by Kitty Kelley
In an affidavit. Bob Hope tried to put an acceptable face on the photograph of Frank with Carlo Gambino, saying that it was not fair “to draw conclusions about him from the fact that he may from time to time have been photographed with people who are not pillars of society.” The comedian saluted Frank’s “reputation for generosity” and said that because of his contributions to the entertainment industry in Nevada he should be given a gaming license.
The last witness called was Frank himself, who testified for almost an hour about his relationship with Sam Giancana.
Q: Did you ever discuss with Mr. Giancana the fact that you might be a front for him at the Cal-Neva or that he might have some type of a hidden interest there?
A: No, never.
The board did not have the FBI wiretaps that showed the December 1961 conversation between Giancana and Johnny Roselli in which they discussed the money Sam had put into Cal-Neva.
The chairman continued trying to ascertain how much Frank knew about Sam’s presence on the property.
Q: There came a time in 1963, sometime between the nineteenth and twenty-seventh of July of that year, when Mr. Giancana was at the Cal-Neva Lodge. Did you have any prior knowledge or did you issue an invitation to Mr. Giancana to come to the lodge?
A: I never invited Mr. Giancana to come to the Cal-Neva Lodge. I never entertained him, and I never saw him.
Despite evidence to the contrary from an eyewitness, which was received by Ed Olsen in 1963 and is still in the Nevada Gaming Control Board’s files, this lie went unchallenged. Even Phyllis McGuire had told the investigators that Frank had been on the premises when Giancana had visited her in July 1963, but when Frank denied it at this hearing, the commission said nothing.
Q: Do you recall going down to Miss [Phyllis] McGuire’s bungalow and there walking into some type of an altercation with a gentleman and not an altercation that you were involved in, but seeing an altercation with a gentleman by the name of Collins?
A: How did I stay out of that one? No, I did not. I was not present. I was in Los Angeles when that happened. I got a phone call from one of my employees telling me there had been a problem.
The FBI agents who were following Giancana at the time knew of the fight between Sam and Phyllis McGuire’s road manager, Victor LaCroix Collins, which Frank and George Jacobs broke up. Now, under oath, Frank was denying he took part in it. He got away with it because the FBI reports were unavailable to the commission’s investigators, and Victor Collins was never contacted for his side of the story. Ed Olsen had a statement from Collins in 1963, but again no one bothered to present it as evidence at the hearing in 1981. When told of Sinatra’s version of events, Victor Collins said, “He’s lying under oath, but what do you expect?”
The chairman directed his next question to Mickey Rudin.
Q: When Miss McGuire was interviewed on January 27, 1981, she indicated to our investigators that it was her recollection that Mr. Giancana was there with her the first three to five days of her engagement, and that to her best recollection, she thought you were there at the same time. Now, you have certainly testified otherwise. Mr. Rudin, I wonder, are you in a position to have any recollection on that particular incident?
Rudin responded: “I would have to tell you it is my recollection that he was not there. I would also have to tell you that I don’t have that much confidence in my recollection on the event. It may have been I have fixed my mind he wasn’t there and that is now the story.”
The chairman asked Frank if Giancana had ever been at Cal-Neva “while you were a licensee while he was included in the Book of Excluded Persons by the State of Nevada.” Frank responded, “I haven’t any knowledge of that.”
The board apparently made no effort to interview any former employees of Cal-Neva who could have told them about Sinatra and Giancana playing golf together, the times they ate dinner together in the Cal-Neva dining room, the riotous parties they threw in the evenings in Miss McGuire’s chalet.
Phyllis McGuire was enraged by Frank’s dishonest testimony. “How could he say all those things?” she asked. “How could he deny his friendship with Sam? Frank adored the man, and then after his death Frank turned on him and denied their friendship just to get that damned license.… But Frank doesn’t stand by his friends. Look at what he did to Jack Entratter, who had been his best friend for years. After Carl Cohen punched him out and Frank left the Sands, Sinatra never spoke to Jack again. And Entratter lived next door to him in Palm Springs!”
Phyllis McGuire said that she had watched her career suffer as a result of loving Sam Giancana. Still, she had attended his funeral in 1975. Sinatra did not go to pay his last respects.
“That’s the way Frank is,” she said. “He cuts people out. I would hate to depend on that man’s friendship. He would sooner help a rank stranger than come to the aid of a friend. He’ll see a poor crippled man on the street corner and pay him to have surgery but turn his back on someone close to him [who is in trouble]. He’d give the prostitutes in Las Vegas five thousand dollars if they walked by, but he wouldn’t be there for a friend in need. It just doesn’t make sense.
“All the proof of Frank’s friendship with Sam is in the FBI files. It’s all there—the wiretaps and surveillance reports. Everything. I kept telling the gaming investigators who interviewed me to go to the Bureau’s files. Why didn’t they do it?”
The hearing continued:
Q: Mr. Sinatra, after purchasing the Cal-Neva, there came a time when you decided that you wanted to expand the facility there and enlarge the showroom, and you were out shopping for money and you had occasion to apply for some loans or at least a loan, is that true?
A: Well, Mr. Rudin, I think, can explain that a little better. We did apply for a loan but we were turned down.
The attorney said that he sent the loan application to the Teamsters Pension Fund in Chicago, which was the only institution other than a Nevada bank making loans for gaming in the state at that time.
Q: Did you and Mr. Sinatra at any time discuss this loan prior to applying or subsequent to applying and prior to their acting on it with Mr. Giancana?
Frank interrupted. “No, no,” he said. The board did not have access to the FBI files on Sam Giancana, which contained wiretaps of the Mafia chieftain’s complaints about being turned down for a similar loan believed to have been for expanding the Cal-Neva Lodge. (“There was a time when I could get all the money I wanted from the Hoffa union,” Giancana said in a telephone conversation in 1963. “I got $1.75 million in just two days from the Central once [Central States Pension Fund]. Now all this heat comes on and I can’t even get a favor out of him now. I can’t do nothing for myself. Ten years ago I got all the fucking money I want from the guy and now they won’t settle for anything.”)
Q: Mr. Sinatra, while you were a licensee at the Cal-Neva Lodge, to your knowledge, was money ever illegally diverted by you or by any of your associates to Mr. Giancana?
A: No, sir.
Without the federal wiretaps that showed Paul “Skinny” D’Amato was the man the Mafia chief put at Cal-Neva to keep track of his investment and to collect his money, the board could not challenge Frank’s statement to the contrary. Instead, the chairman took up the telephone conversation between Frank and Ed Olsen during which Sinatra used “vile and abusive language.” Even seventeen and a half years later Frank resented being asked about it. Bristling, he said, “I wonder, sir, if there is a human alive who once in his life didn’t lose his temper over a specific issue. If we are going to go on about this. …”
“If you want to ask for a show of hands here, we can do that,” said the gaming board chairman soothingly.
“It was a four-minute conversation on the telephone, and we have now made it an international incident practically,” said Frank.
Maintaining that the matter had to be explored, the chairman stated that Mr. Olsen, now deceased, was under the impression from his record that he was being threatened. “Was that y
our intention?” he asked.
“Not true, not true,” said Frank. “It would be pretty absurd to threaten a man who is crippled, wouldn’t you say so?”
“Well, I just am asking the questions.”
“Wouldn’t you say so?”
“Yes, it would appear to be.”
“Fine,” said Frank.
The chairman elected to take Sinatra’s word for what happened instead of referring to the memorandum that Ed Olsen had written at the time of the incident, in which he quoted verbatim from his conversation with Frank: “Now, listen to me, Ed … Don’t fuck with me … Just don’t fuck with me, and you can tell that to your fucking board and that fucking commission too.” Olsen also interviewed a witness who saw Frank break up the fight between Victor Collins and Giancana in the chalet. So he knew that Frank was not telling the truth when he said he was not on the premises. This was all part of the extensive oral history that Ed Olsen had given to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas before he died, but the Nevada Gaming Board agents did not make use of it in their investigation.
The chairman then asked Frank about his relationship with Willie Moretti, which Frank said was very vague in his mind. “He was a neighbor of mine when I bought a house in New Jersey, and the man from whom I bought the house, whose name I wish I could remember but I cannot, was a friend of Moretti’s, or as I met him, Willie Moore. That is the man I met. He came over and visited my wife and daughter and myself and brought Willie Moore with him, introduced me to him.”
Q: Did you know of Mr. Moore’s background when he was introduced to you as Mr. Moore?
A: No. I never seen him before.
Q: Did he ever represent you as an agent in trying to book engagements or contracts through you at any time during that period of time?
A: Never.
Q: Was your career at that particular stage of your life ever a topic of discussion with Mr. Moretti, how he might be of some assistance to you?
A: Never.
Q: Did he ever introduce you to any nightclub owners who were booking entertainment at that particular time?
A: No, sir.
Yet on March 1, 1951, in his secret testimony to the Kefauver Committee, Sinatra had said, “Well, Moore, I mean Moretti, made some band dates for me when I first got started, but I have never had any business dealings with any of those men.” Because the gaming investigators did not have a transcript of that testimony, they could not challenge Frank on his statements now.
Q: The allegation has been made, and I am sure you are not unfamiliar with it, that early in your career one of the reasons you progressed was due to the efforts of some members of organized crime. How would you respond to that allegation?
A: Simply. It is ridiculous.
Q: Did you at any time in those early years play nightclubs that, to your knowledge, were either owned or controlled by members or associates of what is called organized crime?
A: I could never prove that to you, never.… What I am trying to say, sir, there was always gossip as to who owned it or who ran it, but one would perjure oneself by saying, well, I am sure that so-and-so owned the club.
Asked about his relationship with Joe Fischetti, the cousin of Al Capone, Frank said that he was a very dear friend but that they had never had any type of business dealings. He said this unmindful of court papers in Florida that showed that Joe Fischetti was on retainer to the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami and that for representing Frank there he received in excess of one thousand dollars a month.
Q: Did you have an occasion to travel with Mr. Fischetti at one time to Havana?
A: I happened to be on the same plane with him. I didn’t travel with him.
Q: What was the purpose of your trip to Havana?
A: To find sunshine.
Q: And how long were you there?
A: About two days.
Q: Did Mr. Fischetti subsequent to your getting to Havana introduce you to Mr. Charles Luciano?
A: No, I was introduced to Mr. Luciano by a newspaperman named Nate Gross from Chicago.
Q: The allegation again is made that on that trip you conveyed by briefcase a sum of approximately two million dollars. How do you respond to that allegation?
A: If you can find me an attaché case that holds two million dollars, I will give you the two million dollars.
Q: Did you, subsequent to your meeting with Mr. Luciano in Havana, ever have occasion to meet Mr. Luciano again?
A: Never.
Q: You never came in contact with him?
A: Never.
Frank didn’t mention the trip to Naples, Italy, with Hank Sanicola when the two men visited the crime lord, and the gold cigarette case Sinatra had had inscribed as a gift for Luciano.
Q: Could you offer any explanation as to why your name and address might have been in Mr. Luciano’s possession when searched by Italian authorities?
A: I haven’t the slightest idea.
Q: But your testimony is that save and except the time in Havana, you had had no contact at all with him?
A: I just met him in a bar and shook hands, as in many cases, and that was it.
The questioning turned to Frank’s performance at the Villa Venice in a Chicago suburb in 1962. He was asked if he knew that Sam Giancana had a hidden interest in the ownership of the supper club.
“I don’t know whether he had anything to do with the club and he never asked me to entertain there,” said Frank. “An agent asked me to entertain there.”
Neither Sinatra nor the commissioners seemed to be aware of the FBI wiretaps of Giancana’s conversations about performing at the Villa Venice and Giancana’s complaints about the demands Sinatra was making on him.
“That Frank, he wants more money, he wants this, he wants that, he wants more girls, he wants … I don’t need that or him. I broke my ass when I was talking to him in New York,” Giancana grumbled to an associate in the Armory Lounge on September 13, 1962.
Frank produced a contract showing that he had been paid Fifteen thousand dollars for seven days of appearances at the Villa Venice, which was considerably short of the $100,000 a week he was making in Las Vegas at the time. Asked whether the $15,000 figure was commensurate with the other entertainers’ Villa Venice contracts, an agent reported that it was and the board probed no further.
Q: Did you see Mr. Giancana while you were entertaining at the Villa Venice?
A: I might have.
Q: You don’t recall?
A: No, but I might have. Just possible.
Giancana’s daughter, Antoinette, was outraged by Frank’s response.
“Just possible!” she said. “I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read that any more than I could believe the other things that he said about my father.… We were at the Villa almost every night that Sinatra and his Rat Pack were there. Sam took us—friends, family members—to the dressing rooms of Sammy Davis, Jr. and Sinatra, which were upstairs. Sinatra and his group would be eating some bagels or some Italian food … [Frank] would give my father a hug, and so would Sammy Davis whenever Sam entered their rooms, and pictures were taken. Unfortunately, the photographs were confiscated by my sisters when my father died [in 1975], so I no longer have copies of pictures taken of Sinatra and Sam and me.”
Miss Giancana was so upset by Frank’s testimony that she called the Nevada Gaming Control Board to tell them what she knew and to show them the FBI documents that illustrated a much different relationship between her father and Frank than the one he attested to.
“The board people I talked with weren’t very interested,” she said. “They never bothered to come to see me to examine what documents I had.”
The final matter covered in the hearings was Frank’s involvement in the Westchester Premier Theater, but for this Mickey Rudin did most of the talking.
“Would you explain to us why Mr. Sinatra was not listed as a creditor in that bankruptcy when there was still money outstanding on that second contract?” asked the chairman.
&n
bsp; Rudin said he didn’t know why Frank was not listed. “From my standpoint, when they called me up and said they didn’t want—they didn’t want the embarrassment of listing the fact they hadn’t paid Mr. Sinatra in full, I told them that was their problem and not mine because if they did not list the debt, it would not … be discharged by their being adjudicated bankrupt. The debt would survive against the entity if it ever reorganized and wouldn’t be subject to the bankruptcy rules.”
Q: Were you compensated for your services to Mr. Sinatra as pertaining to the Westchester contracts?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: How is that compensation? Is it a monthly retainer type?
A: Mr. Sinatra and I have had no written agreement over the twenty-five years. But generally I charge him on the basis of gross compensation or adjusted gross on a percentage basis.
Q: Did you personally receive any income from activities at the Westchester Theater other than the attorney fees that were paid to you by Mr. Sinatra.
A: No, sir.
Q: Mr. Sinatra, were you ever offered, prior to your going to the Westchester, a sum of fifty thousand dollars which unknown parties agreed to pay you outside of the reportable income that a person would normally have? Were you ever offered that amount of money to book the Westchester?
A: That is a negative.
Q: Did you ever discuss with a Mr. Thomas Marson, who was one of the convicted defendants in the Westchester case, a debt of fifty thousand dollars that he alleged the Westchester might owe you?
A: No, I did not.
Q: From what you said to us, I would conclude that it would be your testimony that you received then no illegal money from any means.…
A: I have never in my life, sir, received any illegal moneys. I have had to work very hard for my money, thank you.
These questions and answers satisfied the board that Frank had not taken fifty thousand dollars under the table as had been alleged by a witness in the Westchester Theater case. The commissioners had no knowledge of any large amounts of cash Frank had access to. It might have been instructive to hear him explain the briefcase full of money that he had showed to Brad Dexter in 1964, saying, “There’s more where that came from.” Or to learn why Barbara Sinatra carried in her purse a ten-thousand-dollar packet of cash with the Caesars Palace wrapper still intact.