His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [277]
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department also held back its investigative files from the board.
Without subpoena power, the Nevada Gaming investigators were unable to compel the interviews they needed to explore Frank’s relationships to organized crime. They ended up getting a great deal of direction from Mickey Rudin, who arranged some of their interviews (Ava Gardner, Phyllis McGuire, Nancy Sinatra, Sr.) and discouraged others (Joe Fischetti and Mia Farrow). Because of these restrictions, the investigation was necessarily limited and could not possibly have been as far-reaching as promised. Relying primarily on newspaper stories, the agents traveled to Acapulco, to Miami, to Chicago, to Australia. They interviewed Miss Gardner in London, where she served them champagne and said how wonderful Frank was, without mentioning his close friendship with Sam Giancana, and the many times she had been with Frank and the Mafia chieftain in Las Vegas, Palm Springs, New York, and New Jersey. In New Jersey, they discovered that Frank had lied on his license application by saying that he had never been arrested, but Mickey Rudin quickly took the blame, saying that Frank’s 1938 arrest on a morals charge seemed so inconsequential that he didn’t think it was worth mentioning.
While some of the agents worked on the personal investigation, others checked Frank’s finances after he submitted a statement claiming a net worth of $14,107,137.29. In addition to $865,242.40 invested in publicly held companies, he listed $1,195,132.26 in his music companies* and the Budweiser (Anheuser-Busch, Inc.) distributorship he owned in Long Beach, California. His lawyer later testified under oath that the distributorship, a large company with thirty employees, grossed close to $30 million a year. Frank also listed $650,683.01 for other investments, including his trucking company, FAS Trucking, the aircraft hangar he owned in Palm Springs, a building in New York City, a wine distributorship, and a water well in Palm Springs.
His fixed assets totaled $4,591,431.33 for his houses in Rancho Mirage, Los Angeles, and Pinyon Crest. His New York property was in Mickey Rudin’s name. Sinatra’s other assets totalled $5,376,288.05 for cars, art, silver, china, office equipment, pension and profit sharing, and life insurance.†
A net worth of fourteen million dollars seemed extremely modest for a man who received about sixty thousand dollars a month in royalties from Columbia Records, although he hadn’t recorded for them in decades. Between 1953 and 1962, he had recorded at least twenty-five million dollars’ worth for Capitol, and from 1961 to 1965, he recorded $14.4 million in albums and $1.5 million in singles for Reprise Records. He had earned one million dollars for each of his movies since 1963 as well as his television specials. He had sold his twenty-percent interest in Warner Bros.-Seven Arts to Kinney in 1969 for $22,500,000 in cash and convertible debentures. Mickey Rudin received $1.5 million for his services in negotiating the sale.
In 1970, Sinatra and Rudin had formed a company with Danny Schwartz (SSR Investment Co.) to buy 200,000 shares of National General Corporation (a giant conglomerate which included motion picture and book publishing subsidiaries), plus $2,200,000 principal value of NGC’s four-percent debentures, which they sold in 1973 for about nineteen million dollars. In 1976, Sinatra had bought 420,000 shares of stock in Del Webb Corp., which owned four casinos in Nevada, for $2,139,294, and Mickey Rudin had bought 113,500 shares for $293,698. Together with Las Vegas publisher Hank Greenspun, the three men controlled eight percent of the company’s common stock. They wanted the company to pay for the investigation necessary to license Frank—a matter of some $500,000—but when they saw Frank faced considerable political opposition