His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [279]
A: No, never.
The board did not have the FBI wiretaps that showed the December 1961 conversation between Giancana and Johnny Roselli in which they discussed the money Sam had put into Cal-Neva.
The chairman continued trying to ascertain how much Frank knew about Sam’s presence on the property.
Q: There came a time in 1963, sometime between the nineteenth and twenty-seventh of July of that year, when Mr. Giancana was at the Cal-Neva Lodge. Did you have any prior knowledge or did you issue an invitation to Mr. Giancana to come to the lodge?
A: I never invited Mr. Giancana to come to the Cal-Neva Lodge. I never entertained him, and I never saw him.
Despite evidence to the contrary from an eyewitness, which was received by Ed Olsen in 1963 and is still in the Nevada Gaming Control Board’s files, this lie went unchallenged. Even Phyllis McGuire had told the investigators that Frank had been on the premises when Giancana had visited her in July 1963, but when Frank denied it at this hearing, the commission said nothing.
Q: Do you recall going down to Miss [Phyllis] McGuire’s bungalow and there walking into some type of an altercation with a gentleman and not an altercation that you were involved in, but seeing an altercation with a gentleman by the name of Collins?
A: How did I stay out of that one? No, I did not. I was not present. I was in Los Angeles when that happened. I got a phone call from one of my employees telling me there had been a problem.
The FBI agents who were following Giancana at the time knew of the fight between Sam and Phyllis McGuire’s road manager, Victor LaCroix Collins, which Frank and George Jacobs broke up. Now, under oath, Frank was denying he took part in it. He got away with it because the FBI reports were unavailable to the commission’s investigators, and Victor Collins was never contacted for his side of the story. Ed Olsen had a statement from Collins in 1963, but again no one bothered to present it as evidence at the hearing in 1981. When told of Sinatra’s version of events, Victor Collins said, “He’s lying under oath, but what do you expect?”
The chairman directed his next question to Mickey Rudin.
Q: When Miss McGuire was interviewed on January 27, 1981, she indicated to our investigators that it was her recollection that Mr. Giancana was there with her the first three to five days of her engagement, and that to her best recollection, she thought you were there at the same time. Now, you have certainly testified otherwise. Mr. Rudin, I wonder, are you in a position to have any recollection on that particular incident?
Rudin responded: “I would have to tell you it is my recollection that he was not there. I would also have to tell you that I don’t have that much confidence in my recollection on the event. It may have been I have fixed my mind he wasn’t there and that is now the story.”
The chairman asked Frank if Giancana had ever been at Cal-Neva “while you were a licensee while he was included in the Book of Excluded Persons by the State of Nevada.” Frank responded, “I haven’t any knowledge of that.”
The board apparently made no effort to interview any former employees of Cal-Neva who could have told them about Sinatra and Giancana playing golf together, the times they ate dinner together in the Cal-Neva dining room, the riotous parties they threw in the evenings in Miss McGuire’s chalet.
Phyllis McGuire was enraged by Frank’s dishonest testimony. “How could he say all those things?” she asked. “How could he deny his friendship with Sam? Frank adored the man, and then after his death Frank turned on him and denied their friendship just to get that damned license.… But Frank doesn’t stand by his friends. Look at what he did to Jack Entratter, who had been his best friend for years. After Carl Cohen punched him out and Frank left the Sands, Sinatra never spoke to Jack again. And Entratter lived next door to him in Palm Springs!”
Phyllis McGuire said that she had watched her career suffer as a result of loving Sam Giancana. Still, she had attended