WWW- Ol' Blue eyes was a mob bagman and nearly got busted while smuggling $3.5 million into New York, comedian Jerry Lewis claims in a new exposé on Frank Sinatra.
Customs officers opened a briefcase Sinatra was carrying that contained "three and a half million in fifties," Lewis told the authors of "Sinatra: The Life."
But Sinatra was saved when people in the crowd behind him began pushing and shoving, distracting the customs officers, who waved the singer through.
"We would never have heard from him again," Lewis told Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, whose new book is excerpted in the June edition of Vanity Fair.
The Voice, as many fans called Sinatra, insisted until he died in May 1998 that he was never in cahoots with the mob. But Lewis said his old friend "volunteered to be a messenger for them" in the late 1940s.
In Sinatra's world, Lewis said, "a handshake goes before God" and the singer knew the Mafia was expanding beyond New York and Chicago and wanted in.
"Frank, at a cocktail party, told [mobster] Meyer [Lansky] in no uncertain terms, 'If there is going to be East Coast, West Coast, intercontinental and foreign - if all that's going to happen, I go all the time, Meyer,'" Lewis said.
The Sinatra exposé does not say when or exactly where he had his close call with the customs agents. Lewis did not witness the customs incident, according to the authors, but said he had heard that it occurred shortly after mobster Charles (Lucky) Luciano was deported from the United States to Italy in February 1946.
Lewis spokesman Bob Mackle did not return a call to elaborate on the comedian's claims.
Sinatra was the model for saloon singer Johnny Fontane in "The Godfather Returns," Mark Winegardner's sequel to Mario Puzo's "The Godfather." In the book, Fontane delivers a bag of mob money to the Michael Corleone character.
Summers and Swan cite several other examples where Sinatra allegedly benefited from having godfathers like Luciano and Sam Giancana on his side.
When Sinatra tried to set himself up in Las Vegas, he found his path blocked by mobster Bugsy Siegel. "At the Mafia gathering in Cuba, Siegel was sentenced to death," the authors write.
They said it was Luciano who approved the hit on Siegel and that Sinatra later toured the room in the Beverly Hills mansion where Siegel ate lead and died.
"Frank and the others got very solemn and raised a glass to him," Sinatra's then-girlfriend, actress Shirley Ballard, said. "It was very eerie."
The writers also describe how a Luciano hood named Johnny Rosselli leaned on Columbia Pictures studio chief Harry Cohn to give Sinatra the role of Pvt. Angelo Maggio in the 1953 movie "From Here to Eternity."
"Give Frank the role or I will have you killed," Rosselli reportedly said.
Sinatra got it, won an Oscar and revived a career that had been on the skids.
