Sinatra

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  The next day, December 11, Frank and FBI agent Jerome Crowe were to deliver the money: $239,985. (Fifteen dollars of the ransom money had been used to buy a fifty-six-dollar valise in which the money was to be delivered.)

  Sinatra and Crowe were then sent on a proverbial wild–goose chase: first to Los Angeles International Airport, then to a gas station, then to another gas station, where they were told they would find two parked school buses. They were told that they should leave the valise between the buses. They were promised that Frank Jr. would be released within hours after the money was dropped off. As they delivered the money, a team of FBI agents shadowed the drop-off point in a Good Humor truck and several taxicabs.

  Barry Keenan picked up the money. But, typical of the daftness that had thus far characterized his caper, he lost his coconspirator, Joe Amsler, who took off when he thought he’d seen an FBI agent lurking about the site. When Keenan called John Irwin from a pay telephone to tell him that he had a black valise filled with Sinatra’s money, but didn’t know what had become of Joe Amsler, Irwin became suspicious. He later said he suspected that Keenan had “iced” Amsler to get rid of a witness to the kidnapping. By this time—Tuesday—there was so much confusion, it seemed as if Frank Jr. was the last thing on their minds. No one had slept in three days, and everyone except Frank Jr. was on some sort of drug. Without telling Keenan, John Irwin then decided to take matters into his own hands: He released Frank Jr. and then called his father.

  Frank: “You Know You’re a Dead Man, Right?”

  At two in the morning on December 12, four hours after the payout, John Irwin telephoned Frank Sinatra. “Something has gone terribly wrong,” Irwin said.

  Frank immediately became frantic. “What do you mean, something has gone wrong?” he shouted into the phone. “We did everything you said. Now where’s my son?”

  “No, not with you,” Irwin said. “Something has gone wrong here.”

  “Where’s my kid?” Frank demanded to know.

  “He’s safe,” Irwin assured him. “I just dropped him off at the San Diego Freeway at Mulholland.”

  “You know you’re a dead man, right?” Frank said angrily. It wasn’t a question as much as it was a statement of fact. “You know I’m gonna kill you, right?”

  “I wish to hell I hadn’t gotten into this thing,” Irwin said, “but it’s too late to get out. So . . . I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, you’re sorry, all right,” Frank said. And with that he slammed down the telephone. Then he turned to Nancy, who looked as if she’d been stricken.

  “What did he say?” she asked urgently. “What did he say?”

  “I’m getting our son,” Frank said as he wrapped his strong arms around his ex-wife. She collapsed in tears. “I’m bringing him home, don’t worry,” he said, holding her close. Tina stood next to her parents, now also crying. Frank reached out and brought her into the hug. The three stood together embracing, with Frank repeating that everything was going to be okay, that he would bring Frankie back to them. “I’m gonna get him,” Frank repeatedly assured them. “Don’t worry about it. I promise.” He then broke away from them and, with an FBI agent in tow, left the house.

  He got into his car, headlights out in order to evade reporters, and drove to what he’d been told had been the drop-off point, the overpass at Mulholland on the San Diego Freeway.

  Meanwhile, Barry Keenan returned to the hideout. “When I got back to the hideout with the ransom and found that John Irwin and Frank Jr. were both gone and I had already lost Joe, I burst into tears,” he remembered. “None of this had worked out. I had the money, but I had lost the kidnap victim and both of my partners. I freaked out, got into my car, and started looking for Frank Jr.,” recalled Keenan. “And as I’m out there looking for him, who do I pass on the road? Frank Sr. and an FBI agent, doing the same goddamn thing, looking for Junior. My heart almost stopped as they just passed me by.”

  Barry Keenan couldn’t find Frank Jr.

  Neither could Frank Sinatra.

  Frankie Is Released

  The fifteen-minute drive back to Nancy’s house without his son must have seemed unbearably long for Frank Sinatra. “I cried the whole way back,” he later confided in one friend. “I cried, man. I was losing it. I couldn’t even drive the car. I was losing it. I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, they took the money, and they killed Frankie.’ They murdered my son.”

  When he walked through the back door of Nancy’s home without his boy, his ex-wife almost fainted from despair. Frank collapsed into a chair, tilted back his head, and stared into space.

  “You don’t have him?” Nancy asked, her eyes wide with horror. “What happened? “

  “My mother and I broke down,” Tina Sinatra recalled. “We just fell apart. I felt wrung out; I had nothing left.”

  “We’ve been double-crossed,” Frank said, not even able to look at Nancy or Tina. He shook his head in disbelief. “How do you like that?” he said, now speaking to John Parker, one of the FBI agents. “ ‘They got the dough, and they got Frankie. I acted in good faith.’ He then told me he was going to call Sam Giancana,” said Parker. “ ‘If I have to handle it that way, then I’ve got no choice,’ he said.”

  “You sure that’s a good idea?” Parker asked.

  “No, I’m not sure,” Frank said.

  “Just let us handle it, then,” Parker said. “We can do this the right way.”

  While Sinatra and Parker discussed bringing Giancana into the situation, the doorbell rang. An FBI agent went to answer it; Nancy followed. They found a man in a uniform who appeared to be a security guard standing blank-faced in the doorway. “Mrs. Sinatra,” he said, “I have your boy in the trunk of my car. And he’s all right.”

  Nancy just stood in the doorway, her mouth wide open.

  Frank came to the door. “What’s going on?” he asked. “What’s going on?”

  “Mr. Sinatra, I have your boy in the trunk of my car.”

  Stunned, Frank must have thought Frankie was dead. “Get him out, get him out,” he said frantically. “Get him out. Get him out.”

  Everyone in the house raced out to the car, the trunk was opened, and Frank Jr. got out. Nancy immediately became overwhelmed at the sight of her son. “Hi, Ma,” he said as they embraced. “Don’t cry, Ma. It’s over.” Then he turned to his father. “Dad,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” Frank said. “Jesus Christ. For what?”

  “I’m just sorry, Dad.”

  A tearful Sinatra embraced his son, then backed away to let his mother hold him again. As he stood in the doorway, Frank Sinatra seemed older—much older—than his forty-eight years.

  Frankie explained that when he was set free, he hadn’t been told that his father was going to pick him up at the drop-off point. So he walked two miles to Roscomare Road in Bel-Air. As cars drove by, he jumped behind bushes, frightened that the kidnappers had changed their minds and had come back for him. He was finally discovered by Bel-Air patrol guard George C. Jones. Jones decided that Frankie should hide in the trunk to avoid being photographed by the media camped outside Nancy’s house.

  Frank Sinatra Jr. concluded, “Seeing the faces of both my parents when the ordeal was finally over, it seemed to me that they had aged ten years. I sometimes wonder if Dad has ever really recovered from the experience. I’m sure my mother hasn’t.”

  As the happy family reunion took place, the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Someone in the house was just taking messages. But then a call came in for Frank that he was told was important. He went to the telephone; it was Bobby Kennedy. He wanted to make sure that everything was okay. Frank assured him that he had his son back, and then thanked him profusely. “I’ll never forget your kindness,” he told RFK. This moment marked the end of any feud with Bobby. From this point onward, Frank never had a critical thing to say about him. He would always be grateful to him for his concern about Frank Jr. and for the manpower he put behind the search for him.

 
Bobby wanted to speak to Frank Jr. “Are you all right, son?” he asked. Frank Jr. said he was just fine. He thanked him for his help. RFK then asked to “speak to one of my men.” FBI agent Dean Elson went on the line. “Implement the ramrod,” RFK said, which meant that now that Junior was safe, find the kidnappers . . . and waste no time doing so.

  Capturing the Kidnappers

  The next few days were hectic. There were phone calls to and from Dolly and Marty Sinatra to keep them apprised of how their grandson was doing. A call from Sam Giancana to express his relief. The FBI then interviewed Frank Jr., who told them, “I think they were a bunch of amateurs. The one guy looked familiar to me. They were more scared than I was. Another guy gave up the whole thing, chickened out, and got me out of there before the first guy [Keenan] came back.”

  When George C. Jones returned to work the day after he dropped off Frank Jr. at Nancy’s home, he found a note asking him to return to the Sinatra estate. When he got there, he was greeted by one of Sinatra’s aides, who handed him an envelope. “Sinatra saw me standing in the living room,” recalled Jones. “He came over and shook my hand. I said, ‘Mr. Sinatra, I feel I shouldn’t take any kind of reward from you.’ He said, ‘Please take it. And have a merry Christmas.’ When Jones got back to his office, he opened the envelope. In it were ten crisp one-hundred-dollar bills.

  Two days later, on December 14, 1963, Frank received a telephone call from J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI had the kidnappers in custody. Joe Amsler’s brother, James, had turned him in to the FBI while his brother was asleep. Amsler was arrested within the hour; Irwin followed. Barry Keenan was arrested while walking into the home owned by his girlfriend’s parents in La Canada, California. Fifteen FBI agents showed up to apprehend him. “The night that we got the news that the kidnappers were in custody, we opened a magnum of champagne,” Nancy Sinatra recalled. “My mother, who doesn’t drink, drank most of it. She was so happy, she didn’t even have a headache the next day.”

  Just before he was arrested, Barry Keenan had given his ex-wife several thousand dollars to buy new furniture. Later, when Sinatra found out about it, he asked the FBI not to take the furniture that had been purchased with his money. “Oh, the hell with it,” he said. “Just let her keep her furniture. It’s not like she did anything wrong.”

  The Trial

  To this day, many people—reporters, fans, interested parties who remember the ordeal as it unfolded—wonder if the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr. was actually just a publicity stunt orchestrated by father, son, or both. Some have even proffered the theory that Frank Jr. set the whole thing up and that his father didn’t know about it—and maybe never did.

  At the trial in late February 1964 in Los Angeles U.S. District Court, the kidnappers’ attorneys—Charles L. Crouch (representing Barry Keenan), Gladys Towles Root (for John Irwin), and George A. Forde and Morris Lavine (for Joe Amsler)—argued that the caper had been staged by young Sinatra for the purposes of publicity, “an advertising scheme.” In her opening statement, John Irwin’s attorney, Root, said, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and Frankie Jr. just wanted to make the ladies swoon like Papa. Frankie told my client, ‘The ladies used to swoon over my father, then some wise publicity agent took that on and made my father an international star.’ ”

  Joe Amsler’s attorney George A. Forde continued, “The kidnapping headlines are doing the same thing for Frank Sinatra’s son. There is a vacant seat here for a fourth defendant, a financier who financed this whole thing.” It would later be learned that the lawyer was referring to Dean Torrence. When put on the witness stand, Torrence admitted giving money to Keenan to finance the kidnapping.

  “How it evolved that the whole thing was supposedly a hoax was that I was in jail, lonely and desperate,” remembered Barry Keenan. “I felt guilty because of the pain I had caused my parents and because of the way I had coaxed my friends to get involved in this scheme. One of the attorneys—not my own—came in one night and said to me, ‘Look, if this was a publicity stunt and you are able to tell us that it was a publicity stunt, then that would be a very strong defense.’ Since I was the ringleader, I was the one who had to make the statement. By that time I had sobered up and realized that we were all in a heap of trouble. I slept on it.

  “The next morning, I came out with this lie about the kidnapping being a publicity stunt, and that’s all my attorneys needed to hear: Frankie was in on the hoax. It became our defense. I’m not proud of it. It was a lousy thing to do to the Sinatras.”

  During the trial, circumstances and events were revealed that seemed suspicious to some observers and bolstered the defense’s claim of an “advertising scheme.” Much of Frank Jr.’s testimony seemed to actually assist the defense. According to the trial transcript, Gladys Root hammered away at Frank Jr. “Did you say to the defendants, ‘You guys don’t have to worry about me, I’ll help you in every way possible’?” Frank Jr. said he didn’t remember, but that it was possible. She then asked him if he voluntarily took a sleeping pill with liquor so that he would appear to be asleep if a police officer happened upon the vehicle? Frank said yes, he had done so, but that he was “ordered” to do it. She then demanded to know if it was true that Frank Jr. gave his signet ring to the defendants so that it would not be recognized? Frank said yes, he had done that. Had the kidnappers demanded it? No, Frank said. He did it because he was trying to act in a cooperative manner.

  “Indeed,” Gladys Root said suspiciously. “You were very helpful, weren’t you? And when a police officer shone a flashlight in your eyes at the roadblock, why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you say, ‘Hey! It’s me. It’s Frank Sinatra Jr. I’m the guy you are looking for!’ Why were you being so helpful to your so-called abductors, but not to the police?”

  “Because I was scared,” Frank said.

  “Well, this doesn’t make sense, sir,” she observed. “Why didn’t you at least signal in some way to the police officer? Why didn’t you do something?”

  “Because Mrs. Root, the number one man [Keenan] stated that when we came to the roadblock, there was going to be some shooting,” Frank said, his voice rising. “I did not want a sudden and idiotic move to cause this man, who was stupid enough to kidnap me, to voluntarily blow the brains out of an officer.”

  Mrs. Root shook her head in disbelief. “Indeed,” she remarked sarcastically. Then she turned to the jury and shouted, “The truth is that you would have wrecked your little kidnap plot, which you had arranged, and which would not have been successful if you were rescued by the police.”

  At that, Frank Jr. jumped from his chair and shouted at her, “That is not true.”

  He was ordered by the judge to sit back down. Judge William G. East called for a break.

  By the time Frank Jr.’s attorneys called him to the stand, he had become more emboldened. “Look, I’m not on trial here,” he said. “I’m the victim. I’m not the criminal. The seeds of doubt have been sown on my integrity and on my guts and will stay with me for the rest of my life,” he said angrily. His attorney asked him directly if he had anything at all to do with the kidnapping. Frank said no. His attorney then asked if the whole thing had been a hoax. Again, he said no. “No.” The lawyer then asked, “Did your father have anything to do with this?” Frank’s answer, again, was no.

  A long letter was then produced, written by Barry Keenan prior to the kidnapping, which he had secreted away in a safe-deposit box in case of his death. Basically, it outlined the plan and totally cleared Frank Sinatra, both father and son, from any involvement.

  Finally, it was time to turn the case over to the jury. In his instructions to the jury, Judge East said, “I must comment that there is no direct evidence in this case by Frank Sinatra Jr. or persons on his behalf that prearrangements were made for his abduction.”

  After deliberating for six hours and fifty-three minutes, the jury found all three defendants guilty. Neither of the Sinatra men were in court when the verdict was read. F
rank Sr. was returning from Tokyo on business. Frank Jr. was in London, performing.

  As the active kidnappers, Joe Amsler and Barry Keenan were sentenced to life in prison, plus seventy-five years, which was the maximum sentence they could have received. John Irwin got sixteen years and eight months for conspiracy. All three had psychiatric-diversion sentences and as a result were sent to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri. There, they underwent four months of psychiatric evaluation.

  Dean Torrence was not sentenced at all, and for a very strange reason: He had originally lied on the stand, saying he was not involved. But then he changed his story and went back onto the stand and confessed. Because he was honest (the second time), it was decided not to press charges against him. Indeed, it was another strange aspect of a very strange case. Some felt that Torrence’s career suffered anyway. Among those was the inimitable Dorothy Kilgallen, who wrote, “Since singer Dean Torrence gave his sensational testimony at the Frank Sinatra Jr. kidnapping trial, he’s been given ‘the chill’ by booking agents and producers. So obviously the word is out. Not many people in show business want to incur the wrath of Frank Sinatra Sr.—his tentacles reach into too many branches of the industry, from movies to records and you-name-it.”

  While he likely had nothing to do with Dean Torrence’s problems, Frank did go after two of the attorneys, Gladys Towles Root and George A. Forde (leaving out Barry Keenan’s lawyer, Charles L. Crouch, who had all along refused to promote the conspiracy theory).

  In July 1964, Sinatra pressed to have Root and Forde charged with unethical conduct, including conspiracy, corruption, perjury, and obstruction of justice. Outside the courtroom on the day they were arraigned, the pair of lawyers charged that the indictments resulted from Frank’s effort to “clear the reputation of his son for having participated in a kidnapping that was a hoax and publicity stunt.” In other words, they were sticking to their story. Both attorneys said they were “shocked and bewildered” by the charges and that they had done nothing during the trial but represent their clients by presenting a defense case. “I feel sorry for anyone that vindictive,” Gladys Root said of Frank. “I have always believed in the power of truth, and truth will be the winner in this case. If a person can be indicted because a plaintiff is unhappy about the way he or she has represented a defendant, then I don’t know what to say about the system.”