Dangerous Rhythms, page 38
That he was projecting this view while sitting before the Nevada Gaming Control Board spoke volumes. There was a time, years earlier, when Sinatra’s livelihood seemed to hang in the balance depending upon a decision from this group. In 1964, when Sinatra was in his prime, he had been stripped of his gaming license by this same commission. That occurred when it was revealed that he and Sam Giancana were seen together at Cal-Neva, the resort that was jointly owned by the two men (though Giancana’s involvement was off the books). Giancana got into a bloody physical altercation at the resort with the road manager of the McGuire Sisters. Sinatra played a role in cleaning up the fight. The incident was supposed to be kept quiet but leaked to the press.
At the time, Giancana’s name was one of the most prominent in the commission’s “black book” of organized crime figures who were not allowed in Nevada’s gambling centers. You could not own points in a casino and be seen doing business or socializing with anyone whose name was in the black book. There were many witnesses to the Giancana fight who saw that Sinatra was there.
When Sinatra heard that he was being investigated by the control board and would likely lose his license, he got on the phone with the chairman of the commission and exploded with invectives, calling him a “goddamn liar.” When he heard that he would be served with a subpoena to appear before the commission, he told the chairman, “You just try and find me, and if you do, you can look for a big, fat surprise . . . a big, fat fucking surprise. You remember that. Now, listen to me . . . don’t fuck with me. Do not fuck with me.”
“Are you threatening me?” asked the chairman.
“No. Just don’t fuck with me. And you can tell that to your fucking board and the fucking commission, too.”
Sinatra made a big show of hiring lawyers and claiming that he would fight the commission, but when push came to shove, he knew that an appearance before the commission might expose him to revelations about his lifetime of fraternizing with the likes of Momo Giancana and other mafiosi. He acceded to the findings of the commission and lost his license, which meant he was stripped of his ownership points in the Cal-Neva Lodge and the Sands Hotel and Casino. It was a decision that likely cost the singer millions of dollars.
Now, seventeen years later, here was Sinatra in front of the board. Much had changed. The board had a new chairman, and Giancana was dead, shot in the kitchen of his home in Chicago in 1975 while stirring pasta sauce. Sinatra had continued his career as a highly successful entertainer, making untold millions, and he continued cavorting with hoodlums.
The occasion for his current appearance was that he was once again applying for a gaming license, this time so that he could acquire ownership points in Caesar’s Palace, where he had lately been performing at Circus Maximus, the casino/hotel’s massive showroom. Vegas needed Sinatra. The town had recently entered into an era of criminal prosecutions that seemed to pose an existential threat. There was, at the time, some doubt as to what the future of the country’s preeminent gambling empire might be. In the present climate, Las Vegas could not say no to Frank Sinatra, and Sinatra knew it.
Still, there were formalities. Sinatra’s interest in a gaming license had to be approved by the board, and this involved public hearings; that was the protocol. The board was obligated to ask Sinatra about what had transpired back in the day. There were questions about the Cal-Neva Lodge and the late Sam Giancana, though they were asked and answered in a highly perfunctory way:
Board member: There was a fight at the Cal-Neva back then. Not a fight you were involved in, but a fight none-the-less.
Sinatra: How did I miss that one.
Board members and press in attendance laughed at that remark. In fact, they laughed frequently during Sinatra’s testimony. It was as if the hearing were a mere formality.
Even so, the public record of Old Blue Eyes tended to complicate things. There was the matter of the singer’s financial involvement in the building of a large performance space in Westchester County, just north of New York City. In 1980, Sinatra had been investigated by a federal prosecutor in New York for his involvement with the Westchester Premier Theater. The 3,500-seat venue had been constructed in 1975 over a landfill in Tarrytown. Sinatra appeared there ten times—all sold-out shows—between April 1976 and May 1977. In November 1977, the theater fell into Chapter Eleven bankruptcy proceedings after its president resigned amid a federal racketeering investigation.
The theater had been built with mob money raised through a fraudulent stock swindle. Once it was open and doing business, a trio of mobsters affiliated with the Gambino crime family skimmed $800,000 in the first year alone. The following year, they skimmed even more. The mobsters not only skimmed off the revenue from the ticket sales, but they also skimmed from parking, bar, restaurant, and candy concessions, souvenir and program stands, and T-shirts. They even scalped tickets and sold others for seats that didn’t exist.
The investigation into the Westchester Premier Theater produced wiretaps that implicated Sinatra in the skim. Prosecutors claimed that the singer received $50,000 under the table from his appearances at the theater in 1976. Not only that, but according to witnesses in front of a grand jury, Sinatra agreed to make appearances at the venue knowing that his shows would pack the place and help fuel the skim. He had a financial stake in the plundering of the Westchester Premier Theater. (After the place went bankrupt, the building was razed in 1982, a mere seven years after it had been built.)
One incriminating piece of evidence against Sinatra was an April 11, 1976, photo that became infamous: the singer standing backstage with a bevy of eight mafiosi, mostly aged gentlemen in their seventies. This was not Frank with Joey Clams from the corner; this was Frank with, among others, Carlo Gambino and Paul Castellano, boss and underboss of the Five Families; and Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno from Los Angeles, who would later become an informant against the mob. Sinatra was positioned in the middle of the group with a big shiny smile on his face.
Miraculously, Sinatra avoided prosecution in the Westchester Premier Theater case. The president of the corporation that operated the venue went to prison partly because he was unwilling to testify against the singer.
Members of the Nevada Gaming Control Board asked Sinatra about the photo of him backstage with a Who’s Who of the mafia circa the late 1970s. The singer gave his standard response: He didn’t know the men and had no idea what their business might have been. He took a photo with them as he would with any group of fans who were there to get an autograph after the show.
The photo was revealing, on a number of levels. For one thing, it is clear from the photo that the mobsters were there to kiss Frank Sinatra’s ass, not the other way around. The fact that Frank, after making hundreds of thousands of dollars off the Westchester Premier Theater, walked away from the wreckage of the place without a scratch—while others went to prison—revealed the extent of his power. The mobsters needed Frank Sinatra; he did not need them. He was bigger than the mafia. And he was also bigger than the Nevada Gaming Control Board. He was bigger than Las Vegas.
The gaming board approved Sinatra’s application for a gaming license. He went on to make lots of money off Caesar’s Palace and even more from concerts and other business ventures. When he died from natural causes in 1998 at the age of eighty-two, the Sinatra estate was valued at between $200 million and $600 million, which in today’s figures would be over $1 billion.
No one could deny that Sinatra was talented, but his riches reveal another reality. In the business of jazz, Frank had an edge, and he knew how to exploit it. Throughout his career, except for that one occasion with the Cal-Neva Lodge, he had avoided being held accountable for his mob connections. There may never have been any criminal liability. The singer’s association with gangsters was mostly an amusing sideshow. He skirted the volcano without ever falling into the fire. He rose up out of the firmament to become the richest man in this saga. He was the capo di tutti capi.
Among the singer’s legion of fans, most would likely argue that Sinatra’s success was a simple case of fair market compensation. His talent was immense, after all, and talent is destiny. The Chairman of the Board worked hard for his riches, with world tours, movie appearances, wise business investments, and royalties that he had earned.
This argument is based on that uniquely held American belief that financial wealth is the true indicator of a person’s stature in society, and that access to that wealth is the result of a game based on fairness.
Given the racial history of the United States, and the intricacies of the marketplace, fairness is a fungible concept.
If financial compensation were based solely on talent, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, and Duke Ellington would have been among the richest men in America; Billie Holiday would have lived atop a mountain comprised of diamonds and rubies; Charlie Parker would never have had to stick a needle in his arm out of frustration and sorrow; and they would have had to name a bank after Count Basie.
Moishe’s Last Stand
Of all the men on the business side of the ledger who profited from the music business, Mo Levy was singular. He started at a low level, in the coat-check and photo concessions of a jazz club, then rose to become the proprietor of his own clubs. He did so by partnering with mafiosi. From there, he branched out into nearly every aspect of the business. One jazz writer, Ralph Gleason in San Francisco, referred to Levy as “the Octopus” because his tentacles seemed to reach into every financial nook and cranny in the business. Levy openly ripped off artists and got away with it. Eventually, in the late 1980s, he got his comeuppance in a seamy, rudimentary criminal conspiracy that seemed almost too perfect to be true.
It started with MCA Records, the management corporation, whose parent company was also sometimes referred to in the music press as “the Octopus.” In real terms, the Music Corporation of America made Mo Levy look like a piker. As influential as Levy was within his world, MCA’s world was many times larger. With offices around the globe, the parent company managed some of the biggest artists in the entertainment business, and MCA’s subsidiary business holdings were vast. Among other things, the company had recently purchased the entire catalog of Chess Records, an early and influential blues and jazz label that started in Chicago in 1950. Chess had produced some major-name artists, and the catalog was likely worth in excess of $1 million. MCA was looking to liquidate some of its back catalog as cut-outs, including the material from Chess.
Executives at MCA turned the deal over to Sal Pisello. Within MCA Records, very few employees knew what Pisello did for the company. Fifty-six years old, salty and abrupt, with a pronounced Brooklyn accent, he had an office at MCA corporate headquarters in Los Angeles. He had been showing up for work promptly at eight o’clock most weekday mornings. He was one of those New Yorkers who moved to Southern California and could never quite shake their East Coast roots. When an executive vice president asked Pisello one day what he was doing for the company, he answered, “Keeping the niggers in line.”
Within the ranks of federal law enforcement, there were those who were aware of Pisello. His nickname was Sal the Swindler, and he was a veteran mafioso believed to be affiliated with the Gambino crime family based in Brooklyn. He first came to Southern California in 1979 when, according to the local FBI, he attempted to smuggle heroin through the Fulton Fish Market in New York City to Los Angeles. The Feds were unable to make a case against Pisello because he had disappeared—or so it seemed. In fact, he had moved up in the world into a six-figure job as a “consultant” with MCA Records.
MCA’s roots in organized crime stretched back to the early origins of jazz. The company founded by Jules Stein in Chicago in 1924 had started out booking acts at venues owned by Al Capone and the Chicago outfit—the Sunset Cafe, the Plantation, the Grand Terrace Cafe. Stein and MCA’s ambitious young legal councilor, Sidney Korshak, had a special relationship with Joe Glaser, whom they helped get started with his own management business. It was the unofficial brotherhood of Ashkenazi Jews from Chicago that would go on to become some of the most powerful players in Hollywood.
In those years, the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles became the boulevard of gangster dreams. Café Trocadero, Ciro’s, and the Macambo (where Ella Fitzgerald held a long residency) assumed their places in the underworld lore of the city. Benny Siegel, Mickey Cohen, Johnny Roselli, and other gangsters used the Sunset Strip as their own personal catwalk, where talent managers, record label executives, and agents from places like MCA paid homage to their status as underworld venture capitalists.
By the 1980s, the late afternoon and early evening sun still cast a magical glow streaming between the huge billboards and Royal Palms along the Strip, but the famous clubs were mostly gone. Those that remained hosted rock and roll, not jazz.
Sal the Swindler felt that he needed a partner to help him unload the Chess back catalog for MCA. So he reached out to a mafia associate he knew named Corky Vastola, based in New Jersey. Vastola had made a career out of feasting on cut-outs, bootleg records, and other financial appendages of the record business. Vastola was a dangerous man, possibly a killer, who represented the DeCavalcante crime family. It was Vastola who suggested to Pisello, “Hey, maybe we should bring Moishe in on this.”
MCA, vintage records, and a cut-out deal that offered multiple opportunities for skimming and scamming, involving mafiosi from various East Coast families? It was a caper right out of the Mo Levy playbook.
By 1986, Levy didn’t really need the money. He had his own airplane. He owned four homes, in New York, Miami, and New Jersey. In the town of Ghent, in upstate New York, he owned a farm where he raised Thoroughbred racehorses.
Levy also maintained his connections with the Genovese crime family. He had Strawberries, his popular chain of record stores, which the FBI believed was a front for Vincent Gigante to launder criminal proceeds from other ventures, such as narcotics. When Gigante wasn’t wandering the streets of Greenwich Village in a bathrobe and slippers, he was now one of the few remaining bosses of stature in the American mafia.
The music business had been good to Mo Levy; he was a multimillionaire. But he was also a hustler. He knew that as an independent operator in the music business, you rarely made millions off one big score; you made your millions by stealing the nickels and dimes of artists over a long period of time.
In the cut-out business, the artist whose work was being bartered didn’t make a dime; he or she received no royalties for the sale.
Moishe, Sal the Swindler, and Corky were an experienced team of grifters, but they still needed a buyer for the MCA cut-outs. No problem. Sal Pisello, representing MCA Records, made a trip to South Florida for the annual convention of the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM). This gathering was not unlike the deejay conventions of the early 1960s where Levy used to ply disc jockeys with hookers and booze. The NARM convention was held at the Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, Florida. The Diplomat was a popular spot for record industry executives and, coincidentally, New York mafiosi on vacation. It was there that Sal Pisello met John LaMonte, owner of Out of the Past, an “oldies” distributer with a warehouse in suburban Philadelphia.
LaMonte looked at the list of cut-outs that Pisello was offering: Benny Goodman, Gene Ammons, Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Over four million total cut-outs for $1 million. LaMonte was excited. Making money off dead artists was always better than trying to grift among the living; they might send lawyers after you.
LaMonte had no idea that the legendary Mo Levy was in on the deal. He found that out later, after he agreed to the deal with Pisello and Vastola.
LaMonte was himself no babe in the woods. He was a convicted record counterfeiter who dwelt on the shady side of the business. Mo Levy, whom he referred to as “that cocksucker Super Jew,” sent chills up his spine. He had once been shaken down by Levy. LaMonte tried to back out of the deal, but Pisello invited him to Los Angeles to meet high-ranking executives from MCA. Pisello also added some “sweeteners” to the deal: old Bing Crosby titles that were sure to sell.
The deal was consummated in June 1984, in Levy’s office at Roulette Records. Among other items, LaMonte noticed on the wall a plaque in the name of Morris Levy, in honor of his ten years as chairman emeritus of United Jewish Appeal.
LaMonte was purchasing 4.2 million records at a price of forty cents a unit. He was told that he would be paying Levy three cents per record off the books, in cash. As soon as he received the cut-outs and had begun selling them, Levy would expect a $15,000 cash payment every week until the full amount of $120,000 was paid.
The following month, seventy tractor-trailers showed up at Out of the Past’s warehouse in suburban Philadelphia. Not only were the sweeteners that LaMonte had been promised missing from the shipment, but many of the most valuable titles that had been promised were also absent. The shipment had been “creamed,” as it was known in the business. John LaMonte had been stiffed. When LaMonte told his partners what had happened, they claimed they didn’t know anything about it. If he’d been stiffed, he would have to take that up directly with MCA, who was responsible for making the shipment. Meanwhile, the partners—two made mafiosi and a cocksucker Super Jew—were demanding that LaMonte pay up immediately or suffer the consequences.
At the same time, LaMonte was approached by two eager FBI agents. As it turned out, they had Corky Vastola under investigation on an entirely separate matter and stumbled upon his ongoing deal with LaMonte, Levy, and the MCA cut-outs. In wiretap conversations, Vastola had incriminated himself and Levy.
The FBI was thrilled. Morris Levy was a target of great import to the Bureau; they had first opened a case on the record exec twenty-four years earlier. The fact that they had never been able to come up with anything indictment worthy against Levy was a source of great frustration. Now it appeared a case against Levy had fallen into their laps. And yet, they were far from having what they needed for a criminal indictment.
