Frank Sinatra and the Mafia Murders Quotes

“As were his Mafia connections. As he played the Desert Inn on the Vegas Strip his hoodlum pals were on display at the government hearings being held across America and in Los Angeles which had been his home since 1944. Organised crime had gone corporate, and the Mob’s national consigliere Sidney Korshak had established an influential network along with his closest friend Lew Wasserman, a Sinatra mentor and supporter and arguably the most powerful show-business tycoon – and major Presidential fixer – in America until his death in 2002. Their funny business was conducted in plush offices not street corners.”
― Mike Rothmiller, Frank Sinatra and the Mafia Murders

“Jimmy Fratianno did worry and rightly so, for he suffered for Sinatra’s behaviour being hassled by the Vegas cops – until he had a word that someone might get much more than hassled unless the aggravation against him ceased. The Mob thought Sinatra stupid for his behaviour. It was not the place or time. Nevertheless, in those fledging days at the Desert Inn, with seven different law agencies monitoring operations, Sinatra also spent even more time with Johnny Rosselli, who was the perfect mobster for Las Vegas. He could be anything anybody wanted him to be. He was attractive to women (by now lovers included Betty Hutton, Lana Turner and Donna ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ Reed) and Sinatra found him fun, good company and a generous all-around guy. He was a facilitator. He could arrange the murder of ‘Russian Louis’ Strauss who tried to blackmail his friend Benny Binion the owner of the Horseshoe Casino. He could get a girl a date with Frank Sinatra and vice versa. He met with Howard Hughes, who had a jealousy-inspired (Marilyn Monroe and Ava Gardner) lifetime hatred for Sinatra, and acted as Hughes’s go-between with Meyer Lansky and Moe Dalitz. They said George Raft was a great dancer, yet Johnny Rosselli could expertly waltz to anybody’s tune.”
― Mike Rothmiller, Frank Sinatra and the Mafia Murders

“He wouldn’t attract flies,’ was the verdict of a club owner invited to book Sinatra for a week of performances. Most believed that and because he’d angered so many people in the movies and recording industry few were willing to help including those who had made good money from his career. His friend Mickey Cohen stepped in with a ‘testimonial dinner’ in early 1951 at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the pink palace standing proudly on that tributary for fading stars, Sunset Boulevard, but it was a disappointing affair. Cohen had to outfit his own bodyguards and assorted other hoods in evening wear to make up the numbers. The invited ‘girls’ got more attention in the hotel’s Polo Lounge. Most of Hollywood thought it was all over for Frank Sinatra but across the country in New Jersey, which has a warm approach to all things Italian, was a pal who always believed the best was yet to come. Paul ‘Skinny’ D’Amato, a maestro of the entertainment business in Atlantic City, a Mafia indulged fixture of the Boardwalk, a gambler, and a fixer and, importantly, an entertaining and loveable man, met Sinatra in 1939. He proved a valuable connection and loyal ally.”
― Mike Rothmiller, Frank Sinatra and the Mafia Murders

“He was kissing the bottle at that time. We went for a drive in the desert and a little woo-poo. We really tied one on. We started shooting up a little town – Indio, I think it was; I don’t know where the hell we were – with a couple of .38s Frank kept in the vanity (glove) compartment. We were both cockeyed. We shot out streetlights, store windows. God knows how we got away with it. I guess Frank knew somebody! Somebody with a badge. He usually did.’ That would be the Riverside Police who wrote the incident up as ‘a domestic disturbance’ although what Ava Gardner recalled wasn’t the whole story; a passer-by was shot and suffered a flesh wound. All involved and the incident were kept quiet after a chartered light aircraft landed with a suitcase of cash in the early hours of the morning. The incident was not reported to the judiciary or in the newspapers.”
― Mike Rothmiller, Frank Sinatra and the Mafia Murders

“Ava Gardner was marketed as as ‘Hollywood’s most irresistible female’ and although Sinatra’s star was fading he remained an instantly recognisable name – and the two made explosive headlines across newspapers and magazines around the world. With the urging of his agents and the heavy hand of the MGM studios on his shoulders, Sinatra feebly tried to keep the affair secret. For him, his marriage was over, but Nancy Sinatra would not grant her husband a release. He chased Ava Gardner as if his life depended on it. The Mob told him to calm it but did not sanction him. Louis B. Mayer who was watching the reputation of his prime asset, Ava Gardner, be trashed, bought out Sinatra’s MGM contract a year early.”
― Mike Rothmiller, Frank Sinatra and the Mafia Murders

“Then he was told he couldn’t drive it. Such protection was licensed only for the cops and the FBI, and a few VIP commercial business concerns, which excluded working in murder and extortion, loansharking and staging successful stick-ups at newfangled theft-proof venues. Mickey Cohen was aghast. The bootlegger and bodyguard, purveyor of mayhem and mischief, followed through in the American way and in 1949 demanded his rights – his day in court. His legal team received a sympathetic hearing from the judge, who said he understood their client’s needs, given all the bombings and clattering shotguns aimed in the gangster’s direction. He’d make a deal. Mickey Cohen could drive his bulletproof Cadillac if he told the court who had given him permission to have the car tested at the gunnery range of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). But Cohen was no stool pigeon. He’d rather not say.”
― Mike Rothmiller, Frank Sinatra and the Mafia Murders

“Cadillac it was, then. A chassis was ordered and all the protective paraphernalia. Coachcraft, the auto bodybuilder over on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood, were engaged to make it bulletproof. One of the Coachcraft partners, Burt Chalmers, set up a private area to keep the engineering work under wraps. ‘It was the goddamnedest thing you’d ever seen,’ reported Cohen. ‘The bottom of the car was flat – bombproof. It felt like a tank. The glass was made so you could shoot out, but killers could be standing by the windscreen blasting you and nothing would come in.’ Coachcraft ran endless tests on the car’s protective shield, including having it fired on by California Highway Patrol high-powered rifles. They didn’t penetrate. The Cadillac went on to be ‘test driven’ by everything but a bazooka and survived intact. Cohen spent the equivalent of $250,000 on his personal tank.”
― Mike Rothmiller, Frank Sinatra and the Mafia Murders

“The scam was that stars were approached and advised to take paid advertisements out in the magazine, or their naughty or illegal behaviour would be a splash of headlines. It was a shakedown, blackmail and, in time, Tarantino would get done for extortion. In the moment, Sinatra received favourable reportage. For a time.”
― Mike Rothmiller, Frank Sinatra and the Mafia Murders

“But, but…just about every spectacular girl in the world gravitated to Hollywood, hoping to get into pictures. Since only a small percentage succeeded, the town was ridiculously overstocked with ridiculously available young women, all of them working the angles, doing absolutely anything they could to get their moment in the Klieg lights (powerful electric lights, used in filming). Sinatra couldn’t turn a corner without smacking into temptation. He made a $15,000 investment to keep many of such temptations private. With mobster Mickey Cohen he invested in Hollywood Nite Life a weekly gossip magazine run by a low life called Jimmy Tarantino. It was, discreetly, owned by Frank Costello, the boss of the New York Luciano ‘Family’.”
― Mike Rothmiller, Frank Sinatra and the Mafia Murders

“Over the years the cigarette case has morphed in reports to a gold lighter and a watch with similar inscription but in official Interpol record the impounded article was the ‘My Dear Pal’ cigarette case. His other good pal, his first ‘godfather’, the syphilis-suffering ‘family man’ Willie Moretti had admonished him for his adultery. That time Sinatra made sure to be around for the birth of his daughter Christina who was always ‘Tina’ to the family.”
― Mike Rothmiller, Frank Sinatra and the Mafia Murders

“Indeed, you didn’t need to upset him with a critical newspaper article, Sinatra was violent on an equal opportunity basis. Yet, always with some heavyweight help nearby. The columnist Lee Mortimer was held down by toughs outside Ciro’s nightclub on Sunset Strip as Sinatra punched and kicked him about. On the couch you could argue it was the way he was brought up. There were lurid stories about sex parties and his on-off infatuation with Lana Turner who had her own close mobster associations with muscle man Johnny Stompanato and a strong, platonic friendship with his boss Mickey Cohen. With Bing Crosby, who Sinatra saw as a singing rival, she was more familiar.”
― Mike Rothmiller, Frank Sinatra and the Mafia Murders

“With a home out in the Springs he could leave his wife, their daughter Nancy (born 8 June 1940), son Frank Junior (10 January 1944) and Christina (10 June 1948) and take off for his Sunset Towers apartment in town and often the arms of actress Lana Turner or those of many other lovers. Marian Collier, who died in 2021, worked as a showgirl in Las Vegas before moving on to movies in Hollywood working with names like Marilyn Monroe. She was forthright about Sinatra’s need never to spend a night alone and told us: ‘For many years I rarely met another woman who hadn’t fucked Frank Sinatra. For most of us it wasn’t romantic, more of a tick on the to-do list. I certainly got on better with him after I slept with him but he could be a moody son of a bitch. Vindictive.’ And jealous. His antics brought attention and his friends didn’t like the spotlight; his future was cemented with the Mob; he’d laid his foundations.”
― Mike Rothmiller, Frank Sinatra and the Mafia Murders

“Circella crumbled. But the unexpected happened. Bioff, little Willie the Pimp, who’d gone Hollywood, flashed gold business cards with inlaid diamonds, went ballistic. Women were off limits. You could kill a guy, beat a guy, but this? Now, he went heroic. He contacted U.S. Attorney Boris Kostelanetz from a jail house visitor phone and got right to it: ‘This is Bioff . . . what do you want to know?’ First, Boris Kostelanetz wanted to know why Bioff was talking. The reply was immediate: ‘We’re doing time for them. They’re killing our families.”
― Mike Rothmiller, Frank Sinatra and the Mafia Murders

“A unpleasant Mob antecedent was the catalyst: Willie Bioff, one of the most remarkable – and evil – walk-on players in the history of Hollywood, had the mission to control the movie unions. Bioff was a clever kid. At nine years old on the streets of Chicago, he was on commission (plus tips) from a group of brothels in the Levee. This red-light district on the Near South Side of the city was twenty square blocks of illicit relaxation: there were 500 bars, the same number of whorehouses, about 50 pool rooms and a dozen or so gambling joints. There were peep shows and cocaine parlours. It was an area where any pleasure or disease was cheaply available. Hollywood was home from home, stars were easy to extort and compromise – drugs, sex, illegal dalliances and perversions – but there were the potentially damaging headlines if matters went wrong.”
― Mike Rothmiller, Frank Sinatra and the Mafia Murders

“A hunting rifle had been leaning against the wall on the other side of their room and Alora already had the rifle expertly armed and pointed at the door. She fired. The man on her left wearing a dark, grey-striped suit fell to the floor. A second shot rang out, from behind the intruders, and the other business-suited man collapsed in the hallway. Both were dead. Now, other men in suit pants and dress shirts were suddenly all over the hallway and crowding into the bedroom which smelled of cordite. ‘You killed that guy,’ said Sinatra, lighting a cigarette. Her voice shaking Alora protested: ‘But they had guns. ‘They were coming to kill us.’ ‘Those weren’t guns,’ added Sinatra. ‘They were walkie-talkies.”
― Mike Rothmiller, Frank Sinatra and the Mafia Murders

“Such was the Mafia control of Batista that he could have retaken power in Cuba at almost any moment of his self-imposed exile. And that power saved Sinatra and Alora Gooding, who decades later finally revealed to her daughter Julie the details of the deaths in Room 214, the luxury suite she was sharing with Frank Sinatra.”
― Mike Rothmiller, Frank Sinatra and the Mafia Murders