His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [147]
“Yes,” said Irwin. “I have other fears.”
When asked why he was so frightened, the young man said that he had been beaten up after he sought out Frank to tell him that he had nothing to do with leaking the story to Confidential.
“And why did you seek out Mr. Sinatra?”
“Because I feared him—from rumors I had heard; I didn’t want what happened [later] to happen.”
The detective “told of being badly beaten by men he had never seen before, and his story was corroborated by State Investigator James J. Callahan, who said: “Irwin had a black eye. I don’t think his nose was broken, but it was very badly bruised. He had severe welts from his shoulder to the belt line. His arms and legs had been kicked. He was pretty thoroughly worked over.”
The detective testified that Frank had accompanied the men into Mrs. Kotz’s apartment after Ruditsky had broken down the door. He said that Frank had turned on the light, causing the woman to scream. When Frank saw they were in the wrong apartment, he ran out with his friends and drove to the Villa Capri restaurant.
The landlady of the building also testified that she had seen Frank enter the building and run out of Mrs. Kotz’s apartment a few minutes later.
With so many conflicting testimonies, the county grand jury decided to investigate the “wrong door raid,” and hearings were set for March. Although Frank was represented by Martin Gang and Mickey Rudin of Gang, Kopp & Tyre, he called the Mafia’s lawyer, Sidney Korshak, in Chicago for help. Korshak was renowned among gangsters as a man who could get just about anything accomplished with a couple of phone calls. Frank later hired Fred Otash, a private detective, to try to prove that he did not perjure himself before the State Senate Committee. By the time the grand jury convened, Frank and his friends had their previously divergent stories straight. Frank testified for fifty minutes, sticking to the story he had given the State Senate Committee. When asked how jurors could possibly reconcile his testimony with that of the detective Philip Irwin, he said, “Who are you going to believe, me or a guy who makes his living kicking down bedroom doors?”
Frank escaped indictment, and perjury was ruled out by the district attorney, who said: “There is definitely a bald conflict in the testimony. But the transcript falls short in its present form of showing the complete elements of a perjury.”
DiMaggio and Monroe divorced several months later, but the friendship between Joe and Frank ended when Sinatra started dating Marilyn and passing her around to his friends. Joe never forgave Sinatra or Peter Lawford for allowing Marilyn’s affair with Robert Kennedy to take place. He was bitter about them after her suicide and barred both men from attending her funeral in 1962.
In 1957, Frank was just beginning to test the effectiveness of litigation as a means of punishment. His first target was investigative reporter Bill Davidson, who had published a three-part biography of Frank in Look magazine, which earned Davidson the University of Illinois’s Benjamin Franklin Award for the best article depicting a person living or dead in an American magazine for general circulation.
“I think the turning point of Frank’s antipathy to the press—and that’s the mild word—began with Bill’s article,” said Richard Condon. “Because we were in Spain shortly after that, and Frank was just rabid about the press at that time, just wild, and he mentioned Bill.”
The first article, “Talent, Tantrums and Torment,” appeared May 14, 1957. Infuriated, Frank sued Davidson and Look magazine for $2,300,000, claiming that he had been libeled as a “neurotic, depressed, and tormented person with suicidal tendencies and a libertine.” His sixteen-page complaint charged that the article was “lewd, lascivious, and scurrilous, containing innuendos and references of the same nature and type as are contained in articles published in what are popularly known as scandal magazines.”
He specifically denied the story of his appearance at the Democratic