His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [280]
“That’s the way Frank is,” she said. “He cuts people out. I would hate to depend on that man’s friendship. He would sooner help a rank stranger than come to the aid of a friend. He’ll see a poor crippled man on the street corner and pay him to have surgery but turn his back on someone close to him [who is in trouble]. He’d give the prostitutes in Las Vegas five thousand dollars if they walked by, but he wouldn’t be there for a friend in need. It just doesn’t make sense.
“All the proof of Frank’s friendship with Sam is in the FBI files. It’s all there—the wiretaps and surveillance reports. Everything. I kept telling the gaming investigators who interviewed me to go to the Bureau’s files. Why didn’t they do it?”
The hearing continued:
Q: Mr. Sinatra, after purchasing the Cal-Neva, there came a time when you decided that you wanted to expand the facility there and enlarge the showroom, and you were out shopping for money and you had occasion to apply for some loans or at least a loan, is that true?
A: Well, Mr. Rudin, I think, can explain that a little better. We did apply for a loan but we were turned down.
The attorney said that he sent the loan application to the Teamsters Pension Fund in Chicago, which was the only institution other than a Nevada bank making loans for gaming in the state at that time.
Q: Did you and Mr. Sinatra at any time discuss this loan prior to applying or subsequent to applying and prior to their acting on it with Mr. Giancana?
Frank interrupted. “No, no,” he said. The board did not have access to the FBI files on Sam Giancana, which contained wiretaps of the Mafia chieftain’s complaints about being turned down for a similar loan believed to have been for expanding the Cal-Neva Lodge. (“There was a time when I could get all the money I wanted from the Hoffa union,” Giancana said in a telephone conversation in 1963. “I got $1.75 million in just two days from the Central once [Central States Pension Fund]. Now all this heat comes on and I can’t even get a favor out of him now. I can’t do nothing for myself. Ten years ago I got all the fucking money I want from the guy and now they won’t settle for anything.”)
Q: Mr. Sinatra, while you were a licensee at the Cal-Neva Lodge, to your knowledge, was money ever illegally diverted by you or by any of your associates to Mr. Giancana?
A: No, sir.
Without the federal wiretaps that showed Paul “Skinny” D’Amato was the man the Mafia chief put at Cal-Neva to keep track of his investment and to collect his money, the board could not challenge Frank’s statement to the contrary. Instead, the chairman took up the telephone conversation between Frank and Ed Olsen during which Sinatra used “vile and abusive language.” Even seventeen and a half years later Frank resented being asked about it. Bristling, he said, “I wonder, sir, if there is a human alive who once in his life didn’t lose his temper over a specific issue. If we are going to go on about this. …”
“If you want to ask for a show of hands here, we can do that,” said the gaming board chairman soothingly.
“It was a four-minute conversation on the telephone, and we have now made it an international incident practically,” said Frank.
Maintaining that the matter had to be explored, the chairman stated that Mr. Olsen, now deceased, was under the impression from his record that he was being threatened. “Was that your intention?” he asked.
“Not true, not true,” said Frank. “It would be pretty absurd to threaten a man who is crippled, wouldn’t you say so?”
“Well, I just am asking the questions.”
“Wouldn’t you say so?”
“Yes, it would appear to be.”
“Fine,” said Frank.
The chairman elected to take Sinatra’s word for what happened instead of referring to the memorandum that Ed Olsen had written at the time of the incident, in which he quoted verbatim from his conversation with Frank: “Now, listen to me, Ed … Don’t fuck with me … Just don’t fuck with me, and you can tell that to your fucking board and that fucking commission too.” Olsen