Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [81]
Whether other, darker forces were brought to bear—and if they were, whether Sinatra knew anything about it—are questions that will forever remain unresolved. The answers are tied up in Frank’s relationship to the Mob, and mobsters, in 1943 and for the rest of his life: a teasing, conflicted, flirtatious dance on both sides.
Jerry Lewis had another version of the Dorsey-Sinatra brouhaha. He asserted that, based on the Mafia’s early adoration for Sinatra, a summit consisting of Frank Costello, Albert Anastasia, Willie Moretti, and the Murder Inc. hit man Frankie Carbo got together and went to Dorsey to make him that offer he couldn’t refuse. “Frank told me years later—laughing—how that talk went,” Lewis remembered. “Carbo said, ‘Mr. Dorsey, could you play your trombone if it had a dent in it? Could you play it if you didn’t have the slide?’ It was all just like that, and Dorsey got the idea.”
One kernel of truth in this account would seem to be the participation of Sinatra’s Hasbrouck Heights neighbor Willie Moretti, a.k.a. Willie Moore, the boss of North Jersey. Moretti was short, plump, bald, wisecracking, gregarious—and, as his job demanded, dangerous. He had his fingers in many pies, paid close attention to such profit centers as the Meadowbrook in Cedar Grove, the Riviera in Fort Lee, and the Rustic Cabin, and apparently took quite a shine to Sinatra. Still, whether that makes Moretti (who was about as different from the noble Don Corleone as it was possible to be) Sinatra’s godfather, and whether Moretti interceded personally with Dorsey (who was, after all, a North Jersey resident himself), is another question.
Peter J. Levinson, in his Dorsey biography, tells us that the “Bergen Record entertainment editor and syndicated writer Dan Lewis, [who] knew Moretti personally … once asked [the gangster] if there was any truth to these reports. Moretti smiled and, in a rare departure from omertà, answered, ‘Well, Dan, let’s just say we took very good care of Sinatra.’ ”
In fact, Moretti had a reputation for making frequent departures from omertà. He was an infamous blowhard whose garrulity—perhaps abetted by an advanced case of syphilis—would eventually lead to his elimination.
To complicate matters further, Dorsey’s daughter, Levinson writes, “vividly remembers her father telling her about getting a threatening telephone call at dinnertime early in the Sinatra-Dorsey contretemps. The anonymous caller implied ominous consequences if Dorsey didn’t ‘cooperate’ by letting Sinatra out of his contract. He was reminding Dorsey that he had two children, and that he wouldn’t want anything to happen to them. That’s when Dorsey responded by putting up barbed wire atop the wall surrounding [his house], installed sweeping searchlights that bathed the property on a nightly basis, and constructed an elaborate electric fence at the entrance to the property.”
There is yet another story, told by an old Hoboken pal of Sinatra’s, one Joey D’Orazio, that possesses a seriocomic ring of truth. D’Orazio asserted that Hank Sanicola sent two rough customers, “not real underworld characters but just some frightening fellows that he and Sinatra both knew,” to threaten Dorsey if he didn’t release the singer from the contract. Sanicola claimed that in order to protect Sinatra should things go wrong, he never told him about the two thugs.
But, according to D’Orazio, when the two threatened to break Dorsey’s arms if he didn’t sign legal papers to let the singer go, the bandleader “laughed in their faces … [saying] ‘Oh, yeah, look how scared I am. Tell Frank … I said, “Go to hell for sending his goons to beat me up.” ’ ”
Dorsey then told the men, “I’ll sign the goddamn