His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [100]
A: Well, you know how it is in Hollywood. That dame, Florabel Muir, she runs a gossip column, had written some pretty bad stuff about me and some women in Las Vegas. Jimmy called up and said he had an eyewitness account of a party that was supposed to have been held down in Vegas in which some broads had been raped or something like that. I told Jimmy if he printed anything like that, he would be in for a lot of trouble.
Q: Did he ask you for money?
A: Well, I asked Hank Sanicola, my manager, to talk to him and that’s the last I heard of it until Muir printed a story about it in the Los Angeles Herald.
Q: Did Hank tell you he paid Tarantino?
A: Well, I understand Tarantino was indicted and I don’t know the rest of the story, but the Hollywood (Night Life) quit publishing this crap afterwards.
Nellis then named a list of Frank’s Mafia friends and acquaintances—Frank Costello, Joe Adonis, Abner “Longy” Zwillman, Meyer Lansky, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel—and asked how well he knew each of them.
A: No business. Just “hello” and “good-bye.”
Q: Well, what about the Jersey guys you met when you first got started?
A: Let me tell you something, those guys were okay. They never bothered me or anyone else as far as I know. Now, you’re not going to put me on television and ruin me just because I know a lot of people, are you?
Q: Nobody wants to ruin you, Mr. Sinatra. I assure you I would not be here at five in the morning at your lawyer’s request so that no newsmen could find out we’re talking to you if we intended to make some kind of public spectacle of any appearance before the committee.
A: Well, look, how in hell is it going to help your investigation to put me on television just because I know some of these guys?
Q: That will be up to Senator Kefauver and the committee. Right now, if you’re not too tired, I want to continue so we can see whether there’s any basis for calling you in public session.
Nellis continued with his roll call of Mafia names, asking Frank if he had ever been associated in business with Willie Moretti.
A: Well, Moore, I mean Moretti, made some band dates for me when I first got started, but I have never had any business dealings with any of those men.
Frank did not elaborate on his close personal relationship with Willie Moretti, who had helped him so much in the early days. Nor did he say that he, Frank, had shown his gratitude in 1947 by singing at the wedding of Willie’s daughter in the Corpus Christi Church in Hasbrouck Heights. The garrulous Moretti had already testified before the committee, distinguishing himself as its most talkative witness. He had told the senators that he made a living by gambling (“Wherever there was a crap game, I was there”) and amused them by saying that he had not done too well on the horses in 1948 but he had won $25,000 on President Truman’s election.
By the end of his testimony, the wise-cracking gangster had talked himself to death. Ten months later, he was gunned down gangland-style in Joe’s Elbow Room in Cliffside Park, New Jersey.
Joe Nellis did not know the extent of Frank’s friendship with Willie Moretti, but he did have evidence of his many underworld associations. “What is your attraction to these people?” he asked Sinatra.
“Some of them were kind to me when I started out,” said Frank, “and I have sort of casually seen them or spoken to them at different places, in nightclubs where I worked or out in Vegas or California.”
Toward the end of the two-hour session, Nellis again asked Frank about his attraction to the underworld. “Well, hell, you go into show business, you meet a lot of people. And you don’t know who they are or what they do,” Frank said.
At this point, Nellis lost his patience. “I knew he was lying and being very cagey,” he said many years later.
Q: Do you want me to believe that you don’t know the people we have