Dangerous Rhythms, page 29
Throughout 1950 and 1951, the hearings garnered media attention from coast to coast. The grand finale was expected to take place in New York City, with Lansky, Frank Costello, Willie Moretti, and others having been served with subpoenas to appear before the committee.
With his wire-rimmed spectacles and folksy southern demeanor, Kefauver recognized the public relations appeal of his efforts. In many localities, the hearings were televised live. Given the newness of television and its power to harness a mass audience, the committee searched far and wide for potential witnesses who might make for riveting viewing.
Joseph Nellis, a member of Kefauver’s legal counsel, was startled when the chairman, in early 1951—eleven months into the committee’s investigation—handed him an envelope that contained a dozen eight-by-ten glossy photos. They were all pictures of Frank Sinatra. “I almost fell off my chair,” Nellis later recalled. “I opened the envelope and saw a picture of Sinatra with his arm around Lucky Luciano on the balcony of the Hotel Nacional in Havana. Another picture showed Sinatra and Luciano sitting at a nightclub in the Nacional with lots of bottles having a hell of a time with some good-looking girls. One picture showed Frank getting off a plane carrying a suitcase, and then there were a couple of pictures of him with the Fischetti brothers, Lucky Luciano . . . Kefauver wanted to know more about Sinatra’s relationship with Luciano, who was running an international narcotics cartel in exile.”
Perhaps Sinatra should not have been surprised when his lawyer contacted him to say that the Kefauver committee wanted to question him. Though the singer routinely denied accusations that he was affiliated with mobsters, the rumors persisted. Recently, a gossip item had appeared in the Los Angeles Herald claiming that Frank had paid off a mafioso named Jimmy Tarantino to squelch a story about his involvement in a rape.
Sinatra balked at the overture from the Kefauver committee. Already, his career was in the midst of a precipitous decline. In August 1947, he had punched out Lee Mortimer, a gossip columnist with the Hearst newspaper chain who for years had taunted Sinatra with accusations that not only was he a fellow traveler of the mob, he was also a communist sympathizer. Sinatra decked the diminutive Mortimer at Ciro’s supper club on Sunset Boulevard, a favored hangout for movie stars and mobsters such as Ben Siegel and Johnny Roselli. The altercation became a major media scandal, with the singer being arrested on assault charges and eventually reaching a settlement with the columnist wherein he paid a sizable cash penalty and issued a public apology.
At the same time, Sinatra’s marriage was going down the tubes. His many public dalliances with starlets such as Lana Turner and Ava Gardner (whom he eventually married in November 1951) were chronicled by Mortimer and other gossip columnists. The singer’s brazen affairs came off as a cruel public humiliation of his first wife, Nancy. Frank and Nancy formerly separated on Valentine’s Day, 1950, and divorced in October 1951.
After a couple of years of unrelentingly negative press, Sinatra was concerned that his career could not withstand being dragged into the middle of a three-ring circus such as the Kefauver hearings.
Committee counsel Nellis offered a compromise: If Sinatra would come into the office for a private session, outside the prying eyes of the public, it was possible he could avoid public testimony. If, accompanied by his attorney, he submitted to questions from Nellis, the committee might be convinced that his appearance would be of no use to their investigation.
Reluctantly, Sinatra agreed.
The meeting took place on March 1, 1951, in Midtown Manhattan. So that no one would know it was happening, the parties involved met in the wee hours of the morning, at four o’clock, at a law office on an upper floor of Rockefeller Center on West 51st Street. The irony would not have been lost on Frank. He had first seen Billie Holiday sing at a nightclub on 52nd Street, a block away. The club where she performed was likely one controlled by the mob, as were many of the clubs on the Street. And now Frank was back in the area to deny that he knew or had any significant dealings with known criminals.
Kefauver was not present. Nellis, the committee’s chief counsel, noticed that Sinatra looked “like a lost kitten, drawn, frightened to death . . . He kept shooting his cuffs, straightening his tie, and he smoked constantly . . . He knew that I was going to ask him about Willie Moretti and Lucky Luciano, but he didn’t know about all the photographs that I had. He also didn’t know that I had a report about a rape he had allegedly been involved in and the blackmail that had reportedly been paid to keep that story from ever being published.”
As nervous as he was, Sinatra tried to strike the proper note of indignation. He was certain that he had broken no laws, he said, and he was getting tired of having to answer for every mafioso who crossed his path. It was nothing more than Italian American guilt by association. The singer had been putting forth this argument for a few years now. Issued as a statement to be published in the press, it was a good argument. It was a tougher position to adopt when presented with photos and documentation of his traveling with the Fischetti brothers and cavorting with Luciano.
With a stenographer present, Nellis asked Sinatra a series of questions about his February 1947 trip to Havana. Frank explained that he had met the Fischettis by coincidence in Miami a few days before that trip. He knew Joe Fischetti from the previous year, having met him in Chicago when the singer was performing there. Joe introduced him to Rocco and Charlie. That night in Miami, Sinatra recalled, “I said to Joe, it is too cold. I think I am going to get out of here and go where it is warm. I said I think I will go down to Havana.”
“Did you have any business with any of the Fischettis?” Nellis asked.
“Not an ounce,” Sinatra replied. “[Joe] told me they had also contemplated going to Cuba. I think the next day he called me on the phone and wanted to know when I was going down to Cuba. Apparently, at that time I probably did say what morning I was going, either the following morning or the morning after he called me, and when I got out to the airport, they were checking the baggage through; that is when I saw them on the plane.”
“Were you carrying any baggage off the plane?”
“Yes.”
“What was it?”
“A tan piece of hand luggage, a briefcase like.”
Nellis had FBI intelligence reports; he knew about the money. “What was in the bag?” he asked.
Sinatra shrugged. “Sketching materials, crayons, shaving equipment, general toiletries.”
“Did either of the Fischettis give you anything to carry into Cuba?”
“No sir.”
“Did anybody else give you anything to carry into Cuba?”
“No sir.”
Sinatra recalled checking into his room at the Hotel Nacional. When he came down to the lobby, a reporter he knew from New York pointed out to him a man he said was Lucky Luciano. “I said, that name is familiar. He said, yes, that’s the guy you think it is. He started to tell me something about the history of this man. I was a boy and remember when his trial was on and remember reading about it.”
Nellis looked hard at Sinatra. “There has been stated certain information to the effect that you took a sum of money well in excess of one hundred thousand dollars into Cuba.”
“That is not true.”
“Did you give any money to Lucky Luciano?”
“No sir.”
Nellis ran down a number of names—Willie Moretti, Frank Costello, Joe Adonis, Longie Zwillman—a Who’s Who of the mob, all men who had attended the Havana conference weeks before Sinatra’s arrival there.
“Well,” said Frank, “Moretti made some band dates for me when I first got started, but I have never had any business dealings with any of those men.”
“But you know Luciano, the Fischettis, and all those I have named?”
“Just like I said, just in that way.”
The back-and-forth went on for more than an hour. The darkness outside gave way to the earliest inklings of dawn.
In an almost pleading tone, Nellis asked Sinatra, “What is your attraction to these people?”
“Well, hell, you go into show business, you meet a lot of people. And you don’t know who they are or what they do.”
Finally, the lawyer became exasperated. “Do you want me to believe that you don’t know the people we have been talking about are hoodlums and gangsters who have committed many crimes and are probably members of a secret criminal club?”
A club: as if they were members of a homicidal version of the Racoon Lodge.
Said Frank, “No, of course not. I heard about the mafia.”
“Well, what did you hear about it?”
“That it’s some kind of shakedown operation. I don’t know.”
Nellis moved in for the kill. “Like the one you were involved with in the case of Tarantino?”
Sinatra allowed himself a sardonic smile. It was like he had a microphone in his hand, standing onstage in front of a room full of screaming girls. Nellis asked a series of questions about Sinatra’s payoff to squelch the rape story in the press. By now, the singer knew that his grand inquisitor was more smoke than fire.
Joseph Nellis reported back to Senator Kefauver. He was pretty sure that Sinatra was lying through his teeth. They had plenty of circumstantial evidence about his relationships with various mobsters, but what good was it? To call Sinatra as a public witness would only open up the committee to accusations of grandstanding.
When Sinatra heard that he would not be subpoenaed to appear, he was relieved. That night, the Jack Daniel’s flowed at Toots Shor’s in Manhattan, one of his favorite watering holes. Over the next few months, he kept his eyes on the Kefauver hearings, which became a television sensation. Like everyone else, he watched as Frank Costello testified. In a deal with the committee, Costello’s face was not shown. As he testified, the camera remained only on his hands. Somehow, it was all the more sinister.
To Sinatra, the moment of greatest interest might have been when his godfather, Willie Moretti, was called to testify. Apparently, Moretti had not gotten the memo that the committee was a hostile entity that deserved little more than a terse Fifth Amendment invocation for every question. Though the pudgy New Jersey gangster revealed nothing of any criminal importance, he did seem to be enjoying himself while testifying in front of the committee. When Kefauver himself asked Moretti if he was a member of the mafia, he answered, “What do you mean, like do I carry a membership card that says ‘mafia’ on it?”
The spectators in the gallery and the media loved Willie Moretti. He sounded a note of levity in proceedings that were otherwise deadly serious. Mob leadership, however, was not at all amused. Moretti’s testimony seemed to indicate a lack of discretion. Already, there were rumors within the mob that Moretti was losing his marbles. There was a meeting over espresso and Sambuca, as there often was in these situations. Vito Genovese was said to have characterized the results of this meeting as the decision to engage in a “mercy killing.”
On October 4, 1951, Moretti, age fifty-seven, was having lunch with three acquaintances at Joe’s Elbow Room Restaurant in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. He was talking and joking in Italian with the men. They were alone in the restaurant. According to the waitress, when she left the dining room and entered the kitchen, she heard four shots. When she returned, Moretti was on the floor in a pool of blood. He had been shot in the face and head. The other men were gone.
Moretti’s murder received lavish coverage in the press. Sinatra, who was an avid reader of the New York tabloids (he had them shipped to him in Los Angeles), would have read the headlines with great interest. In a graphic crime scene photo, there was his godfather and former neighbor from Hasbrouck Heights splayed out on the tiled floor of Joe’s Elbow Room, a pool of blood near his head. Police reports and the press were assertive in their speculation that Moretti’s death was the result of his testimony before the Kefauver committee.
No doubt, Sinatra let out a short, tight breath, and the thought crossed his mind: That could have been me.
Lansky’s Dream
Meyer Lansky stood on the Malecón, the famous seaside walkway in Havana, and looked out at the Gulf of Mexico, a quixotic body of water that could go from placid to angry in a matter of moments. The mob boss liked to come to this spot near the monument to the USS Maine, a ship that was allegedly sabotaged and sunk in 1898, touching off the Spanish-American War. In the middle of a circular plaza, two stone columns supported a large bronze eagle with its wings spread wide, surrounded by concrete steps and benches. It was a popular gathering spot for young lovers, old folks on their morning or afternoon constitutionals, and American mobsters pondering the maximization of power and profit on this auspicious island ninety miles off the coast of Florida.
It had been a long, bumpy ride. More than five years had passed since twenty-two major American mobsters held their conference at the Hotel Nacional. Since then, there had been unexpected developments. For one thing, in the wake of Luciano and Sinatra gallivanting around Havana together, leading to much consternation in the press, the State Department put pressure on the Cuban Foreign Ministry to deport Charles Luciano off the island back to Italy—which they did. Luciano was out. It had seemed like a blow to the mobsters and their scheme for a gambling and entertainment empire in Havana, but, ultimately, it was advantageous. At the mobster conference, everyone had committed to a contribution of $1 million each to the project. They were all in. As far as Lansky was concerned, though he thought of Luciano as a brother, it was a relief to not have him around. Luciano liked the limelight; he chased after women, partied into the night, and caused problems. He had ideas of his own, and not all of them were great. Lansky was the one who knew Cuba. He was the one who had been cultivating various key military and political leaders for two decades. He was better off managing the situation by himself.
There were other problems. After Luciano was forced off the island, the Cuban president balked at cooperating with the mobsters. He was concerned that it was going to cause him political problems with the U.S. government. He got cold feet. This had necessitated Lansky making a trip to Daytona Beach to meet secretly with his old pal Fulgencio Batista, the retired president. Lansky convinced Batista to make a comeback. “All the pieces are in place for that gamblers’ paradise we talked about,” he told Batista.
The former president had gone through a staggeringly expensive divorce with his first wife. No one would have believed it, but he was nearly broke. What Lansky was suggesting—the creation of casinos and nightclubs, with a weekly, guaranteed skim for Batista in the millions—was too good an offer to refuse.
And so Batista returned to Cuba. He set about running for president, thinking his election was a foregone conclusion. But he had been away from the scene for a long time and didn’t have the votes he expected to have. So he did what any despotic former head of the country’s military might be inclined to do: He coalesced around him commanders in the Cuban armed forces who were still loyal to him. Then he staged a coup d’état, rolling into Havana in the dead of night with armored vehicles, rocket launchers, and thousands of armed soldiers. He chased the sitting president off the island and declared himself president.
Lansky followed these happenings with a great sense of expectation. It was all coming together. In the fall of 1952, after Batista had been in office for a few months, he appointed Lansky as his advisor on gambling reform. Lansky moved into a room at the Hotel Nacional. It was the official beginning of an era of gambling and entertainment in Havana that would go down in history.
A consortium of mob bosses ran the show; they brought in veteran casino managers from Las Vegas, Kentucky, Hot Springs, and South Florida. Along with Lansky, another major player was Santo Trafficante Jr., who owned the gambling concessions at the Sans Souci and Tropicana nightclubs and was a co-owner of the Capri and Deauville hotels.
Neither Lansky, Trafficante, nor the other American gangsters knew that they were contributing to the development of an unprecedented musical scene. The idea was to build casinos and hotels—the music was an afterthought. Nightclubs already existed at the city’s most prestigious hotels, the Nacional and the Sevilla, and there were smaller clubs all around Havana. In the 1950s, new hotels were constructed—the Capri, Deauville, Hilton, Comodoro, Habana Riviera, and others. All of these hotels had a nightclub or two (usually one large room and a smaller lounge), as well as gambling. In addition, there were world-famous clubs like the Sans Souci, the Montmartre, and the Tropicana, which staged elaborate floor shows that hearkened back to the days of the Cotton Club in Harlem and the Sunset Cafe in Chicago. The clubs all had gaming rooms for cards, roulette, baccarat, and the ubiquitous slot machines.
The games of chance may have been the raison d’être, but jazz was the emollient that fueled the engine. Partly, this had to do with what was happening simultaneously in New York. At clubs like the Palladium Ballroom, located on Broadway one block away from Birdland, bands led by Machito, Tito Rodriguez, and Tito Puente were incorporating Afro-Caribbean rhythms into jazz. Latin and American jazz musicians moved between the Palladium and Birdland, sitting in with one another and working out the melding of jazz 4/4 time and the clave, the five-beat rhythm at the heart of all Afro-Cuban music. The bebop musicians, in particular—Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, drummer Philly Joe Jones, Cal Tjader, and others—were drawn to the music and even created a subgenre the critics referred to as Cubop.
One musician who was central to this movement was Havana-born Luciano “Chano” Pozo, a percussionist and composer of immense gifts. Pozo was raised poor in the neighborhood of Cayo Hueso, in El Africa solar, a housing project that at one time had been a slave quarters. El Africa was dangerous and also a locus for Afro-Cuban religions such as Santeria and Abakuá, of which Pozo was not only a practitioner, he was a babalao, or “priest,” of the faith. Pozo is rightly remembered as the greatest conga player of his generation, but he was also—despite minimal formal education—a brilliant creator of music who composed tunes like “Manteca” and “Tin Tin Deo” that would become Latin jazz standards.
