Sinatra

by Anthony Summers

  Frank was “shuttling backward and forward between her bedroom and Nancy’s,” Ava Gardner recalled Lana telling her, “trying to equate obedience to Catholic doctrines with indulgence in his natural inclinations . . . divorce plans were all set up and wedding plans had been made . . . she felt like she’d been on the verge of marrying Frank.” If Frank did encourage Lana to believe that, he let her down. The Sinatras’ marriage was to wobble on for four more years.

  “I HAVEN’T MUCH TO SAY in my defense,” Frank said of that time, “except that I was in a terrible state of mental confusion.” He was sick for a while after the Lana furor, and there was newspaper talk of an impending nervous breakdown. A contributory factor must have been overwork. In the seventeen days of the Lana crisis he had done four radio shows, performing a full program of songs on each, spent one day in the studio making a record, two recording for his current movie—It Happened in Brooklyn—and one night live on stage. He remembered having been “desperately tired, right on the ragged edges.”

  MGM production memos for It Happened in Brooklyn confirm it: “Sinatra reported he was ill and didn’t work,” “Sinatra was tired and would not work,” “didn’t report,” “refused calls to come in.” Louis B. Mayer sent Frank a telegram complaining of “a long series of violations of your contractual obligations,” ensuring that the text got into the newspapers. Frank fired off furious telegrams of his own, including one to Los Angeles Daily News drama critic Erskine Johnson: “Just continue to print lies about me, and my temper—not my temperament—will see that you get a belt in your vicious and stupid mouth.”

  At year’s end, the Hollywood Women’s Press Club voted him “least cooperative star of 1946,” accusing him of turning down hundreds of interview requests. Now began an endless cycle of skirmishing with journalists, bellicose talk, and actual physical violence.

  Just before leaving home over Lana, Frank had shocked fellow members of the Screen Actors Guild at a meeting to discuss a current strike. On learning of wild threats by some strikers—there was talk of throwing acid in actors’ faces should they cross picket lines—he had responded with an outburst of his own. No one, he was reported as saying, “was going to tell him what to do . . . if anybody got tough with him—why, he knew some tough guys too.”

  He did indeed, as the nation was about to find out.

  13

  A Handshake in Havana

  ON JANUARY 30, 1947, Frank took out a license in California to carry a German Walther pistol. Questioned by a reporter at the sheriff’s office—someone tipped the press that he was there—he said he needed the weapon for “a personal matter.” Carrying a handgun was to become routine for him. He “never left home without it,” his valet George Jacobs said of the .38 Smith & Wesson his boss favored in the 1960s. “Always carried the gun in a holster.”

  In one account Frank claimed the pistol was a souvenir brought home from his postwar USO tour to Italy. He told another reporter that he had “wanted Nancy to have some protection in case of an emergency. So I bought a little gun for the house.” Later still, he would say he had needed the weapon “to protect personal funds.”

  After obtaining the permit, Frank flew to New York to fulfill a radio commitment, then on to Miami. Before he went south, though, the columnist Earl Wilson got word of his journey, learned who Frank’s host in Florida was to be—and was appalled. The host was the mobster Joe Fischetti, and the Miami Beach mansion at which Frank stayed belonged to Joe’s older brothers Charles and Rocco, often described as the “heirs to Al Capone.” The brothers were just back from attending Capone’s funeral in Chicago.

  Charles, then forty-six, liked to use the name Dr. Fisher and pose as a wealthy art collector. Friends dubbed him Prince Charlie. In reality, he was a feared extortionist and political fixer. Rocco, three years younger, called himself an antiques dealer. He, too, had come up through the ranks as an enforcer.

  Thirty-seven-year-old Joe—his real name was Giuseppe—is described in his FBI file as “the least intelligent and the least aggressive” of the brothers. “I’m the only one in the family who hasn’t killed anybody,” he once told a visitor, while brandishing the gun he always carried. Joe, too, was linked to extortion. He was an errand boy for his brothers and a front man for an empire based on gambling and, increasingly, show business. The roots of that empire were intertwined with those of gangsters on the East Coast. Rocco had once been arrested while leaving a Mafia gathering with Lucky Luciano. Charlie, for his part, was in regular touch with Willie Moretti.

  Frank joined the brothers in Miami at a pivotal moment for organized crime. Luciano was back in circulation. He had been released from prison in New York in early 1946, on condition he go into exile in Italy. Italian police who met his ship escorted him to Sicily, and back to Lercara Friddi. From there Luciano rapidly made his way to Rome, where he was soon ensconced in a fine hotel suite, in contact with American associates and plotting his return to real power. Before leaving the United States Luciano had agreed with one of the most powerful of those associates, Meyer Lansky, as to how to go about it. He would resume control of the empire of crime from Cuba, just ninety miles from the United States mainland.

  Luciano arrived in Havana in the late fall of 1946, set up his base of operations with the connivance of Cuban politicians, and began receiving a steady stream of senior American mafiosi. “The guys was coming,” he recalled, “not because I asked them to. I ordered it.” Rocco and Joe Fischetti flew in on Pan Am from Miami on February 11, 1947. A still frame from newsreel footage shows them walking from the plane, Rocco to the rear, Joe in front with a hand up to his face. Between them, toting a sizable piece of hand baggage, is Frank Sinatra.

  Nine days later, American newspapers carried an article with a Havana dateline. “I am frankly puzzled,” wrote the columnist Robert Ruark, “as to why Frank Sinatra, the fetish of millions, chooses to spend his vacation in the company of convicted vice operators and assorted hoodlums. . . . He was here for four days last week and his companion in public was Luciano, Luciano’s bodyguards, and a rich collection of gamblers. . . . There were considerable speculations of a disgusted nature by observers who saw Frankie, night after night, with Mr. Luciano at the Gran Casino Nacional, the dice emporium and the horse park. . . . Mr. Sinatra, the self-confessed savior of the country’s small fry, by virtue of his lectures on clean living and love-thy-neighbor, his movie shorts on tolerance, and his frequent dabblings into the do-good department of politics, seems to be setting a most peculiar example.”

  The article had an explosive effect, and Frank at once denied it all. “Any report that I fraternize with goons and racketeers is a vicious lie,” he said. “I go to many places and meet a great many people from all walks of life—editors, scientists, businessmen and, perhaps, unsavory characters.”

  Frank’s accounts of the episode—his association with the Fischettis, the trip to Cuba, and the Luciano encounter—did not remain consistent. He said he had met Joe Fischetti fleetingly while performing in Chicago, but saw little of him. He had just happened to “run into” Fischetti in Miami before the Cuba trip. Questioned later by attorneys for Senator Estes Kefauver’s Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce—the Kefauver Committee—he claimed he had met Charlie and Rocco Fischetti “just to say ‘Hello, how are you?’ . . . three times at most.” He had “not an ounce” of business with any of them.

  George Evans told federal agents that his client went to Cuba only at Joe Fischetti’s suggestion, because he was being harassed by fans in Miami. Frank told the Kefauver Committee attorneys, however, that he already intended to go to Cuba before mentioning it to Fischetti. Indeed, he said in one interview, he had already been planning the trip when he applied for a gun license before leaving California. Later still, testifying to the Nevada State Gaming Control Board, he said it was pure coincidence that he and the Fischettis flew to Havana on the same plane.

  Of the news story reporting his encounter
with Luciano, Frank said: “I was brought up to shake a man’s hand when I am introduced to him, without first investigating his past.” Then, telling “the complete story” in an interview with Hedda Hopper, he said, “I dropped by a casino one night. One of the captains—a sort of host—recognized me and asked if I’d mind meeting a few people. . . . I couldn’t refuse. . . . So I went through some routine introductions, scarcely paying attention to the names of the people I was meeting. One happened to be Lucky Luciano. Even if I’d caught his name, I probably wouldn’t have associated it with the notorious underworld character. . . . I sat down at a table for about fifteen minutes. Then I got up and went back to the hotel. . . . When such innocent acts are so distorted, you can’t win.”

  In a signed article, Frank came up with another variant. “I was invited to have dinner,” he wrote, “and while dining I realized that one of the men in the party was Lucky Luciano. . . . I could think of no way to leave in the middle of dinner without creating a scene. . . . After dinner I toured the nightspots. . . . We finally wound up at the Havana Casino where we passed a table at which were Luciano and several other men. . . . Again, rather than cause a disturbance, I had a quick drink and excused myself.”

  Frank told the Kefauver Committee attorneys he was introduced to Luciano in Havana by Connie Immerman, whom he described as a “New York restaurateur.” In other statements, he said the introduction was made by Nate Gross, a Chicago journalist. The name of America’s most notorious mobster, he claimed, had seemed merely “familiar.” Only when a dinner companion explained, he said, did he realize who it was he had met. Luciano and the Fischettis were again present, he told Kefauver’s staff, when he sat through a show at Sloppy Joe’s, a famous nightspot in the Cuban capital.

  Finally, questioned as late as 1970 by a New Jersey state body probing organized crime, Frank claimed that he knew no mobsters and remained unaware of Luciano’s reputation as a Mafia boss.

  In fact, FBI records show, he and the Fischettis had spent a good deal of time together during the months before the Cuba trip. He and Charles Fischetti had spent three hours visiting with the Fischettis’ mother at her home in Brooklyn. He had been Rocco’s guest at the Vernon Country Club outside Chicago, and in touch with Joe about a meeting in New York. Contrary to Frank’s denial of any business relationship with the Fischettis, the brothers told Kefauver Committee attorneys that he was their partner in a car dealership operation. According to an FBI informant, Joe Fischetti had stated on the very eve of the Havana trip that he “had a financial interest in Sinatra.”

  Both the FBI and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which had agents in Havana in 1947, had known Luciano was in town before Frank arrived. After his arrival, two sources on the Narcotics Bureau payroll, an elevator man and a telephone operator at the Hotel Nacional, reported on comings and goings from Luciano’s suite on the eighth floor and from Frank’s on the floor below. Bureau records and the private papers of journalist Robert Ruark contradict Frank’s claim that the meeting with Luciano amounted to one brief handshake.

  “While in Havana,” bureau supervisor George White reported to commissioner Harry Anslinger, “Luciano lavishly entertained Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, Ralph Capone, Rocco and Charlie Fischetti, as well as Frank Sinatra and Bruce Cabot, actors.” Willie Moretti was also in Cuba.

  Wary of Sinatra’s lawyers—Frank would in fact sue over the Havana stories—the executive editor of the New York World-Telegram asked Ruark to submit a detailed in-house memorandum on how he had developed his information.

  “I was told by Mr. Larry Larrea, [Hotel Nacional] general manager,” Ruark responded, “that Frank Sinatra was vacationing in Havana and— to Mr. Larrea’s evident horror—was spending most of his waking hours with Lucky Luciano, Mr. Luciano’s bodyguard, and an assorted group of gamblers and hoodlums. . . . The caliber of Mr. Sinatra’s intimates was so low that Mr. Larrea preferred to stay in his suite rather than run the risk of bumping into Sinatra and his friends in the lobby.”

  World-Telegram society writer Charles Ventura told Ruark he had seen Frank at the casino with Luciano on two consecutive nights, and that they had also been seen together at the racetrack. Other corroborating witnesses included Connie Immerman, the man Frank said introduced him to Luciano. Immerman, a former manager of the Cotton Club, is referred to in Narcotics Bureau reports as a “Luciano henchman . . . notorious gambler.” Immerman characterized Luciano as just “a swell kid . . . just taking it easy and trying to live down his past.”

  At a second meeting with Larrea, Ruark learned Sinatra was at that very moment upstairs with Luciano. “I wouldn’t advise your going up there,” the manager warned. “The best you can expect is to get thrown out. They are pretty tough fellows. They’ve got a lot of women with them, and I don’t know how much they’ve been drinking.” The warning, Ruark remembered, included advice “not to file my stories concerning Sinatra and Luciano by Western Union . . . it was a practice of the Cuban wireless office to immediately call subject people in stories of the type I intended to write, and that there would be a good chance of the story being lost, badly garbled or distorted. He also said the writer of such a story might be likely to wind up with a ‘knot’ on his head.”

  A month after Ruark’s scoop, his colleague Ventura told him in a letter that Frank had been involved in an orgy while in Havana. “Emilio Sanchez threw a party at Sinatra’s suite when he was here, also attended by Ralph Capone [brother of Al]. . . . Gist of the party was to have too much booze and twelve naked women. Midst of the party a delegation of Cuban Girl Scouts arrived with a mentor to offer some token or other to the Voice. All babes were shooed into the two bedrooms, whilst the Voice came out impeccably garbed in lounge robe and silk scarf. During the ceremony four naked bodies suddenly catapulted into the living room. The Girl Scouts retreated in complete rout.”

  Years afterward, in a book endorsed by commissioner Anslinger, Reader’s Digest editor Frederic Sondern told the story as preserved in bureau files. The Girl Scouts, he wrote, had been escorted by a nun and admitted to the suite “through a series of disastrous mistakes by various personnel.” They walked into a scene of “ribald chaos. There were bottles on the floor, lingerie hung from wall brackets and a number of people lay sleeping where they had collapsed. The Scouts were marched back into the elevator by their white-faced leader. The sister reported at once to her mother superior, the mother superior to her bishop.”

  An informant later told the FBI that “a planeload of call girls” had been sent to Havana courtesy of the Fischetti brothers. They were supplied for “a party at the Hotel Nacional attended by Sinatra.”

  Four years later, in 1951, Kefauver Committee staff confronted Frank with eight photographs taken in Havana. One, according to committee attorney Joe Nellis, showed him “with his arm around Lucky Luciano on the balcony of the Hotel Nacional . . . another showed Sinatra and Luciano sitting in a nightclub in the Nacional, with lots of bottles, having a hell of a time with some good-looking girls . . . and then there were a couple pictures of him with the Fischetti brothers [and] Luciano.” Other shots showed Frank with Santo Trafficante, Johnny Rosselli, and Carlo Gambino, all then rising mafiosi.

  A former member of the Hotel Nacional staff, Jorge Jorge, recently provided information suggesting that Frank’s involvement went way beyond the supposedly chance handshake with Luciano. Jorge said that for security reasons, Luciano spent most of his time in a set of communicating rooms far from the suite in which he was registered. Luciano and Lansky used two of them, Frank the third.

  Jorge, who said he was assigned to serve Luciano because he spoke English, described bringing breakfast to the suite. “We would come with the tables, the tables with the little wheels. And there they’d be, Sinatra, Luciano, and Meyer Lansky. They thought I was going to listen to what they were talking about, so they would change the subject. They waited for me to serve breakfast. . . . Once I had finished, they would look at me as if to say ‘Goodbye’ and I
would leave.”

  Narcotics Bureau agents learned Luciano was involved in huge casino and resort developments—and, they thought, in narcotics—in Cuba, and for that he needed access to vast sums of money. The bureau’s information, later corroborated by the Mafia boss himself, Rocco and Joe Fischetti, and a key associate of Meyer Lansky, was that visiting associates carried huge cash sums to him in Havana.

  There were suspicions that Frank and former heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey had acted as couriers during the Cuba episode. Official records suggest the Fischettis contributed as much as $2 million, ($16 million today) and that Frank may have carried the cash into Havana in his hand luggage. After that allegation appeared in the press, Luciano denied it and Frank responded with derision.

  “Picture me, skinny Frankie,” he said, “lifting $2,000,000 in small bills. For the record, $1,000 in dollar bills weighs three pounds, which makes the load I am supposed to have carried 6,000 pounds. Even assuming the bills were twenties, the bag would still have required a couple of stevedores to carry it.” The baggage seen in the film of his airport arrival, Frank said, contained only “my oils, sketching material and personal jewelry.” Frank did take up painting and buy art supplies in 1947, but, according to his wife Nancy did so only months after the Havana trip. “If you can find me an attaché case that holds $2,000,000,” Frank said in testimony to Nevada’s State Gaming Control Board, “I will give you the $2,000,000.” Norman Mailer tried it, and discovered that in fact an even larger sum could be packed into an attaché case.

  Jerry Lewis said in a taped interview that Frank carried money for the Mafia on more than one occasion. Lewis was born in New Jersey, had been befriended by Dolly Sinatra, met Frank in 1939, and knew some of the same mobsters. In the year of the Cuba episode, he performed at the wedding reception for one of Willie Moretti’s daughters. He was on intimate terms with the Fischetti brothers.