Sinatra

by Anthony Summers

  In Frank’s case, Lewis said, the relationship with the mob “had to do with the morality that a handshake goes before God. Frank, at a cocktail party, told Meyer [Lansky] in no uncertain terms, ‘If there is going to be East Coast, West Coast, intercontinental, and foreign—if all that’s going to happen, I go all the time, Meyer.’ He volunteered to be a messenger for them. And he almost got caught once . . . in New York.” Frank was going through Customs, Lewis explained, carrying a briefcase containing “three and a half million in fifties.” Customs opened the briefcase, then—because of a crowd of people pushing and shoving behind Frank—aborted the search and let him go on. “We would never have heard of him again,” Lewis reflected, had the cash been discovered.

  At some point during Frank’s stay in Havana, according to Nacional Hotel employee Jorge, Frank performed for the assembled mobsters in the banquet room. “Luciano was very fond of Sinatra’s singing,” said Lansky’s associate Joe Stacher, “but of course our meeting had nothing to do with listening to him sing.” Of the various matters on the agenda in those weeks in Cuba, one had to do with Bugsy Siegel, the veteran bootlegger, gambling racketeer, and killer operating on the West Coast. Siegel’s latest and most grandiose project, the mob-funded Flamingo hotel and casino in Las Vegas, was going badly. Its opening a few weeks earlier had been a fiasco, and the hotel was temporarily closed down. The mafiosi had learned that some of the millions of dollars entrusted to Siegel, including a huge sum contributed by the Fischetti brothers, had been siphoned into private accounts in Switzerland.

  The embryonic Las Vegas operation promised to be a fabulous bonanza. Frank, who knew Siegel and other key West Coast mobsters, had himself seen the potential. He had been exploring plans to build a hotel casino of his own in Vegas, one with broadcast facilities. Siegel had complained about the prospect of having Frank as competition, while simultaneously trying to get him to perform at the gala opening of the Flamingo. Frank had not obliged.

  At the Mafia gathering in Cuba, Siegel was sentenced to death. He died in a hail of bullets a few months later, his execution approved by Luciano and directed, by one account, by Charles Fischetti. A few days later, said Shirley Ballard, who was still seeing Frank, “We were with a couple of music publishers—probably in Frank’s dressing room—and Frank says, ‘Okay, we’re going to the house where Ben died—he always called Siegel ‘Ben’—‘and we’re going to have a drink for him.’

  “So we got in Frank’s Cadillac and drove to Beverly Hills, and sat in the living room where Siegel was killed. This was just after he’d been shot. And drank a toast to his memory. It was eerie, like his ghost was still there. Frank and the others got very solemn and raised a glass to him.”

  In Las Vegas, the syndicate had taken over the Flamingo within hours, and went on to oversee the building of Las Vegas into America’s gambling and entertainment mecca, with Frank as star of stars.

  AFTER HAVANA, Luciano and Frank sought to minimize their relationship. Luciano denied that Frank “was ever asked to do anything illegal,” while Frank insisted in 1952 that the Havana encounter had been the only time they ever met.

  The headlines about Frank’s adventure in Cuba had proved a boon for the Bureau of Narcotics. Washington put pressure on the Cuban government, and Luciano was once more shipped back to Italy. He would live there for the rest of his life, plotting further crimes and in constant touch with Mafia associates in the United States. The Narcotics Bureau pressured the Italian police to keep him under surveillance and, when a pretext could be found, to conduct searches of his homes.

  It was a police search, two years after Frank’s Havana trip, that first yielded evidence of the continuing Sinatra connection. “When Italian police raided Lucky’s lavish apartment in Rome,” New York Daily Mirrorcolumnist Jack Lait wrote in transparent code, “they found a sterling silver cigarette case inscribed: ‘To My Dear Friend, Charlie Luciano,’ over one of the most sought-after American autographs, that of a young star, a known gangster lover.” Lait’s source was evidently the Narcotics Bureau; a similar passage can be found in a draft manuscript in Anslinger’s papers. A later article identified the “star” named in the dedication as “Frank Sinatra.”

  The story endured, with variants as to whether the gift was gold or silver, and whether it was a cigarette case or a lighter. Frank would claim he made “no gift of any kind, at any time, to Luciano.” Speaking of the Cuba trip, Luciano recalled that Frank had given “a few presents to different guys, like a gold cigarette case, a watch, that kind of thing . . . for me, the guy was always Number One OK.”

  The woman who was Luciano’s mistress in the three years prior to his death from a heart attack in 1962, Adriana Rizzo, said recently that she did remember a certain lighter. “I had a gold lighter that he gave me as a present, and he had received it from Sinatra. He had stopped smoking because of the heart ailment.” The lighter had been among items removed after Luciano’s death by his brother Bartolo, Rizzo said, and she had not seen it since. She remembered, however, that it had been inscribed.

  As for a cigarette case, retired General Fulvio Toschi of Italy’s Polizia Tributaria, a Treasury enforcement unit, recalled having seen just such a case while searching a Luciano safe deposit box. It was, he said, a “large gold cigarette case with the words, something like, ‘To my friend, or pal, Lucky’ and the word ‘Frank’ or ‘Frank Sinatra.’ ”

  A document in Anslinger’s files indicates that Luciano knew Frank’s address a year before the Cuba episode. It records the seizure by Italian police, apparently in early 1946, of Luciano’s address book. “Frank Sinatra” was listed in it, along with the California address Frank had by then had for two years.

  Back in exile after his foray to Cuba, the mob boss became a familiar figure in the exclusive hotels and restaurants of Rome and Naples. The public came to see him as a sort of Godfather emeritus, a seeming has-been happy to give interviews to journalists and to chat with tourists. Yet Mafia bosses in the United States consulted him regularly in coded telephone calls, and sent couriers with information and money. The Bureau of Narcotics believed he remained a major power, the brains of the burgeoning international drug traffic.

  Narcotics Bureau reports indicate that Frank, like Jimmy Durante, George Raft, and other lesser-known show business figures, had repeated contact with the mobster. A Luciano associate since boyhood, Louis Russo, characterized all three entertainers as being the Mafia boss’s “close personal friends and great admirers, if not hero-worshippers.”

  In 1950 and 1960, informants told the FBI that Frank had carried money to Luciano in Italy, as once he allegedly had to Cuba. Reports to the Narcotics Bureau quote Luciano as saying that he expected Frank for Christmas in 1952 and then, when Frank did not make it, that he met him at the Hotel Terminus in Naples the following spring. Frank was in Italy at that time, on a tour that included performances in Naples and Rome.

  From time to time, it seems, Luciano made new sorties back across the Atlantic, making his way—more discreetly than in 1947—to Fulgencio Batista’s Cuba. Rumor had it, according to a press report, that by 1956 he had surreptitiously entered the United States nine times. Federal agents received information on two Mafia conclaves presided over by the exiled Mafia boss, one in Cuba in 1951, another the following year at the Plantation Yacht Club on one of the Florida Keys. There were several meetings with Luciano there, according to the wife of the Chicago gangster Murray Humphreys. “We used to meet him at the Plantation Yacht Club,” Jeanne Humphreys said. “The boys always threw big ‘coming out’ bashes for Lucky at the club.” According to an FBI report, Sinatra was present at the meeting in 1951.

  Frank’s valet, George Jacobs, recalled what happened at a Rome hotel a few years later, probably in the summer of 1958. “We walked into the suite,” Jacobs said, “and there was Lucky Luciano sitting in the living room. Just sitting there, waiting for us to arrive.” When Jacobs saw the infamous face and realized who it was, he was afraid. “I though
t maybe this was one of those times when you don’t get out of it.” Luciano rose from his chair and kissed Frank. “They clearly knew each other well,” Jacobs remembered, and the meeting with Luciano struck him as Frank’s one “joyous moment” during that trip to Italy.

  Soon after Christmas the same year, Frank and Luciano may have got together again twice within weeks, in Cuba and in Florida. Frank and the Mafia boss were both reportedly in Havana in that period, on the eve of the overthrow of the Batista regime. If so, the subject under discussion was likely the building of a new multimillion-dollar casino development. According to an FBI document that cites National City Bank records, Frank and others were investors in the project in association with a mob partner.

  According to a firsthand report, Luciano and Frank met again within the month, in Miami. Billy Woodfield, the photographer who often worked with Sinatra, said he saw them there during the shooting of A Hole in the Head, a comedy starring Frank and Edward G. Robinson. “The crowd from Hole in the Head was there for location shooting,” he said. “Frank had me go with him and these guys to the track at Flagler Field. It was funny, they were all wearing short pants and high socks and big Kadiddlehopper hats or fedoras—odd clothes for the races. They were all going into a dining room off the executive area as I was loading film.

  “Frank said, ‘Billy, take some pictures for me. . . . Make two prints of each picture and give me the negatives. Make no other prints.’ One of the guys—he was wearing regular pants—said, ‘Whaddya mean, a picture? I’m not supposed to be in the country!’ It was Luciano.”

  Peggy Connelly, a young singer who was Frank’s lover in the fifties, knew nothing about organized crime. She could not help but notice, though, that Frank had odd weekend guests and associates about whom he was highly sensitive. “There are some people I’ve got to say hello to,” he said as he took her to a private room in a New York club to meet some hefty fellows in dark suits. “I’ll introduce you. I won’t say any last names, and don’t ask for them.”

  Once Frank talked with pride of a Mafia meeting he had been allowed to attend. “He told it seriously,” Connelly remembered. “He said they were talking about who would be in charge of something, who would be the right man. ‘And,’ he said, ‘they all turned as one and looked at me!’ Frank added, of course, that it wasn’t really a possibility that he’d be some sort of Godfather—not at all. But he talked as though he could conceive of himself in that light. He was very moved by their sort of appreciation, homage, of him. I could see that his heart went out to this.”

  Ten years later, when Frank was friendly with President John F. Kennedy, he had become more careful, at least about seeing Luciano. “Sinatra has become somewhat scared off,” a source told the Narcotics Bureau in 1961, “and now when in Italy he makes excuses for not visiting Naples and Luciano. However, he always telephones.” He also corresponded with Luciano that year, according to another Bureau report.

  “Sinatra was a very close friend of Luciano,” Adriana Rizzo said. “He certainly was. Sometimes he came to Naples. They met from time to time, at the Excelsior or other leading hotels like the Vesuvio. I was there with Luciano when they spoke on the phone. Always very affectionate phone calls.”

  The aging mobster had a large collection of Sinatra records. Ensconced in his apartment on Via Tasso in Naples, he listened to them often. “They were very fond of each other,” said Rizzo. “And, for Sinatra, Luciano had a lot of respect.”

  14

  Courting Disaster

  THE ADVENTURE WITH THE MAFIA in Cuba was “one of the dumbest things I ever did,” Frank told Pete Hamill years later. Other follies soon followed, and personal misery.

  “Will you be my Valentine?” he had wired Nancy from Havana, suggesting they take a Mexican vacation. Before he left for Havana, she had told him she was pregnant again. She had told him, too, that she was considering having an abortion—illegal then, and an especially radical step for a Catholic. Frank never thought she would go through with it, but she did. When she told him, in Mexico, he was appalled.

  Soon after returning to Hollywood, he brought more trouble on himself. On April 8, shortly before midnight, Frank and a male companion arrived at Ciro’s, a nightspot on Sunset Boulevard. He drove in through the exit gate, a waiting taxi driver noticed, thus avoiding having his car parked by an attendant. Inside, the columnist Lee Mortimer was finishing dinner with a woman companion. The cab driver, William Taylor, would be the only independent witness to what happened when they came out fifteen minutes later.

  “Sinatra came out of Ciro’s,” investigators later quoted the driver as saying, “walked up behind Mortimer and hit him with his right hand, knocking Mortimer down. After Sinatra had knocked Mortimer down Sinatra backed away. Mortimer got up holding his jaw and said something to the effect ‘Why did you hit me?’ At this time a man described as 5′11″ or 6′ tall, 200 pounds, black hair, wearing a blue pin-striped suit, grabbed Mortimer and pushed Mortimer down and held him. . . . Sinatra made the statement, ‘Let him up, I’ll kick his brains in’ . . . called Mortimer a ‘shit heel’ and a ‘perverted bastard.’ ”

  Taylor could not see what happened next, because his view was blocked by people rushing out of the club in response to the commotion. Mortimer told investigators Frank hit him several more times, while others held him down. Two other witnesses, his companion and Nat Dallinger, a King Features photographer, also saw others pinioning Mortimer. Dallinger recalled shouting, “Four men against one is too many!” and trying to pull them off.

  The melee was quickly over. Bruised but not seriously hurt, Mortimer made his way to the sheriff’s office, saw a doctor, and called the press. Frank, who had gone back to the bar and ordered a double brandy, seems at first not to have realized that there would be a price to pay.

  The next day, while rehearsing “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’!” at a local studio, he was arrested, charged with assault and battery, and released on bail. His license to carry a gun was withdrawn until further notice. The men around Frank at the time of the incident declined to speak with investigating officers “under the advice of their attorney.” The heavy fellow identified as having initially held Mortimer down, song plugger Sam Weiss, a longtime friend of Frank, declined to make a statement on the grounds that he was “afraid of policemen.” The proprietor of Ciro’s and his staff said they had seen nothing.

  Frank admitted having hit Mortimer but denied having attacked from behind or that anyone helped him. He had only hit the columnist, he was quoted as saying, because Mortimer insulted him in the restaurant. “He called me a dirty dago sonofabitch, and I wouldn’t take that from anyone.” The claim earned Frank much sympathy, and he made it so often that many came to believe it. In fact, it had been concocted by one of his PR men. The allegation did not appear in Frank’s first conversation with a journalist, held within half an hour of the fracas. He told the columnist Harrison Carroll, who had rushed to Ciro’s on receiving a tip, that he and Mortimer had said nothing to each other. Frank attacked Mortimer, he said, because “For two years he has been needling me . . . he gave me a look. I can’t describe it. It was one of those ‘Who do you amount to?’ looks. I followed him outside and I saw red. I hit him. I’m all mixed up. . . . I couldn’t help myself.”

  Mortimer, who specialized in covering show business, had written harsh pieces about Frank. Sinatra fans, to him, were “squealing, shouting neurotic extremists . . . juve delinqs.” He had sneered at Frank for waiting “until hostilities were over to take his seven-week joy ride” entertaining troops in Europe. He slammed The House I Live In as “class struggle posing as entertainment.” Frank, he said, spent “much of his time while in New York with other leftwingers . . . fighting for this and that and almost any goofy cause that comes along.” Just weeks earlier, after the Havana episode, he had made a reference to “Frank (Lucky) Sinatra.”

  The sniping so enraged Frank that he had talked openly of wanting to “belt” the columnist or, accor
ding to Sonny King, to “stick his head down into the toilet bowl and flush it.” “The next time,” Mortimer claimed Frank said at Ciro’s, “I’ll kill you.” It seems possible that he had planned the attack in advance. The district attorney’s investigators concluded that “Sinatra, with a gang behind him and with the active assistance of one man, made an unexpected and unprovoked assault.”

  Yet the case never went to trial. Frank appeared in court, apologized, and agreed to pay Mortimer $9,000 ($72,000 today). The DA then withdrew the charge. Mortimer went on criticizing Frank in his articles and, as he focused increasingly on organized crime, in several books. In U.S.A. Confidential, he and coauthor Jack Lait wrote flatly that Frank was “a mob property.”

  The mob, as well as Frank, had it in for Mortimer. Three years after the attack at Ciro’s, the columnist was beaten unconscious by two hoodlums at New Jersey’s Riviera club, owned by Willie Moretti. In 1960, FBI surveillance microphones would overhear New Jersey criminals discussing a Mortimer article that excoriated Frank for his links to a mob-run casino in Las Vegas. Someone, one of them predicted, “will shoot or beat up Mortimer sooner or later.”

  When Mortimer died three years later, of natural causes, Frank took posthumous revenge. “Frank and I were at Jilly [Rizzo]’s club in Manhattan,” Brad Dexter remembered. “He said, ‘That dirty sonofabitch, I’m glad he’s dead.’ He told Jilly to get the car—this was 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning, and he was full of whiskey. Mortimer had been buried across the river, and we drove to his grave. Frank unzipped his pants and urinated on the grave.

  “Can you imagine how a sick sonofabitch would want to go out there just to piss on the guy’s grave? I said: ‘What the hell did you want to do that for? D’you think pissing on his grave is going to prove anything?’ He said, ‘Yeah, this cocksucker made my life miserable. He talked against me, wrote articles, caused me a lot of grief. I got back at him.’ Frank always had to even the score.”