by Kitty Kelley
“I’ll get him out when I’m good and ready,” said Toni, slamming the receiver down.
Dolly called back begging for her son’s release and even offered Toni money, but she got nowhere. In desperation, Dolly sent Marty to Lodi to talk to Toni’s family.
“Marty came to my father’s house, and he was shaking,” she said. “He walked real slow and quiet, like he was a beaten man. Dolly made that man so low. He said, ‘Frank should respect his mother but when he doesn’t, she takes it out on me.’ You never embarrass an Italian man and make him low like that. As soon as I saw him I felt bad. He looked like a hobo at the door begging for something to eat. He didn’t even ask for help right away, but his face said it all. He was stunned when I let him in. He thought I was going to swear at him. My father came out and said, ‘You look bad. You want a shot of liquor?’
“ ‘Yeah,’ said Marty. ‘Today I feel tired.’ ”
The two men talked for a couple of hours, and then Toni’s father asked her to get Frank out of jail. “Why?” she asked. “So he can go to another party with Nancy Barbato?” Mr. Della Penta shrugged his shoulders and Marty lowered his head without saying a word. His hangdog expression made Toni feel so guilty that she changed her mind and decided to let Frank out after she visited him in jail. She called her brother-in-law, the assistant sheriff, who took her to Frank’s cell.
“You going to take me out?” he asked when he saw her.
“No,” said Toni. “I just brought you a sandwich.”
“I can’t take it no more,” said Frank, starting to cry.
“I don’t see your girlfriend around here to help you.”
“Please, Toni. Don’t do this to me,” he said, sobbing.
“You embarrassed me, Frank. You humiliated me. What makes your mother, an abortionist, think she is better than me? You have to apologize to me and your mother has to apologize.”
Dolly was willing to promise anything to get her son out of jail, so Toni signed the papers withdrawing her charges against Frank.
Three weeks later, no one had yet apologized to her. When Frank did not call, Toni was convinced that it was his mother’s fault, so she drove to Hoboken “to have it out with that awful Dolly.”
“I went to her house on Garden Street and said, ‘Who the hell do you think you are? Your lousy son is so thin. Don’t you ever feed him or don’t he want to stay home with you long enough to eat?’ She got so mad she threw me down the cellar. But I wasn’t scared. The next-door neighbors heard all the screaming, and Frank’s aunts recognized my car in the front of the house and came over yelling at Dolly not to hurt me.”
Within minutes, the police arrived, as did Toni’s grandfather, Anthony Della Penta.
“This nut is keeping my granddaughter in the cellar,” the old man said.
The police asked Dolly why she had Toni locked up. “She’s running with my son and I don’t like it. She’s caused a big disturbance here and I want her arrested like she arrested my son,” said Dolly.
Detective Sergeant John Reynolds arrested Toni, who was given a suspended sentence for disorderly conduct. The next day, December 22, 1938, Toni swore out her second warrant for Frank’s arrest, this time charging him with adultery.
But before Frank’s hearing, Toni’s grandfather persuaded her to drop the charges and forget Frank’s songs of love. He had looked up Dolly’s arrest record and did not want to be related to her even by marriage. “How bad you need a boyfriend to have one with a mother who kills babies?” he asked her.
“It took me fourteen years to get married again after Frank,” she said many years later. “I don’t hate him for what he did to me. He was in a hole at the time and had to do what his mother said. It was really her fault. She ran his life.”
Dolly Sinatra also ran part of Hoboken, a mile-square city of seventy thousand people, which had long since lost its luster as a resort for New York’s monied socialites. From the turn of the century on, the lush landscape had been devoured by concrete foundries and wooden tenements to accommodate the waves of immigrants who had come in search of a dream.
The Germans had arrived first and in time had become prosperous merchants who lived in mansions high on the hill of Castle Point, overlooking the Hudson River. Their lawns stretched to the banks of the river, where their view spanned the skyline of Manhattan. They sent their daughters away to finishing schools while their sons stayed home to attend the Stevens Institute of Technology, the oldest college of mechanical engineering in the country.
Next had come the Irish, who nestled snugly in the middle of town, where they were welcomed by the Catholic church and soon dominated the police force and the fire department.
At the bottom of the heap were the Italians, who lived on the west side of town, packed into five-story wooden tenements. Little Italy was the dirty downtown area west of Willow Avenue, where the air smelled of the garlic and hunks of provolone hung in the front windows of groceries alongside strings of spicy sausage and garlands of red peppers. Old Sicilian women wearing black dresses, black stockings, and black shawls walked to and from church on the narrow cobblestone streets. Scorned by the uptown Irish and Germans, who barred them from their clubs and churches, the Italians were disparagingly referred to as Wops because so many had arrived from the old country without papers. Immigration officials had stamped their cards accordingly—W.O.P.—and the abbreviation soon became a term of derision.
Within Little Italy there was a further division: The northern Italians dismissed their countrymen from the south as peasants. And it was this class distinction that affected the coupling of Natalie Delia Garavante from Genoa and Anthony Martin Sinatra, a Sicilian from Catania.
When nineteen-year-old Natalie, considered so adorable as a child that they called her Dolly, first began dating the twenty-two-year-old boxer with tattoos all over his arms, John and Rosa Garavante began to worry—especially when she crept out of the house every night wearing her brothers’ clothes so that she could watch Marty fight. Women were not allowed to attend boxing matches in those days, but Dolly refused to stay away. So she pulled on her brothers’ trousers, shirts, and boots, stuffed her strawberry-blond hair into a poor-boy’s cap, stuck a cigar into her mouth, and marched into a gymnasium with her two brothers, who were also fighters.
While Marty Sinatra seemed nice enough, he certainly wasn’t anything special, and Dolly’s parents were heartsick when their exceedingly gregarious daughter decided she wanted to marry the quiet, asthmatic boxer. The son of a boilermaker, Marty could neither read nor write, and he’d never held a steady job, but because of his mother’s small grocery store he never went hungry. To the Garavantes, though, he exemplified the southern Italians’ attitude which held that learning was for a cultural life that peasants could never aspire to. “Do not make your child better than you are,” runs a Sicilian proverb.
Dolly, pretty and spirited, was the daughter of a lithographer’s stonecutter, and she had had an elementary education that put her light years beyond her would-be fiancé. Her proud Genoese parents pleaded with her not to marry this Sicilian who wasn’t even a good boxer and had little chance of ever making a successful life for himself, but Dolly wouldn’t listen. She felt that her driving ambition more than compensated for Marty’s lack of direction and that his weaknesses softened her toughness. In a last attempt at dissuading her, the Garavantes refused to give their daughter a wedding. But Dolly remained undaunted. On February 14, 1914, she and Marty headed for City Hall in Jersey City.
The young couple told the clerk they were born in Jersey City rather than admit they were from “the other side”—or “over the line,” as immigrants referred to their motherland. Giving his full name as Tony Sinatra, the bridegroom said his occupation was athlete. He didn’t mention that he had to fight under the Irish name of Marty O’Brien to be permitted in the ring, since even the gymnasiums closed their doors to Italians in those days. With their Hoboken friends Anna Caruso and Harry Marotta standing up for the
m, Natalie Garavante married Martin Sinatra against her parents’ wishes.
The young couple started housekeeping in a four-story eight-family building at 415 Monroe Street in Hoboken. The water was cold, and the bathroom was in the hallway. Even so, Dolly and Marty were the envy of their immigrant neighbors who were living in one-room novels crammed with beds, and whose toilets were in the backyard.
Monroe Street was the heart of Little Italy, and few immigrants dared to venture out of their enclave. Most could not speak English well and they feared people in authority, especially policemen in uniform, who, they believed, could send them back to Ellis Island. Their swarthy complexions, dark hair, and brown eyes coupled with their broken English made them immediately recognizable to the uptown Irish, whom they sought to avoid.
Most Italians would never be so bold as to cross the dividing line of Willow Avenue into Irish territory, but Dolly Sinatra refused to be deprived of anything her betters had. And her blond hair and blue eyes enabled her to pass. She would introduce herself as Mrs. O’Brien, thereby making herself acceptable to the Irish. She was determined to become uptown, and she dreamed constantly of better days, even though Marty, a plain man who loved baseball and boxing, did not share her aspirations. He boxed regularly but not well; he was never a champion like Dolly’s brother Dominick. Marty spoke only when necessary; she talked all the time. He was quiet; her raucous laughter shook the ceiling plaster. He preferred staying downtown in the pool halls and bars of Little Italy, where he could eat ravioli and drink homemade wine with the rest of the men, but Dolly wanted to wear Hoboken like a ribbon in her hair.
She had an amazing facility with languages. She spoke all the dialects heard in Little Italy as well as she spoke English. This made her someone her immigrant neighbors could turn to when they had problems understanding the rules and regulations of the new world. She was also the person in Little Italy to whom Irish politicians could go when they needed Italian votes. And so she became a natural for the position of leader of the third ward in the ninth district, a position never before held by an immigrant woman.
Dolly was a woman of such gall that men had to recognize her as their equal. If they didn’t, she told them off in words that from a man would have started a brawl.
“The mouth on that woman would make a longshoreman blush,” said Steve Capiello, a former mayor of Hoboken, who knew Dolly when he was growing up. “Her favorite expression was ‘son of a bitch bastard.’ She’d curse your mother to hell without even blinking.”
“Dolly had the roughest language of any female I’ve ever known,” said Doris Corrado, a Hoboken librarian. “One time, she walked into a party from pouring-down rain and the first thing she said when she got in the door was, ‘Holy Jesus! It’s raining sweet peas and horseshit out there.’ She was a devil! Her mouth dripped with honey one minute and the next it was ‘Fuck this’ and ‘Fuck that.’ ”
The vile language added to Dolly’s tough reputation. Immigrants in Little Italy knew that she would never be intimidated by Irish policemen, Irish priests, or Irish politicians. So they naturally turned to her whenever they needed someone to plead their case to the public officials.
Her door always open, Dolly came to know those in the downtown area on a first-name basis. People flocked to her home for spaghetti and linguine. Fun-loving, she danced the tarantella at weddings. When someone died, she swooped into the wake to comfort the bereaved with a platter of sausages and homemade pasta. During the holidays she made crispeddi, the sugar-coated fried dough pastry that the Italians loved, and distributed it to everyone on her block.
A year after she married Marty, Dolly became pregnant. Both families were excited by the prospect of a grandchild, the first to be born in America to either the Garavantes or the Sinatras. And so the Garavantes became more tolerant of their Sicilian son-in-law.
The child would come into the world with four uncles and two aunts on his mother’s side, one uncle and one aunt on his father’s side, and two sets of grandparents, all living within two blocks of one another. Later, there would be almost a dozen cousins. And the generations would live together in daily contact. For the family was the primary source of support.
The baby arrived in the Sinatras’ Monroe Street apartment on December 12, 1915. It was a breech birth and an excruciating delivery for the twenty-year-old mother, who was never able to bear children again. As a result of the doctor’s forceps, the baby—a thirteen-and-a-half-pound boy—emerged with a punctured eardrum, a lacerated ear, and deep facial wounds on the left side of his face and neck.
Because of the baby’s birth injuries, the baptism was delayed for several months. When it did take place, downtown Hoboken was shocked by the compart (godparents) the Sinatras had selected. Traditionally, Italian couples chose their maid of honor and best man to be godparents of their firstborn, but Dolly boldly ignored the custom.
Taking her first step uptown, she selected for her son an Irish godfather, Frank Garrick, circulation manager of The Jersey Observer. Garrick and Marty were very good friends: they played baseball together, drank together. But it was the fact that Garrick’s uncle, Thomas Garrick, was a Hoboken police captain that appealed to Dolly. She knew that the gloss reflected from that association would give her child more standing than any Italian godfather could ever bestow.
On April 2, 1916, Martin Sinatra carried the four-month-old boy who was to be his namesake into St. Francis Church and handed him to his godmother, Anna Gatto, a good friend of Dolly’s, for the christening.
“We were standing in the front hall of the church, where the font is,” Frank Garrick recalled many years later. “The priest came in and asked my name, and I said, ‘Francis.’ He then started the baptism, saying, ‘I baptize thee in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.’ I knew the boy was to be named after his dad, so I didn’t pay much attention. Afterward, when we were walking out of the church, Marty turned to me and said, ‘Guess what the kid’s name is?’
“ ‘Martin,’ I said.
“ ‘Nope. It’s now Francis. The priest forgot and named him after you instead of me.’
“I never heard the priest say Francis, but Marty did, only he never said a word. Marty wouldn’t, of course, and Dolly wasn’t there. She was at home in bed still recovering from the birth. If she’d been there, she would have thundered and raised hell all over the place.”
Dolly never challenged the absentminded cleric. She accepted his mistake as a good omen, a way of further cementing the relationship between her Italian son and his Irish godfather. Already Francis Albert Sinatra had a fighting edge in Hoboken.
2
On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson called for a declaration of war against Germany. Immediately, he made Hoboken a principal port of embarkation for American troops and ordered all two hundred thirty-seven waterfront saloons closed, making the city the first in the nation to experience federal prohibition.
The Germans who had ruled the town for so many years found themselves ostracized after German spies were discovered placing a time bomb aboard a steamship carrying sugar from New York to France. Throughout America, Germans became suspect, but wartime hysteria over imagined German espionage was especially high in Hoboken. German newspapers were banned and German beer gardens closed. The German part of the city was put under martial law, and military police rounded up “enemy aliens” and shipped them off to Ellis Island without even the semblance of a hearing. Panic swept through the German community, and thousands fled after being told to vacate their luxury apartments or face arrest.
The Irish now ascended to the ruling class, but the city became more Italian in character as thousands of immigrants moved into the downtown area. Their natural distrust of authority became heightened when the President insisted that everyone in the United States subscribe to “the simple and loyal motto: America for Americans.” A few days later, the chairman of the Iowa Council of Defense received national attention with his announcement, “We are go
ing to love every foreigner who really becomes an American, and all others we are going to ship back home.”
Fearing deportation, the immigrants in Little Italy rarely ventured off their own blocks and seldom went uptown for anything. Some even tried to stop speaking Italian except in their own homes, and encouraged their children to learn English and become “Americanized.”
Around that time, Dolly Sinatra was summoned to the mayor’s office where, in addition to her duties as ward heeler, she was given the title of official interpreter to the municipal court. This meant that she was paid to accompany the immigrants whenever they had to appear before a judge.
“She told wonderful stories about taking the immigrants to get their citizenship papers,” recalled her niece, Rosalie Garavante. “She had one Italian who was a fruit peddler, and when the judge asked him how many stars were in the American flag, the man said, ‘How many-a-bananas in a buncha?’ The judge looked puzzled, and before Dolly could say anything, the little man looked up at the judge and said, ‘Say, your honor. You sticka your business. I sticka mine.’ ” Dolly immediately stepped forward to cajole the judge into granting the fruit vendor his citizenship papers.
That meant one more vote that Dolly could deliver for the Democratic machine of New Jersey’s Hudson County, a corrupt political organization run by Mayor Frank “I am the boss” Hague of Jersey City. Dolly’s political activities put such great demands on her time that she turned her baby over to her mother’s care while she attended to her duties. Her main function was to open the way for the poor people in her neighborhood to get help from City Hall. In return, they were expected to vote the way she told them to on Election Day.
Dolly knew that if she delivered enough votes, she would eventually get patronage that she could use to provide employment for her family and friends. But as considerable as her influence was becoming, it was not yet enough to shield her family from punishment for their crimes.