His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [194]
The governor said that he had received several phone calls from wealthy men who talked about resolving the “Sinatra problem” and about making large contributions to his coming election campaign. “I told them that the rules were made for everybody, including Mr. Sinatra.”
The governor’s position was supported by the lieutenant governor, Paul Laxalt, who felt it was about time that the state did something about Sinatra.
But while the case was pending, President Kennedy came to Nevada and was given a caravan tour through Las Vegas. Riding in the first car with Sawyer, Kennedy said to the governor, “Aren’t you people being a little hard on Frank out here?” Sawyer said that the matter was out of his hands and that the issue would be settled legally. He later told Ed Olsen what the President had said, and Olsen was flabbergasted by Kennedy’s intervention in Frank’s behalf.
“That’s about the highest degree of political pressure that you could ever put into the thing,” Olsen said many years later. “There was this very definite suggestion from the President of the United States that, frankly, we were being a little tough.”
On the other hand, Sam Giancana was disgusted with Frank for losing his temper. “He [Sinatra] called Ed Olsen a cripple,” said Phyllis McGuire. “Sam couldn’t get over the fact that Frank had done that. Sam said, ‘If he’d only shut his damned mouth.’ But Sam never could figure out why Frank would deliberately pick fights … he would always say to him: “Piano, piano, piano’ (Softly, softly, softly). ‘Take it easy, take it easy.’ Sam could never get over the hotheaded way Frank acted.”
Cal-Neva became a running issue in the nation’s newspapers, because it coincided with the public testimony of Cosa Nostra gangster Joseph Valachi. Appearing before Senator McClellan’s rackets committee, Valachi named Sam Giancana as the chief of the Mafia’s Chicago family, adding that the Chicago hoodlums are “the smart guys” of the syndicate.
When reporters asked Frank if he had harbored the top “smart guy” at Cal-Neva, he said he had no idea Sam was on the premises. “I’ll fight the charges,” he said in New York, where he was performing at a United Nations benefit.
As Frank mounted the dais of the General Assembly hall, he said, “Anybody want to buy a used casino? I didn’t want it anyway.”
Mickey Rudin retained Harry Claiborne, a Las Vegas criminal attorney, to represent Frank in the action brought by the board. On September 27, 1963, Claiborne, who later became the first federal judge to be convicted of tax evasion, subpoenaed Olsen for a deposition. He and Rudin cross-examined the board chairman for four hours. Once they realized that Olsen had a statement from Victor LaCroix Collins about the fight with Giancana in Chalet Fifty as well as a memorandum of Olsen’s telephone conversation with Frank, and memoranda prepared by those who were listening in on an extension, they decided not to fight the action.
Rudin called Frank and then called Jack Warner to discuss leasing Sinatra’s casino holdings, totaling $3,500,000, in exchange for a business arrangement that would align Frank with the studio.
“I was with Jack at that time and remember very well how he bailed Frank out of the Cal-Neva mess,” said Jacqueline Park, Warner’s mistress for seven years. “Jack agreed to buy something like two-thirds of Reprise Records and sell Frank one-third of Warner Bros. Records. He also made a movie deal with him, which enabled Frank to move his Sinatra Enterprises to the Warner Bros, lot, but Frank wouldn’t agree to anything until Jack promised to make him assistant to the president. That was the biggest thing Jack did for him because that title helped Frank save face and tell the press that he was going to concentrate on the movie business from now on.”
The day after the joint announcement by Sinatra and Warner of their new merger, Frank walked around flashing a certified check from