His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [198]
Blocked by the blizzard and unable to drive or fly to Lake Tahoe, Frank set up headquarters at the Mapes Hotel in Reno. He was soon joined by Jack Entratter and Jilly Rizzo. After calling his former wife, Nancy, who was in Bel-Air, and his mother and father in Fort Lee, New Jersey, he waited for sixteen sleepless hours for the kidnappers to contact him.
On Monday, December 9, at 4:45 P.M., he finally received the first of seven calls. Following the script that kidnapper Keenan had written, a confederate, John Irwin, forty-two, called Sinatra to say that his son was safe. He said the kidnappers would call him later.
“They haven’t asked for money yet,” Frank told reporters that evening. “They know I would give the world for my son. And it’s true.”
When the ransom call finally came, Frank said, “You can have anything—a million dollars—anything.” But inexplicably, the kidnappers’ script asked for much less, $240,000, in used currency.
“Fine, fine, anything, okay,” said Sinatra.
“We’ll make another phone contact about the exchange,” said Irwin. “Discretion will be the demeanor.”
Frank called a friend, Al Hart, president of the City National Bank of Beverly Hills, to make arrangements for the ransom money, and flew to Los Angeles to await further instructions. He went to his former wife’s home in Bel-Air. Reporters were waiting outside to cover the biggest name kidnapping in America since the Lindbergh baby was abducted in 1932.
Hart assembled the money at the bank, and Frank, accompanied by an FBI agent, delivered it in a brown paper bag according to the kidnappers’ complex instructions. After fifty-four hours, young Frank was released two miles from his mother’s home in Bel-Air and taken to the home by a Bel-Air patrolman who recognized the young man. He hid in the car’s trunk to avoid newsmen, and his father was so grateful to the driver for bringing Frankie home that he gave him one thousand dollars.
“Father, I’m sorry,” said Frankie as he crawled out of the car trunk.
“Sorry? Sorry for what?” said Frank as he threw his arms around his son. “You’re alive, and that’s all that matters.”
“Don’t cry, Mother,” said Frankie. “I’m well. I’m in good shape.”
Frank went to the phone to take a call from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. He then called Frankie’s grandmother in Fort Lee. “Mom, we have him back. He is alive. He is well and will call you this afternoon. He is with the doctor right now.”
Dolly Sinatra burst into tears. “I was saying the Rosary when the call came,” she told reporters keeping vigil outside her home in New Jersey. “I dropped my rosary beads and dropped down in a near faint. This is the happiest moment of my life. We are leaving for California on the twentieth. We will spend Christmas together—the whole family.”
The three kidnappers were captured the next day, and most of the ransom money was recovered. Frank hired a Pinkerton guard for Nancy’s Bel-Air home and dispatched one of his personal bodyguards, Ed Pucci, to travel with Frankie to make sure nothing happened to him. He then called Chasen’s to deliver enough food and liquor for a three-day party to celebrate his son’s return as well as his own forty-eighth birthday. He invited all the FBI agents who had worked on the case as well as Dean Martin, Jimmy Van Heusen, Jack Entratter, Gloria and Mike Romanoff, and a Palm Springs neighbor, Abe Lipsey. “Getting Frankie back is the best birthday present I could ever have,” Frank told his friends.
The next night, he flew to Las Vegas with Jill St. John to celebrate the Sands’s eleventh anniversary party. Red Skelton joked about the kidnapping. “Frank called me and asked me to come over and I told him, ‘How can I? You marked all the money.’ ”
Don Rickles cracked, “Do you know why the kidnappers let Junior go? Because they heard him humming in the trunk.”
“It’s a week I never want to live through again,” said Frank. “I’m so happy that it turned out the way it did. I am happy that the FBI did such a magnificent job in capturing the three men, because I know it will act