How Ol' Blue Eyes 'carried the mob's greenbacks'Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Thursday May 5, 2005
The Guardian
Frank Sinatra worked as a mafia courier and was nearly caught carrying a suitcase stuffed with $3.5m, according to the entertainer Jerry Lewis.
In an interview for a new biography of Sinatra, Lewis is quoted as saying of the Rat Pack member: "He volunteered to be a messenger for them. And he almost got caught once ... in New York."
As he passed through customs, Lewis says, Sinatra was stopped by officials who started to open the suitcase he was carrying. Inside, says Lewis, were notes to the value of "three and a half million in 50s".
But the customs officers were distracted by the crowds of people trying to catch a glimpse of the singer and aborted their search.
Had they not, claims Lewis, "we would never have heard of him again".
The anecdote is one of several accounts linking the legendary singer to organised crime in the biography Sinatra: The Life, by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan.
According to Vanity Fair magazine, which has published extracts of the book, the authors do not claim that Lewis witnessed the aborted search but rather related the account "as a fact of which he had knowledge".
Lewis says the incident took place shortly after the mobster Lucky Luciano was deported from the US to Italy in 1946.
It is not the first time Sinatra has been connected to the mob. The FBI boss Edgar Hoover was convinced that Sinatra was a mafia hoodlum and in 1998 the FBI released its files on the singer.
Surveillance of Sinatra over many years showed that he had maintained contact with many mafia figures, including Luciano, the Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, and the Chicago gangster Charles "Trigger Happy" Fischetti.
Although charges were never pressed against Sinatra for his involvement with the mafia, it was alleged that mobsters helped his career get off the ground. Many of Sinatra's business activities, including his involvement in hotels and casinos, were undertaken in partnership with known mafia figures.
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