings to no fewer than twenty murders to pioneering drug trafficking. One of his attorneys thought him “sadistic.” Another observer described him as “wily, rapacious . . . savagely cruel, like some deadly King Cobra, coiled about the Eastern underworld.” By 1928, having distanced himself from personal involvement in violence, he was ordering others to kill.

  In the course of the next three years, the murders of three major criminals marked the end of the “old Mafia.” Luciano, who was involved in at least two of those killings, emerged in 1931, at the age of thirty-four, as the head of the new national crime syndicate.

  The face he showed to the world in the early 1930s was that of a wealthy businessman. He lived in style at the Waldorf Towers, going out at night to the restaurants and clubs he controlled. Durante was a dining companion, Lewis and Raft were friends. He invested in Broadway musicals and—to extend the crime empire to Hollywood—played a leading part in establishing mob control of the stage employees’ union.

  Then in 1936, having been declared New York’s Public Enemy Number One, Luciano was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to a long prison term for running a chain of brothels. Behind bars, however, he would long remain, in the words of one scholar, “one of the most brilliant criminal executives of the modern age.” Senior mob associates stayed in constant touch, consulting him regularly on important matters.

  Prominent among those accomplices were Frank Costello and Willie Moretti. Moretti “idolized” Luciano and was his most loyal associate, according to a Federal Bureau of Narcotics document. He and Costello, like their leader, had committed juvenile crime—robbery and assault—then moved on to major-league crime during Prohibition. Moretti, whose neighbors in New Jersey saw him as a good family man, benefactor of local charities, and regular churchgoer, was a brute and a murderer. Costello, in New York, was a wise adviser to criminal associates and an effective corrupter of public officials. Less well known was the fact that he, too, was a killer.

  Moretti controlled casinos and nightspots in northern New Jersey and elsewhere. The Riviera, high on a bluff near the George Washington Bridge, was his showpiece. It was popular for its nightclub, with a roof that slid back in summer so that couples could dance beneath the stars, and notorious for its Marine Room, where illegal gambling went on. Sinatra used to stop by on his way home from the Rustic Cabin, just three miles away, to listen to the music.

  Costello’s fiefdom was Manhattan, and like Luciano he had major show business interests. He was covert owner of the Copacabana nightclub, was said to have an interest in the Stork Club and, eventually, in the Tropicana in Las Vegas. He befriended and hired Joe E. Lewis, and took part in the attempt to lure Mario Lanza into a crooked deal. In Hollywood, Costello had influence with studio chiefs Harry Cohn and Jack Warner.

  Sinatra said he did not set eyes on Luciano until 1947, and then only in a chance encounter that amounted to no more than a handshake and a drink. Had he heard the mobster’s name, he asserted, he might even then not have connected it with the infamous Mafia boss. This of the most notorious gangster of his time, who came from Frank’s own family’s home village in Sicily.

  Sinatra knew Costello. “Just to say ‘Hello’ ” in nightclubs, he would one day tell Senate investigators. Others had different memories. Nick Sevano firmly recalled Costello as one of “those guys” with whom Frank “sat around and talked all night in the clubs.” The columnist John Miller, Costello’s intimate friend and Copacabana dining companion, said “Sinatra and Frank C. were great pals. . . . Sinatra would join us all the time.”

  As for Moretti, Sinatra said he never heard of him until the mid-1940s, when Moretti became his “neighbor.” The mafioso did live around the corner from Frank in the 1940s. “Our backyards just about touched,” Moretti’s daughter Angela has said. Frank said he declined the invitation when Moretti asked him to dinner. “Later,” he added, “he introduced himself at a restaurant, and I subsequently saw him five or six times over a period of years.” On another occasion, he said someone— he claimed he could not recall the man’s name—brought Moretti to see him at home. He knew him, he said, only “very faintly.”

  Yet Moretti was present, as were Sinatra’s parents, when Frank opened at the Copacabana in 1950. The Las Vegas restaurateur Joe Pignatello, the personal chef to another top mobster, said before his death in 2001 that Moretti was Sinatra’s “longtime friend.” Tina Sinatra has acknowledged that her father had “known people like Willie Moretti all his life.”

  THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that Moretti or Costello had anything to do with getting the young Sinatra his job at the Rustic Cabin. If there was mob help at that stage, as claimed by Lee Mortimer and others, it was likely provided by a lesser figure. Three sources say that man was local mafioso Angelo “Gyp” De Carlo.

  De Carlo was born and raised in Hoboken and in 1938, in his mid-thirties, was coming into his criminal prime. “He was a kind of laid-back, not a flamboyant, guy . . . never loud,” an acquaintance recalled. “If you went into a bar you’d think he was your uncle.” In f
act he had done time for highway robbery, then moved on to gambling and loan-sharking. The FBI would eventually characterize him as “methodical gangland executioner.”

  De Carlo was a “made man,” a formally inducted mafioso, and his family was in touch with Lucky Luciano at least from the 1940s to the early 1960s; there are entries for Gyp and his daughter Gloria in separate Luciano address books. “My grandfather would say, ‘Lucky said this’ or ‘Lucky said that,’ ” Gloria’s son Joe Sullivan said. “Everything was hush-hush.” Locally, De Carlo answered to Moretti.

  Dolly Sinatra knew De Carlo well. When they were young they had run dances together, and now they collaborated in local politics. Her nephew Sam Sinatra was soon to marry De Carlo’s wife’s sister. Gyp helped Sam when he needed cash, and Sam did a little work on the side for De Carlo. “He used to check places out for him,” said his grandson. “These guys would send somebody like Sam to the West Coast . . . and Cuba, back and forth . . . to see if dealers were cheating them or not.”

  De Carlo took a proprietary interest in entertainers, singers especially. Anthony Petrozelli, brother of Hoboken Four member Jimmy “Skelly” Petrozelli, served time in jail with the mafioso and said De Carlo liked Frank and the other members of the group. “He loved all those guys,” Anthony Petrozelli said recently. “They worked for him. He’d just snap his fingers and they would be at Gyp’s no matter what occasion it was.”

  James Petrozelli, Jimmy’s son, recalled his father telling him much the same thing, and got the impression from his father that “Gyp had a lot to do with getting” Frank the Rustic Cabin job. Sam Sinatra thought so, too, said his widow, Rose. Robert Phillips, a former police officer who had frequent contact with Frank years later in California, said “Sinatra was nowhere until Gyp De Carlo put the okay on him,” basing his statement on what he saw in organized crime files. “Gyp De Carlo was his sponsor, his main man. His ‘duke-in,’ as they used to say on the street—meaning, the man who brought him in.”