Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  That at one point during the getaway, when the Impala was approaching a police roadblock, Joe Amsler climbed out of the car into the heavily falling snow and knocked himself out by running into a tree branch.

  That upon finally hearing that he had in fact been kidnapped, Frank junior flew into a rage, refusing to give Keenan his father’s private telephone number for a ransom call. “No. Fuck you,” Junior said. “I’m not cooperating anymore. Go ahead, shoot me. Go ahead. I fucking dare you. Shoot me.”

  That, not trusting himself to be able to handle the job of telephoning Frank senior with the ransom demand, the twenty-three-year-old Barry Keenan had enlisted a second confederate named John Irwin, a gravel-voiced, forty-two-year-old housepainter who, like his accomplices, had a record of petty crimes.

  —

  On that same Monday morning, Dean Torrence’s phone rang. It was Barry Keenan calling. “He asked me if I’d turned on the radio yet,” Torrence recalled. “I said, ‘No—why?’ He said somebody had kidnapped Frank Sinatra Jr. from Lake Tahoe.”

  Torrence was thunderstruck. “I never thought he’d do it,” he said. “I thought somebody else must’ve heard his plan.”

  A few moments later, the musician realized that his old friend really had pulled off his crazy scheme. “I was in shock,” Torrence recalled. Keenan, he said, “sounded pretty calm. He was tired; he hadn’t slept in a day or two. Then he got to the basics of it, which was that he needed more money.”

  Barry Keenan and Joe Amsler, who now had Frank junior padlocked in the back bedroom of a rented house in Canoga Park in the San Fernando Valley, had not yet made their ransom demand, because they themselves were too frightened to talk to Frank Sinatra on the telephone.

  —

  At 4:45 p.m. on Monday, the phone finally rang in the room at the Mapes Hotel.

  “Is this Frank Sinatra?” the deep-voiced caller asked.

  “Speaking,” Frank said.

  “It doesn’t sound like Frank Sinatra.”

  “Well, it is,” Frank said.

  “Can you be available at nine a.m. tomorrow?”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “OK. Your son is in good shape. Don’t worry about him.”

  There was a click on the line, then silence.

  —

  Not long afterward, police captured the bank robbers Sorce and Keating twenty miles from the kidnap scene. The pair were indeed heavily armed. When the FBI showed photographs of the two men to John Foss, however, he was unable to identify them. “The development apparently left police without a major clue to the kidnapping,” UPI’s account said.

  —

  Frank endured another sleepless night in the suite at the Mapes, as did Big Nancy and fifteen-year-old Tina at 700 Nimes Road in Bel Air. Nancy junior was in New Orleans with Tommy Sands, where Sands was appearing at the Roosevelt hotel. FBI agents had been assigned to the whole family. Frank had also hired private guards to patrol the Nimes Road house.

  On Tuesday morning at about nine, John Irwin, the deep-voiced kidnapper, phoned again; this time, he put Frank junior on the line.

  “Hello, Dad,” Frankie said.

  “Frank junior?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How are you, son?”

  “All right.”

  “Are you warm enough?”

  There was no response. “You on the other end of the phone there?” Frank asked. “You on the other end of the phone there?”

  But it was Irwin who answered. “Yeah,” he said.

  “You want to talk to me about making a deal?” Frank asked. “You want to resolve this thing?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Irwin said. “But I can’t do it now, Frank.”

  “Why not?”

  “Gotta wait till around two o’clock.”

  “Well, do you have any idea what you want?”

  “Oh, naturally we want money.”

  “Well, just tell me how much you want.”

  “Well, I can’t tell you that now.”

  The FBI agents had already asked Frank how much cash he could get together on short notice: a million to a million and a half, he’d said. “I don’t understand why you can’t give me an idea so we can begin to get some stuff ready for you,” he said.

  “Well, that’s what I’m afraid of. I don’t want you to have too much time to get ready.”

  Subtly, Sinatra had shifted into command mode. “Well, hey, I gotta have some time,” he said.

  “I know. But you see—don’t rile me. You’re making me nervous. I’ll call you back about two o’clock.”

  “Well, can you call before that?”

  “I don’t think so. I gotta hang up now.”

  “Hey, can I talk to Frankie again?”

  The line went dead.

  “Frank was shaken when he hung that phone up, let me tell you,” former FBI agent John Parker recalled. “I was right there, in the room. I saw him break down. ‘I just want my kid back,’ he said…‘That’s all I want. Give me back my kid.’ I don’t think anyone had ever seen Sinatra like this. Everybody just sort of looked at him, not knowing what to do. I mean, do you comfort him or leave him alone?

  “When I saw all of this, that’s when I started thinking, Man, this guy’s got no mobster connections. This guy’s got no underworld ties.’Cause if he did, Jesus Christ, that would’ve been the time to use ’em, wouldn’t it have been?”

  —

  In the interim, the kidnappers told Frank to go to Ron’s Service Station in Carson City, thirty miles south of Reno, where he would receive further instructions on the station’s pay phone. “So, you know, Frank Sinatra, Senior and the FBI go racing down to Carson City, 30 minutes away,” Keenan recalled.

  And in about 15 minutes, John started calling for Frank Sinatra to the gas station. And the mechanic at the gas station—who was busy and by himself—kept answering the phone. And this caller was asking for Frank Sinatra, the most famous entertainer in the world at the time, and the guy got very angry when this caller was calling back time and again for Frank Sinatra.

  He thinks it’s a prank of some sort. And so, as soon as he hung up from the third time after letting John have it with four-letter words…in screeches two FBI cars and Frank Sinatra, Senior jumps out of the car and says, “My name is Frank Sinatra, have I had any calls?” And you can imagine the reaction that that poor mechanic had. So finally, one more time, John called back, and this time Frank answered the phone. And John told them what the next step was going to be.

  The kidnappers wanted $240,000, Irwin told Sinatra. “That’s exactly what I’ve decided we needed,” he said.

  Frank was mystified by the strange—and strangely low—number. “What are you talking about?” Frank asked. “I’ll give you an even million, nice and clean and easy.”

  “We don’t need that much,” Irwin said. “We’re not gonna take advantage of you, Mr. Sinatra. We need $240,000.” He then told Frank to proceed to Nancy’s house in Bel Air and await yet another call.

  “By this time, Junior was calmed down,” Barry Keenan recalled. “He and Joe Amsler were cracking up, telling each other dirty stories. He said to us, ‘You know what? I hope you guys get away with this. You guys got guts.’ ”

  —

  In Mexico, where she had just finished shooting The Night of the Iguana, Ava found out about the kidnapping—perhaps Frank had sent her word—and sat up drinking with a local acquaintance named Nelly Barquette. “She was very upset, Nelly remembered, and she cried because of the boy who had been kidnapped,” Lee Server writes.

  She cried out, “That boy—he could have been my son!” She had never had a child, she said, and for this she felt much regret. She could have had one with Frank Sinatra, she said. And she cried some more, and it seemed like she was no longer crying for the boy who had been kidnapped but for herself and the things in her life that she had done wrong. And she told Nelly Barquette that she was still in love with Frank Sinatra and it hurt so much to be in love with so
meone you could not have.

  “Yes, she said this to me many times,” Barquette recalled. “She was in love with him. She would always be in love. And it hurt so much.”

  —

  Frank was now irritated as well as terrified. The kidnappers seemed to him to be making it up as they went along: the ransom amount was too small, too strange. The FBI agreed with his assessment. (The crooks also appeared to be deriving a certain amount of satisfaction from ordering the most powerful man in show business around the landscape.) If the kidnappers truly were bumbling amateurs, of course, the news was both good and bad: on the one hand, they might be easily outwitted; on the other, they might panic and harm Junior.

  In the meantime, Sinatra had phoned his banker Al Hart and told him to withdraw $240,000 from his account, in bills of varying denominations, 12,400 bills in all: $70,000 in hundreds, $35,000 in fifties, and the rest in twenties, tens, and fives. Hart and his staff photographed every bill. It was a lengthy process. At the end of the afternoon, an FBI agent asked the bank president, “What are we going to put this money in, a paper bag?” The bills weighed twenty-three pounds. Hart said, “Go buy a valise.” The agent went to the department store J. W. Robinson’s but didn’t have enough money for the $56 bag. He returned to the City National Bank, where Al Hart gave him $15 from the ransom money to cover the shortfall.

  Hart took the money, $239,985 in thick stacks of bills bound with rubber bands, to Nancy’s house in the new leather valise.

  On Tuesday at 6:00 p.m., Frank, having been spirited out of the Mapes, flew back to Los Angeles with his retinue. The hilly neighborhood around 700 Nimes Road was jammed with reporters’ and photographers’ cars. Twenty-six FBI agents and more than a hundred members of the LAPD were on the case, the biggest kidnapping since the Lindbergh baby in 1932. The FBI had set up a command center in Frankie’s old bedroom. When her father walked through the back door, Tina Sinatra saw in Frank’s face “a mix of barely contained emotion, of grief and rage…and something else,” she writes. “Dad felt helpless. It was a foreign sensation for him, and sheer torture.”

  Throughout Tuesday evening, Frank’s fifteen-year-old daughter watched with alarm as her parents came close to falling apart. Her mother, she recalled, “had refused any sedatives and was just this side of hysterical.” But, she said, it was her father who made her most nervous. “I’d seen him truly frightened just once before, on a very bad flight to New York. Now I saw the same chilly look in those blue eyes, and it chilled me in turn. My father did his best to conceal his emotions. He wanted to lead by example, not exacerbate the problem. But he couldn’t fool his daughter, and it was tough on me to watch him wrestle with his fear.”

  “Why haven’t they called?” Frank kept muttering. “Why haven’t they called?” It helped her, Tina said, that he seemed to be getting angry.

  At 9:26 p.m., the phone rang. Frank picked it up on the fourth ring, as the FBI had instructed him. This time, Irwin directed him to go to a phone booth at a gas station at Camden Drive and Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Sinatra carried with him a roll of dimes—$5 worth—to use for pay-phone calls, should he need to make any.

  The coins came in handy: for the next hour or more, Frank would be making a tour of West and Southwest Los Angeles phone booths, placing and receiving calls to and from the kidnappers and others. At the Camden and Santa Monica booth, John Irwin told Frank to have a courier bring the ransom to yet another telephone booth, at the Western Airlines terminal at LAX, and answer to the name Patrick Henry. Sinatra called J. Edgar Hoover and asked for a man who could stay cool and not endanger his son. Hoover tapped an agent named Jerome Crowe for the job.

  With the valise full of cash and Crowe alongside him, Frank headed to the airport. The phone in the booth at the Western terminal rang, and Crowe picked it up.

  “This is John Adams, to whom am I speaking?” the voice said.

  “This is Patrick Henry,” Crowe replied.

  The kidnapper instructed the agent to go to still another service station and ask for a road map. From then on, the man said, Crowe would be observed. The kidnapper then told the agent to proceed to a gas station at Sepulveda and Olympic boulevards in West Los Angeles. Crowe would get a call three minutes after his arrival there, he was told.

  At this next station, Crowe answered the phone and was told that Frankie would be released unharmed at the Mulholland Drive exit of the San Diego Freeway three to four hours after the agent dropped off the money.

  Wanting to make sure the hostage was still alive, Crowe asked if he could speak to Frank junior. The caller said he could not, because Junior wasn’t with him—perhaps a sign that Keenan was now speaking for the trio, since John Irwin was with Frankie at the Canoga Park hideout. The kidnapper then directed Crowe to proceed to a Texaco station near a cemetery on Sepulveda Boulevard. At this last gas station, Crowe was told, he would see two parked school buses. He was to leave the valise between the buses, then check into a hotel. As a squad of FBI agents hovered nearby in taxis and a Good Humor truck, Jerome Crowe put the satchel on the pavement between the buses, then he and Frank left.

  —

  The kidnappers, sleepless for days and high on various drugs, were now in full disarray. Barry Keenan had picked up the ransom, but Joe Amsler, also detailed to the pickup, had panicked and fled after he saw what he thought was an FBI agent lurking at the Sepulveda gas station. When Keenan called John Irwin to say he had the money but that Amsler was missing, Irwin instantly suspected that Keenan had killed him to eliminate a witness. Meanwhile, Frankie, who through some combination of Stockholm syndrome and personal neediness had now grown close to Irwin, was causing problems. When Irwin told him that the kidnappers had received the ransom but that there was a problem—Amsler’s panicked flight—Junior bridled. He told Irwin that if he didn’t let him go, he, Frankie, would kill him—or Irwin would have to kill Frankie.

  “Junior was now highly irate that we had caused his family all this trouble,” Keenan recalled. “He was sick of us. He wanted to be set free. This was not the fun we thought it was going to be. John and Frank had bonded, and John wanted to set Frank free. He thought maybe I had gone crazy and killed Joe, and he didn’t want to take any chances.”

  Frankie had also suggested another possibility to Irwin: that his accomplices had absconded with the ransom money and left him to take the rap.

  Exhausted, guilty, and worn down by his captive, John Irwin had lost his taste for the whole enterprise. At 2:00 a.m., he phoned Frank Sinatra at Nimes Road and said, “Something has gone wrong.”

  Frank’s heart stopped. “What do you mean, something has gone wrong?” he yelled into the phone. “We did every goddamn thing you said. Now where’s my son?”

  “No, not with you,” Irwin said. “Something has gone wrong here. So I just dropped your son off at the San Diego Freeway and Mulholland. I wish to hell I hadn’t gotten into it, but it’s too late to get out. I’m sorry.”

  Sinatra took Tina’s face in his hands. “I’m going to bring your brother home,” he said.

  —

  But he didn’t. Driving alone as he’d been instructed, but with an FBI agent tailing him, Frank had circled and circled the Mulholland overpass area and come up empty. Half an hour later, he returned to Nimes Road without his son. “I cried the whole way back,” he later told a friend. “I cried, man. I was losing it. I couldn’t even drive the fucking car…I thought, Jesus Christ, they took the money, and they killed Frankie. They murdered my son.”

  At the same time as Frank was searching for Frankie, so was Barry Keenan. “When I got back to the hideout with the ransom and found that John and Junior were both gone and I had already lost Joe, I just burst into tears,” he recalled.

  None of this had worked out. I had the money, but I had lost the kidnap victim and both of my partners. And it was very important to my plan that I have the opportunity to let Junior go. I didn’t want to get caught and not have Junior. I wanted everyone to
know I had good intentions. This had turned into a comedy of errors.

  I freaked out, got into my car, and started looking for Frank Junior. As I’m out there looking for him, who do I pass on the road? Frank senior and an FBI agent, doing the same thing, looking for Junior. My heart stopped as they just passed me by.

  When Frank returned empty-handed, “the look on his face alarmed me,” Tina recalled. “I had never seen a face like that: stunned, angry, wired, and terminally tired, all at the same time. ‘I’m sorry,’ he told us. ‘He wasn’t there.’ It was the day before my father’s forty-eighth birthday, but he suddenly looked old to me.”

  “This isn’t good,” said one of the FBI agents, “but it’s not necessarily the end.”

  —

  The kidnappers had failed to take into account that there was no Mulholland Drive exit on the southbound San Diego Freeway. Heading south from Canoga Park, John Irwin had exited on North Sepulveda Boulevard and dropped Frank junior off a quarter mile past the Mulholland overpass, on the wrong side of the highway. In his agitated state, Irwin had also neglected to tell Frankie that his father was coming to pick him up. It was 2:30 in the morning. Well oriented in spite of being freezing, hungry, and exhausted, Frankie walked back to the overpass and crossed it, heading toward Bel Air. The sleep mask still dangled from his neck. He turned right on Roscomare Road, proceeding by dead reckoning toward his mother’s house, which lay two miles to the southeast, across the twisty, hilly, densely foliaged roads of the world’s wealthiest enclave. Every time a car passed, he ducked into the bushes, fearful that the kidnappers might have changed their minds and come after him.

  Twenty minutes later, George C. Jones, a private policeman cruising in his Bel-Air Patrol car, heard a voice call out, then saw a skinny young man flagging him down. Then he saw the sleep mask. Everyone who had read a newspaper or listened to the radio in the last two days knew about that sleep mask.