Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [140]
The young Ruark knew a great story when he saw one, and the moment he finished his legwork, he immediately began cranking out columns from Havana: three in the last week of February alone. They were titled, none too subtly, “Shame, Sinatra!” “ ‘Lovable’ Luciano,” and “The Luciano Myth.” In the first, dated February 20, he wrote:
Sinatra was here for four days last week and during that time his companion in public and in private was Luciano, Luciano’s bodyguards and a rich collection of gamblers and highbinders. The friendship was beautiful. They were seen together at the race track, the gambling casino and at special parties …
Staying close to the action in a seventh-floor suite at the Nacional (the floor below Luciano’s rooms), Frank rubbed a lot of elbows that week. The conference was a veritable summit of crime, with all the Jewish and Italian bosses from major and secondary American cities present. Naturally, New York and New Jersey were most heavily represented: besides Lansky and Luciano, there were Frank Costello, Vito Genovese, Joe Bonanno, Longy Zwillman, Joe Adonis, and Willie Moretti. The Fischettis and Tony Accardo represented Chicago; Moe Dalitz, Detroit; and Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello, Tampa and New Orleans. There were closed-door conclaves on internal politics and the divisive question of narcotics trafficking: even the Jews were excluded from meetings that strictly concerned Cosa Nostra matters, and Sinatra would probably not have been privy to any business discussions. He was there to provide a cover story and, in keeping with his lifelong relationship to men like these, to admire and be admired. He was, as Luciano later said, “a good kid and we was all proud of him.”
Frank did what he was there to do, giving the attendees their promised concert in the hotel’s banquet room. There is no record of the song list. Still, wouldn’t it have been lovely to pan the house with an imaginary movie camera and watch those faces—fascinating faces, on the evidence of mug shots, but not inclined to be sensitive or reflective—while the Voice vocalized? There were probably more than a few moist eyes. “Luciano was very fond of Sinatra’s singing,” an associate later recalled.
Frank performed, he glad-handed, and he was rewarded, not just with fellowship, but with fun. Pre-Castro Havana was a twenty-four-hour fiesta of unapologetic pleasures. There was even allegedly an orgy in his suite—twelve naked women, a number of gangsters, plenty of alcohol. Improbably, a group of Cuban Girl Scouts, led by a nun, arrived in the midst of the festivities to present Sinatra with an official token of their esteem. He is said to have hustled the celebrants into another room and received the Scouts in a silk dressing gown and ascot.
It could be a slightly more ribald version of Some Like It Hot, set in the Batista Havana of The Godfather: Part II. The problem was that it was real life, and Frank’s hero worship of tough guys had gotten him in way over his head. Danger made these men magnetic, and our fascination with gangsters suggests that few of us could have been in their presence without being, on some level, thrilled. But to the American public of 1947, the men were not faces and eyes and rough handshakes but names, names to be censured. And ethnic names at that. The court of public opinion would quickly take note of Sinatra’s new friends, and would react violently.
Ruark wrote of Frank’s wild going-away party on Valentine’s Day (the day he was supposed to meet Nancy in Acapulco):
In addition to Mr. Luciano, I am told that Ralph Capone [brother of Al] was present … and so was a rather large and well-matched assortment of the goons who find the south salubrious in the winter, or grand-jury time …
The curious desire to cavort among the