Alleged Organized Crime Links
Sinatra garnered considerable attention due to his alleged personal and professional links with organized crime, including figures such as Carlo Gambino, Sam Giancana, Lucky Luciano, and Joseph Fischetti. The Federal Bureau of Investigation kept records amounting to 2,403 pages on Sinatra. With his alleged Mafia ties, his ardent New Deal politics and his friendship with John F. Kennedy, he was a natural target for J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. The FBI kept Sinatra under surveillance for almost five decades beginning in the 1940s. The documents include accounts of Sinatra as the target of death threats and extortion schemes. They also portray rampant paranoia and strange obsessions at the FBI and reveal nearly every celebrated Sinatra foible and peccadillo.
For a year Hoover investigated Sinatra's alleged Communist affiliations, but found no evidence. The files include his rendezvous with prostitutes, and his extramarital affair with Ava Gardner, which preceded their marriage. Celebrities mentioned in the files are Dean Martin, Marilyn Monroe, Peter Lawford, and Giancana's girlfriend, singer Phyllis McGuire.
The FBI's secret dossier on Sinatra was released in 1998 in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.
The released FBI files reveal some tantalizing insights into Sinatra’s lifetime consistency in pursuing and embracing seemingly conflicting affiliations. But Sinatra’s alliances had a practical aspect. They were adaptive mechanisms for behavior motivated by self-interest and inner anxieties. In September 1950 Sinatra felt particularly vulnerable. He was in a panic over his moribund career and haunted by the continual speculations and innuendos in circulation regarding his draft status in World War II. Sinatra “was scared, his career had sprung a leak.” In a letter dated September 17, 1950, to Clyde Tolson, Deputy FBI Director, Sinatra offered to be of service to the FBI as an informer. An excerpted passage from a memo in FBI files states that Sinatra “feels he can be of help as a result of going anywhere the Bureau desires and contacting any people from whom he might be able to obtain information. Sinatra feels as a result of his publicity he can operate without suspicion…he is willing to go the whole way.” The FBI declined his assistance.
Read more about this topic: Frank Sinatra
Famous quotes containing the words alleged, organized, crime and/or links:
“The entire construct of the medical model of mental illnessMwhat is it but an analogy? Between physical medicine and psychiatry: the mind is said to be subject to disease in the same manner as the body. But whereas in physical medicine there are verifiable physiological proofsin damaged or affected tissue, bacteria, inflammation, cellular irregularityin mental illness alleged socially unacceptable behavior is taken as a symptom, even as proof, of pathology.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“I dont have any doubts that there will be a place for progressive white people in this country in the future. I think the paranoia common among white people is very unfounded. I have always organized my life so that I could focus on political work. Thats all I want to do, and thats all that makes me happy.”
—Hettie V., South African white anti-apartheid activist and feminist. As quoted in Lives of Courage, ch. 21, by Diana E. H. Russell (1989)
“Remember that its never a crime in the face of humanity and enlightenment to distribute the works of the great humanists among the merchants and moneychangers of this godforsaken country... You better slip me the dough.”
—John Dos Passos (18961970)
“All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuitytheir links with their dead and the unborn.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)