His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [189]
“The next day everyone was talking about the fight and the way Frank threatened Anderson. Everyone knew about Frank’s temper, but no one paid any attention until a couple of weeks later …” said Bethel Van Tassel, a former newspaper columnist.
At 10:26 P.M. on the night of July 17, 1962, Dick Anderson and his wife were driving on Highway 28 not far from the Cal-Neva. They were on the way to the Crystal Bay Club for dinner after a day spent working on the house they were building. Coming toward them at high speed was a late-model maroon convertible with California license plates. The Andersons’ car went off the road and smashed into a tree. Dick Anderson was killed instantly. His wife was thrown from the car and suffered multiple fractures. The occupants of the maroon convertible never stopped, and the deputy sheriff investigating the crash could not determine the cause of the accident.
“We have not found any reason why Anderson should have lost control of his car or driven off the road as he did,” he said, adding that Anderson might have been blinded by the bright lights of the oncoming car or deliberately forced off the road.
“It’s still a mystery,” said Dick Anderson’s mother, Louise, twenty-four years later. “An FBI man and some people in the community thought that Frank Sinatra had something to do with the accident. That’s something they didn’t prove or didn’t try to prove.
“After the dispute, my son told me that Sinatra went to the sheriff in Reno and told him to just can my son, to suspend him—to get rid of him. When Dick was killed, he was under suspension. The sheriffs office still gave him a military funeral, but he was under suspension on account of Sinatra. My husband and I still think that Frank Sinatra had something to do with Dick’s death, either directly or indirectly … I just never went into it … because I thought, well, Sinatra is very powerful … Richard had four children and I didn’t want anything to happen to them or to us, so we just dropped it. Now I’m seventy-nine years old and I don’t care what happens to [my husband] or to me. I don’t think they would ever come after us.”
“There were a number of circumstances that led to suspicions that actually the automobile accident wasn’t an accident,” said Ed Olsen, Chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission, in 1972 in his oral history at the University of Nevada. “But on the other hand, there was never anything concrete or provable; the matter was ultimately dismissed … even though there were reports from both law enforcements that [Toni Anderson] had told conflicting stories about her relationship with some of the Sinatra people and indicated there might have been something else to the accident than an accident. But as I say, there was never anything proven.”
Toni Anderson told her friends she was frightened, and she did not return to her job.
By 1963, FBI agents had Sam Giancana under constant surveillance, which is why Frank’s name was mentioned so frequently in FBI reports. The two men were frequently together by this time, spending Easter in Palm Springs, vacationing in Hawaii in May, traveling to New York in Jyne, playing golf at Lake Tahoe in July. Sam came to know the FBI agents following him by name—Bill Roemer, Marshall Rutland, Ralph Hill—and railed at them at-every turn.
“Why don’t you fucks investigate the Communists,” he would scream. “I’m not going to take this sitting down. I’m going to light a fire under you guys, and don’t forget that.”
In July 1963, Giancana became so exasperated, he sent one of his Mafia lieutenants, Charles “Chuckie” English, with a message for Bill Roemer, who was standing outside the Armory Lounge in a Chicago suburb. “If Bobby Kennedy wants to talk to Sam, he knows who to go through,” English told the agent.
“Who?” said Roemer. “Frank Sinatra?”
“You said it, I didn’t,” said English.
Giancana had given up on Frank’s influence with the Kennedys to rid him of the FBI