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.
I never knew Lewis was part of the "Rat Pack"
I thought it was Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, and WhatsHisName... related to the Kennedys at one time....
Lawford - Peter Lawford.
Well, "Johnny Fontaine" wasn't based on Bing Crosby.
Lewis who personally never saw this claims to be the book on the subject.
Bunk, this is like homosexuals calling everyone gay after they are dead.
Muleteam1
Joey Bishop was in the Rat Pack as well.
I never did either that much but a few movies he made in the fifties weren't too bad.
and that personal contract he had was also based on reality.
Lewis was neither a Rat Pack member nor a friend of Rat Pack members.
Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop.
He could carry a tune, though...
By the way Jerry Lewis has book coming out in October about his relationship with Dean Martin and may cover some of the Rat Pack stuff there.
Muleteam1
He was not a draft dodger. He was 4F.
May be wrong there. Lewis claims that he and Sammy Davis, Jr. were very close friends and of course he and Dean Martin had been partners before their big split in the 1956 and yes Lewis knew Sinatra fairly well also.
Sinatra to my knowledge was not a draft dodger, I believe he was 4F during the War.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.