His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [236]
Q: Do you know Willie Moretti?
A: No.
Q: Ever meet him?
A: I’m not sure whether I ever have, because it seems so long ago that I had a house in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, my wife and I. We bought a house, and the man from whom we bought the house, I think, brought him to the house one day to meet me.
Q: Do you know Meyer Lansky?
A: I’ve met him.
Q: Who is he?
A: I just read in the papers that he was an undesirable.
Q: You have never heard that “Skinny” D’Amato is a member of Cosa Nostra?
A: Never.
Q: Are you familiar with Sam Giancana’s reputation as a member of Cosa Nostra?
A: No.
Q: Are you familiar with Joseph Fischetti’s reputation as a member of Cosa Nostra?
A: No.
Q: Are you familiar with Lucky Luciano’s reputation as a member of Cosa Nostra?
A: No, sir.
Q: Are you familiar with Willie Moretti’s reputation as a member of Cosa Nostra?
A: No, sir.
Q: Are you familiar with Joe Adonis’s reputation as a member of Cosa Nostra?
A: No, sir.
The commission member asking the questions seemed incredulous. “I have been using the word Cosa Nostra. If I were using the word Mafia with respect to any of those people named above, would your answers be different?”
Frank said that his answers would remain the same.
Q: Do you know anybody who’s a member of Cosa Nostra?
A: No, sir.
Q: Do you know anybody who’s a member of the mob?
A: No, sir.
Q: Do you know anybody who’s a member of any organization that would come under that category of organized crime?
A: No, sir.
When one of the commissioners asked Frank if he knew Harold “Kayo” Königsberg, a New Jersey extortionist and loan shark, Frank said he did not know the man and had never met him. Perhaps, but Frank’s name had surfaced during a 1961 FBI wiretapped telephone conversation between Königsberg and Angelo “Gyp” DeCarlo, a lieutenant in the Mafia family formerly headed by Vito Genovese, in which the two mobsters talked about how they would raise the money to take over a hotel in Jamaica.
“Do you know where I’ll get it from?” Königsberg said. “Frank Sinatra.”
“I’m going down there to Florida next week,” said DeCarlo. “I’ll see Sinatra and have a talk with him.”
“Is he going to be in Florida next week?”
“He’ll be there until the twelfth or thirteenth [March],” said DeCarlo. “I’m going down there Friday, so I’ll see him before he leaves.”
Frank was asked whether he knew Generoso Del Duca, a member of the New York Mafia, and he said no.
“Ever meet him?” asked one of the commissioners.
Again Frank said no, although he had been in a Miami nightclub with Joe Fischetti and Del Duca a few years before, when Del Duca had a heart attack and died in Frank’s arms. Del Duca’s body was sent to New York the next day for burial. Frank and Tony Bennett canceled their midnight shows in Miami to fly to the funeral home in New York. At two-thirty A.M., they were admitted to pay their last respects. They checked into a hotel and the next morning visited Mrs. Del Duca before flying back to Miami. Unaware of this incident, the commission could not ask Frank why he went to such great lengths to pay tribute to a man he said he didn’t know.
The commission dropped its contempt charges against him the next day, saying “he has fully and completely answered all our questions.”
Having been forced to testify once, Frank knew that he was now vulnerable to a subpoena from any investigative body in the country looking into organized crime. Without political protection of any sort, he was defenseless.
“For many years, every time some Italian names are involved in any inquiry—I get a subpoena,” he said. “I appear. I am asked questions about scores of persons unknown to me. I am asked questions based on rumors and events which have never happened. I am subjected to the type of publicity I do not desire and do not seek.”
Courting respectability, he instructed his press agents