Posted on 05/04/2005 5:36:35 PM PDT by blam
Sinatra 'almost got caught carrying $3.5m Mafia cash'
By Catherine Elsworth
(Filed: 05/05/2005)
Frank Sinatra once served as a Mafia courier and narrowly escaped arrest with a briefcase containing $3.5 million in cash, according to a new biography of the legendary singer.
The entertainer Jerry Lewis is quoted as saying that Sinatra "volunteered to be a messenger for them... And he almost got caught once... in New York."
Frank Sinatra: mob links
Extracts of Sinatra: The Life, an unauthorised biography by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, were published yesterday by Vanity Fair magazine.
Lewis said that Sinatra was going through customs with a briefcase containing "three and a half million in fifties" and that customs officials opened the case.
But due to crowds jostling for a glimpse of the star, officials aborted their search. Otherwise, Lewis said, "We would never have heard of him again."
According to Vanity Fair, the authors do not claim that Lewis witnessed the customs incident but related the account "as a fact of which he had knowledge".
Lewis, one of the singer's Rat Pack compatriots from the 1960s, claims that Sinatra's mob links "had to do with the morality that a handshake goes before God". The anecdote is one of many fleshing out Sinatra's reputed close ties to the Mafia.
The singer carried mob money several times, Lewis is quoted as saying. He knew the Mafia was expanding beyond its East Coast base and volunteered to be a "messenger".
"Frank, at a cocktail party, told Meyer [Lansky, a known mobster] 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," Lewis says.
Sinatra, who died aged 82 in 1998, always denied any links to the mob, although FBI files released seven months after his death portrayed him as a close friend of Sam Giancana, the reputed Chicago mobster.
The federal documents also suggested that he had contact with Mafia boss Lucky Luciano during a 1947 trip to Cuba and alleged that his early singing career was backed by a New Jersey-based racketeer named Willie Moretti.
The book quotes Lewis as saying that the cash smuggling incident occurred shortly after Luciano was deported from the US to Italy in 1946.
According to Vanity Fair, the authors of the book describe Sinatra's "long-time, intimate relationship with Luciano", who in 1936 was declared New York's "public enemy Number One", progressing from "beatings to no fewer than 20 murders to pioneering drug trafficking".
Sinatra said he did not meet Luciano until a chance encounter in 1947, but the book suggests that he had contact with "top New York area mobsters as early as 1938 or 1939". It also describes how Sinatra's mob links helped his career.
It quotes Sonny King, a friend of the singer, as saying: "The Boys got on to Frank. In part because he was a saloon singer and they loved saloon songs, and they liked his cockiness... They liked to think of him as their kid, or son."
Sinatra was also allegedly helped by his "godfathers", who, at a gathering in Cuba, essentially "sentenced to death" the mobster Bugsy Siegel, who was blocking the singer's attempts to set himself up in Las Vegas. It was Luciano, the book says, who approved the killing of Siegel.
The Big Sleep
The Maltese Falcon
Sabrina
The Caine Mutiny
The Petrified Forest
Muleteam1
You misread, I wrote that "I don't doubt that Frank was mobbed up"
Although Sinatra was definately tied into the mob, I really doubt that Meyer Lansky killed his boyhood friend because of him. Bugsy was skimming the mob's money and they couldn't stand for that.
Just finished Panic In The City
This is for you New Orleans freepers.
In 1988 I was in New Orleans for the Republican Convention and got lost. It wasn't my fault, though, the desk clerk told me to take the "Nawlins" exit! Honest. I even asked him to repeat it several times because it was such a strange-sounding name. Of course, he couldn't pronounce it "Noo Or-leens" like regular people so like an idiot I just kept driving and driving looking for the exit spelled "Nawlins," until I ended up across the river in the public housing section of town and had to ask directions from a guy who worked inside a fortress-like glass cage at a very scary gas station. Except for that, and the suffocating humidity, "Nawlins" is a fun town.
Dear sinkspur,
Never was much into vocal music. Except for Gregorian chants. ;-)
For modern stuff, I prefer Gershwin.
sitetest
Great I'll look for those too. The Maltese Falcon was another one I heard was good.
I'm in the middle of the Three Stooges.
Sinatra and Tony Bennett have magical voices, IMO. True crooners.
Dear sinkspur,
Yes, Sinatra was a great singer. He was my mother's favorite. She'd go see him sing when he was a scrawny young guy starting to sing in NYC-area clubs. She was, I think, a "bobby-soxer." That's what she used to say.
She used to tell me that when he first started, he was so scrawny, they used to laugh at him.
Later, they swooned.
But I much prefer instrumental music. Of course, the "Ode to Joy" is a major exception, as well.
sitetest
Believe me, the novelty wears off real fast.
My best Nawlins story is, however, the fact that years after leaving Louisiana I learned that one of my great great great grandfathers in North Carolina built many, if not most, of the American muskets used at the Battle of New Orleans.
"Nawlins" is indeed a very interesting place. However, it is a tough place to have a young family which I did when I was there.
Muleteam1
That jumped out at me also. When I hear people talk about folks carrying millions of dollars in a duffel bag or suitcase, I try to get them to understand how many bills that would have to be. When they're talking denominations of $20s, its easy to calculate out how it would have to be a truck and not a duffel bag.
I heard that, too. 4F. I especially liked some of his early musicals. I'm lol at the thought of him with that suitcase of 70,000 $50's. He was so slight, so thin and fragile looking in his early life. But I'd always heard it the other way around. That he didn't volunteer for the mob, but that the mob 'volunteered' him. And that the kidnap of his son was 'encouragement' to continue in their help. Also, that early on in his career, mob guys tried to 'own' him and his career, but he fought against being owned. However much of my info came from many die-hard-fan friends from NY who looooved him like some people adore Elvis.
I often suffer from old-timers disease.
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