The World's Most Evil Gangs (6 page)

A
curious bond has always existed between the Mafia and top entertainers, film stars and even politicians. Perhaps there is a parallel between living ‘life on the edge’ as a famous celebrity and as an infamous gangster. Many major figures have happily risked being tainted by their connections with the Mafia. For some, it has paid off. For others, the price has been high.

Best known among those accused of ‘supping with the Devil’ was Frank Sinatra. He freely admitted that he has known mobsters – but every time anything more than that was suggested he reached into his writ drawer. Right up until his death in 1998, the word’s most famous singing star denied Mafia involvement. But was Sinatra being perfectly Frank? We shall see.

As entertainers of his era knew, it was impossible to play the
clubs and not come into contact with organised crime. The Mafia backed or owned the venues, providing glamorous centres for money laundering, liquor sales, gambling and prostitution. Sinatra would have known many Italian criminals from an early age. Mob boss Meyer Lansky was said to be an acquaintance of Sinatra’s parents. Guarino ‘Willie’ Moretti, the bald, wise-cracking Mafia boss of North Jersey, was one of his neighbours.

An under-boss of the Genovese family and a cousin of Frank Costello, Moretti became friends with the then unknown singer in the 1930s. Sinatra’s first wife, Nancy Barbato, was a cousin of a Moretti associate. Moretti helped Sinatra get bookings in New Jersey clubs in return for kickbacks. He also became acquainted with comedians Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis – and the pair, along with Sinatra and comedian Milton Berle, performed at the wedding of Moretti’s daughter.

Sinatra had signed a recording contract with band leader Tommy Dorsey in 1939 but within a few years had achieved nationwide stardom and wanted to wriggle out of it. Dorsey refused to release him, so Sinatra asked Moretti for help. The Mafioso’s method of ‘negotiating’ was to jam a gun barrel down Dorsey’s throat and threaten to kill him. It was a convincing argument; the band leader sold the contract to Sinatra for one dollar.

When the singer moved to California, he became a friend of former hitman and now the West Coast boss, ‘Bugsy’ Siegel. Sinatra and his friend Phil Silvers (TV’s Sergeant Bilko) were enthralled by him, according to Silvers’ wife, who never forgot ‘the awe Frank had in his voice when he talked about him’. She recalled: ‘He wanted to emulate Bugsy. He’d brag about what Bugsy had done and how many people he’d killed. Sometimes
he’d argue about whether Bugsy preferred to shoot his victims or simply chop them up with axes.’

In February 1947 Sinatra stayed at the Miami mansion of his friends, the Fischetti family, cousins of Al Capone, before flying with Joseph ‘Joe Fisher’ Fischetti to Cuba for his most blatant walk on the wild side with the Mob. The notorious Havana summit of top US gangsters was under way, presided over by Godfather ‘Lucky’ Luciano. They all saw Sinatra sing, but he presented their subsequent meeting afterwards as pure coincidence. After the trip, he told Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper that he had ‘dropped by a casino one night and was asked if I’d mind meeting a few people. I couldn’t refuse. One happened to be Lucky Luciano. I sat down at a table for about fifteen minutes then went back to my hotel. When such innocent acts are so distorted, you can’t win.’

In 1950 a US Senate Select Committeee looking into organised crime began an investigation known as the Kefauver hearings, named after its chairman, Senator Estes Kefauver. In drawing up preliminary evidence, Frank Sinatra was called to account. His lawyers negotiated a private hearing for the sake of his career, but when summoned, ‘he looked like a lost kitten, drawn, frightened to death,’ said Joseph Nellis, the committee’s lawyer. Asked about the Fischettis, he said he barely knew them. But his innocent explanation of the brief Cuban meeting with the mobsters was shattered when Nellis revealed photographs of Sinatra with his arm around Luciano on the hotel balcony in Havana and of the pair at a nightclub surrounded by bottles and girls.

The committee presented him with a list of known mobsters and asked whether he knew any of them. ‘Just to say hello,’ he replied, adding: ‘Surely you’re not going to put me on
television and ruin me just because I know a lot of people?’ He was lucky, because they did not. They let him off the hook.

Yet 12 years later, in 1962, Sinatra was named in a 12-page memorandum from the US Justice Department as being pals with a dozen of America’s top gangsters. Some of them, the document stated, even knew his ex-directory telephone number. Here are the Men of Honour with whom Ol’ Blue Eyes was linked:

While other mobsters – Meyer Lansky, Mickey Cohen and Frank Costello among them – refused to testify before the Kefauver committee by repeatedly invoking the Fifth Amendment, Moretti was the only one who cooperated.
Although he didn’t give away too many secrets, he overplayed his role – playing to the cameras, joking and chatting with the committee, the senators and public breaking out in laughter at his wise-guy comments. However, the joker was violating the Mafia code of silence.

A contract was placed on him by the Commission and a few months later, in October 1951, he was blasted to death as he lunched at a New Jersey restaurant. More than 5,000 mourners attended his funeral. In a Mafia trial 12 years later, a government witness, Joe Valachi, described a conversation with Vito Genovese about the murder, in which the Mafia Godfather said he had been concerned that Moretti was becoming deranged through syphilis. Valachi testified: ‘It was supposedly a mercy killing because he was sick. Genovese told me, “The Lord have mercy on his soul, he’s losing his mind”.’

So some won, some lost. Sinatra was among the former. The Italian crime families helped launch his career, promoted it and Frank sang for his supper at Mafia venues. In
The Godfather
, one of author Mario Puzo’s more gory storylines involves the flagging career of a singer being restored when he gets an important film part – thanks to a horse’s head left as a warning in the movie producer’s bed. It is probably a coincidence (and, in this case, it almost certainly is a coincidence) that Frank Sinatra’s flagging career was relaunched when he unexpectedly got the part of Private Angelo Maggio in the 1953 movie
From Here to Eternity.

But there were other ways in which the Mob helped him out, and vice versa. In his 2013 autobiography,
My Way,
singer Paul Anka, who wrote that song for Sinatra and remained a friend for 30 years, told how the star would act as a bagman for the Mafia. He was once stopped carrying a briefcase through
Customs containing $3 million in cash, said Anka – ‘They eventually stopped using him because he always got caught.’ It had already been noted by the FBI that when Sinatra turned up at the 1947 Havana summit to sing for ‘Lucky’ Luciano, he uncharacteristically carried his own heavy suitcase through the airport. Paul Anka also told how when Sinatra played Las Vegas – both on stage and at the gaming tables – his casino owning associates would give him $50,000 worth of chips and allow him to keep the winnings.

Italians love song and Italian-American hoodlums just adore singers, so Sinatra is not the only one who has been linked to the Mob. His ‘Rat Pack’ pals Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Junior performed at Sam Giancana’s nightclub. Other great entertainers of the day who starred there included Tony Bennett, Eddie Fisher, Frankie Laine and Jimmy ‘Schnozzle’ Durante.

The ‘Schnozz’ was an especially close friend of Giancana. ‘That wonderful man loved my mother and treated her like a queen, and he adored Sam,’ said the Mafioso’s daughter. Another star, Phyllis McGuire of the singing McGuire Sisters, was even closer – she and Giancana became lovers.

Godfather
film actor James Caan proved to be close to a
real-life
Mafia godfather when he turned up at the 1999 trial of the notoriously violent Colombo crime family. His aim was ‘to give moral support’ to his long-time friend Andy ‘Mush’ Russo, who was a real-life godfather to Caan’s son, Scott. He offered to stand bail for Russo. He also greeted accused Colombo family boss Carmine ‘The Snake’ Persico with a kiss on the cheek.

Another Hollywood star linked to the Mafia was the greatest screen goddess of her age, possibly of all time. But just how
close Marilyn Monroe was to gangland has only come to light in recent years. And her fellow players in this murky game were Frank Sinatra, Mafia boss Sam Giancana and the President of the United States.

For it is now reasonably established that Monroe spent her last day alive in an angry confrontation with the Mafia boss. She had flown from Los Angeles to Nevada in Frank Sinatra’s private plane and was staying at the singer’s mountain retreat on the banks of Lake Tahoe, next to the Mafia-owned
Cal-Neva
Lodge hotel. There, Giancana – with whom she was allegedly in love – tried to persuade her not to go public about her affair with President John F. Kennedy and with his younger brother Robert, the Attorney General. She apparently refused to be silenced and, returning to her Hollywood home, she was found dead the following day, 5 August 1962, supposedly of a drugs overdose.

Neither of the Kennedy brothers had been suitably secretive in their extra-marital activities. They had both been Monroe’s lovers and, in her developing state of depression and nervous disorder, it was thought that she might make public some of their indiscretions. Such stories, which were no more than rumours at the time of her death, have since become common currency.

In 1981 a reformed criminal, Ronald ‘Sonny’ Gibson, wrote a book,
Mafia Kingpin,
in which he made some startling new allegations. Gibson said that while working for the Mob, he had been told that Marilyn had been murdered by a Mafia hitman. J. Edgar Hoover, he said, had been furious about the actress’s affairs with the Kennedys, whom he hated, so the Mafia had taken upon themselves the task of silencing her as a means of repaying favours done for them by the FBI.

Gibson is not alone in his assertion that Marilyn died not because she had swallowed an overdose of barbiturates but because drugs had been injected into her. Even top pathologists who investigated the case have since gone into print to say the same.

Then in 2011 an extraordinary tape-recording emerged that, for the first time, placed Marilyn with Sam Giancana on her last day alive. On the tape, made by the star’s late make-up artist George Masters before his death in 1988, it is claimed that Monroe was besotted with the Mafia boss. But Giancana, having shared her favours with both Kennedys, feared that she was about to go public about her scandalous affairs.

In the recordings, Masters says: ‘The night before she died, the last time I saw her, was in Lake Tahoe at the Cal-Neva Lodge. She was there with Sam Giancana, who was the head of the Mafia.’ Masters flew back to Los Angeles with her and dropped Monroe off at her home that night. Her naked body was later found on her bed and it was assumed she had killed herself with sleeping pills.

But 50 years after her death, a 2012 bombshell book,
Marilyn At Rainbow’s End,
claimed finally to reveal how the
36-year
-old star had died. Investigative author Darwin Porter, who knew the star, says five Mafia hoodlums murdered her under orders from Sam Giancana. But Porter believes Robert Kennedy, who secretly visited Marilyn hours before she died, had a lot to do with her death. ‘Of course Bobby didn’t do it himself,’ he said. ‘He was a very smart man. Sam Giancana also had the motive to kill her – she was threatening to blow the lid off his operations. But it also begs the question, did someone pay him to murder Marilyn? And if someone did pay him, the only person I can think of is a Kennedy.’