Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [113]
But there was another organization—to the extent that it actually was organized—that remained a constant in Frank’s life. His connection to gangsters should be neither overemphasized nor underplayed. As many entertainers who came up in the great era of nightclubs (the 1930s through the early 1960s) have pointed out, it was impossible to play the clubs and not come into contact with the Mob. The Boys backed the clubs, often secretly owning them and hiring front men to present a legitimate face to the public. They operated the clubs as glamorous profit centers for many of the businesses in which they took a direct interest: entertainment and liquor and cigarettes and gambling and prostitution. Every enterprise touched on a dozen others. Organized crime during Frank Sinatra’s early career, and prior to the U.S. government’s tardy but assiduous attempts to break it up, was a vast, darkly shimmering American under-culture—an alternative economy so huge that the über-criminal Meyer Lansky was able to boast, famously, “We’re bigger than General Motors.” The problem with the remark being the small but crucial word “we.” What was called organized crime was actually something far more complex—and less organized.
Unlike General Motors, organized crime was not publicly held; it did not elect a board of directors or issue stockholders’ reports. Unlike privately held businesses, it wasn’t formally incorporated. It was ten thousand businesses, an enormous shape-shifting cluster of enterprises under the control of whoever happened to be in control until someone more powerful came along and took over, displacing or (often) eliminating the previous owner: an infinite chain of big fish eating smaller fish. It could be argued that while legitimate business operates under the nominal oversight of the law, it is actually subject to the survival of the fittest; illegitimate business merely eliminates the oversight. Yet organized crime, lacking any checks and balances or a structural superego, functions under brute power. This may seem glamorous to outsiders who have to live by (or at least contend with) society’s rules. It seemed alluring to Frank, who in becoming a man sought stronger role models than his weak father. But to the men who live it, it is simply the Life. They swim like sharks: sometimes in pods or schools, sometimes alone, now and then turning to attack each other out of sheer bloodthirstiness.
Frank Sinatra’s old Hasbrouck Heights neighbor Willie Moretti was one such. Another was Benjamin Siegel, who grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the early twentieth century, a remarkably bold and clever and comely youth who quickly saw crime as the only chance he would ever have to get rich. Siegel turned thirteen—bar mitzvah age—exactly at the beginning of Prohibition and, around the same time, met seventeen-year-old Meyer Lansky, who was little and ugly and tough and brilliant: he could memorize and calculate great strings of numbers, useful skills. The two boys appreciated each other’s qualities. Soon they were literally thick as thieves: running numbers and rum together, stealing cars, breaking heads. Lansky was fearless but not enamored of violence for its own sake; Siegel, whose pale blue eyes sometimes took on a crazed gleam, actually enjoyed bludgeoning, stabbing, and shooting. Crazy as a bedbug, they said. And so Benny Siegel acquired a nickname—Bug, or Bugs, or Bugsy.
Siegel and Lansky soon formed alliances with Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Frank Costello. During the Castellammarese War among the New York gangs in the early 1930s, Siegel participated in the killing of the old-time Mob boss Salvatore Maranzano that elevated Luciano to supreme power. For this, Luciano was grateful. Having made an enormous amount of money from bootlegging, Siegel married, moved to Scarsdale, and began a family. For a while, he lived as a kind of commuter-gangster. But in 1937, when his partners asked if he might be interested in relocating to Los Angeles to set up a gambling operation, he jumped at the chance.