His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [76]
A few days before leaving Los Angeles, on January 31, 1947, Frank requested a gun permit and was fingerprinted. He said he wanted the right to be armed because he sometimes carried large sums of money. In exchange for a few days alone with “the boys” in Cuba, he promised to meet Nancy in Mexico City on Valentine’s Day. After a stop in New York, he flew to Miami Beach, where he stayed with the Fischettis in Charlie’s mansion on Allison Island. The night before leaving for Cuba, Frank and Joe visited the Colonial Inn in Hallendale, a luxurious gambling casino owned by New Jersey mobster Joe Adonis and Meyer Lansky, where Frank put on a free show for everyone. On February 11, they flew to Havana, where the Fischetti brothers and Frank were photographed walking down the steps of a Pan American clipper. Both Frank and Rocco were carrying attaché cases, which federal investigators suspected held two million dollars in cash for Luciano.
They checked into the Hotel Nacional, where thirty-six suites had been readied for the conclave, and within four days Frank met the major chieftains of America’s underworld. He partied with Lucky Luciano, gambled in the casino with him, went to the races with him, and ate dinner with him. He even posed for a few photographs with him. He also enjoyed the company of Albert “The Executioner” Anastasia, Carlo Gambino, Willie Moretti, Vito Genovese, Frank Costello, Augie Pisano, Joe “The Fat Man” Magliocco, Joe Bonanno, Tommy “Three-Fingers Brown” Lucchese, Joe Profaci, Joe Adonis, Tony Accardo, Carlo Marcello, “Dandy Phil” Kastel, Santo Trafficante, and Meyer Lansky, all major mobsters.
Also present was Joseph “Doc” Stacher, who controlled the jukeboxes in Newark and operated slot machines for Lansky. Years later, in exile, Stacher recalled the underworld conference in Cuba in 1947: “The Italians among us were very proud of Frank. They always told me they had spent a lot of money helping him in his career, ever since he was with Tommy Dorsey’s band. Lucky Luciano was very fond of Sinatra’s singing. Frankie flew into Havana with the Fischettis, with whom he was very friendly, but, of course, our meeting had nothing to do with listening to him croon. The meeting took place in the Hotel Nacional and lasted all week. Everybody brought envelopes of cash for Lucky, and as an exile he was glad to take them. But more important, they came to pay allegiance to him.”
A few days after Frank had flown to Mexico City to meet his wife, newspaper columnist Robert Ruark, who was in Havana, discovered the presence of Luciano and denounced Frank for consorting with a deported drug peddler, procurer, and thug. Ruark wrote:
If Mr. Sinatra wants to mob up with the likes of Lucky Luciano, the chastened panderer and permanent deportee from the United States, that seems to be a matter for Mr. Sinatra to thrash out with the millions of kids who live by his every bleat.… This curious desire to cavort among the scum is possibly permissible among citizens who are not peddling sermons to the nation’s youth and may even be allowed to a mealy-mouthed celebrity if he is smart enough to confine his social tolerance to a hotel room. But Mr. Sinatra, the self-confessed savior of the country’s small fry, by virtue of his lectures on clean living and love-thy-neighbor, his movie shorts on tolerance, and his frequent dabblings into the do-good department of politics, seems to be setting a most peculiar example for his hordes of pimply, shrieking slaves, who are alleged to regard him with the same awe as a practicing Mohammedan for the Prophet.
The effect of the column was astonishing. The United States immediately cut off all shipments of narcotic drugs to Cuba, and Harry J. Ansiinger, Federal Narcotics Commissioner, said the ban would continue as long as the vice czar remained on the island. The next day, Cuban police arrested Luciano