FBI's Sinatra File Features Mobsters, Communists
By Deborah Zabarenko
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The FBI opened its Frank Sinatra files
Tuesday, a four-decade dossier featuring mob bosses Sam Giancana and
Lucky Luciano and the legendary singer's denial that he was ``crooning
American bobby-soxers into the hands of the communists.''
Going back to Sinatra's 1938 arrest on a seduction charge in Hackensack,
New Jersey -- a grand jury refused to indict him -- the 1,275 pages of documents paint a picture of an agency with infinite appetite for information on Sinatra, who died in May at the age of 82.
For all their record-keeping, the FBI's personnel never seemed to prove Sinatra was directly involved in the Mafia or the Communist Party.
The dossier includes fuzzy black-and-white pictures of Sinatra with first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, and an account of how then-Sen. John F. Kennedy may have pressured Sinatra not to announce a deal with a communist-affiliated screenwriter until after the New Hampshire presidential primary in 1960.
But there are hundreds of pages in the dossier dwelling on Sinatra's relationship with Giancana, whom the FBI files described as the reputed head of Chicago-based organized crime who should be ``considered armed and dangerous since he allegedly has a vicious temperament, psychopathic personality and has been known to carry firearms.''
``Sinatra enjoys surrounding himself with hoodlums and ... would give up his show business prominence to be a hoodlum himself if he had the courage to do so,'' one FBI document said.
The FBI also suggested that Sinatra had contact with mobster Lucky Luciano during a 1947 trip to Cuba, and alleged that his early singing career was backed by a New Jersey-based racketeer named Willie Moretti.
Sinatra had access to most of the documents released Tuesday, since his lawyers obtained them in 1979 and 1980. He always maintained that while he was friends with some people involved with organized crime, he was not involved himself, and the newly opened documents also include this assertion.
What seemed to rankle some who gave tips to the FBI about Sinatra was his galvanizing effect on women.
``Frank Sinatra arrived in Detroit around midnight and a group of bobby-soxers (young girls named for the thick socks they wore in the 1940s) were waiting for him at the airfield,'' reads one declassified memo from 1946.
``The police started challenging girls who appeared to be under 16 and tried to send them home. ... There was widespread indignation on the part of numerous individuals that I came in contact with and a severe indictment of the parents of the girls. One individual went so far as to state that Sinatra should be lynched.''
In another case, the FBI files cited Sinatra's denial that he was ``crooning American bobby-soxers into the hands of the communists.'' A ``Daily Worker'' article featured the denial by Sinatra and quoted him as saying ``the minute someone tries to help the little guy, he is called a communist.''
In a 1970 document, Sinatra was named along with a virtual Who's Who of reputed organized crime figures -- Aniello Dellacroce, Carlo Gambino and Guiseppo ``Joe'' Gallo among others -- in an alleged plot to extort $100,000 from a former stockbroker named Ronald Alpert. Sinatra was not charged.
The documents also show the FBI's accounts of Sinatra as the victim of threats to his life and the target of extortion schemes.
Copies of FBI telegrams noting the threats in dry official language and reproductions of at least one hand-written note from a self-styled ``psychic'' who believed Sinatra was bent on dividing the United States ``West against East, East against West'' were included among the documents.
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