Did Frank Sinatra once act as a kind of courier for the mafia — carrying a huge stash of cash in a briefcase?
According to a controversial new book he did. When a big show biz or political figure dies, it usually takes a few years for unflattering tidbits to come out. Sinatra (STILL one of our favorite singers) died in 1998 at age 82 after surviving a tempestuous life and enough negative press coverage to require the cutting down of a forest.
These new allegations, among the most sensational yet, are from a new book Sinatra: The Life, an unauthorized biography by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan. Excerpts from the book are being published in Vanity Fair. According to the Telegraph:
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.”
The book quotes Lewis as saying that the cash smuggling incident occurred shortly after (mob boss Lucky) Luciano was deported from the US to Italy in 1946…..
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”.
But Lewis apparently had a lot to say:
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.
Yet another potentially explosive allegation:
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.
Sinatra always denied he was was tied to the mob. Associates of his explained that he had a respect for mob guys, since he grew up around some of them in New Jersey. Others suggested his critics were simply connecting the dots where there was really nothing to connect. But FBI reports released after his death portrayed him as a close friend of Chicago mobsters Sam Giancana.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.