Marvin Belli and Mickey Cohen

[Tim Gratz]

The Junior kidnapping occured on December 8, 1963, forty-two years ago Thursday.

An interesting vignette I found in an on line article about the case:

The next night, a stricken Sinatra and Mickey Rudin met with four FBI agents, including Dean Elson, the FBI's special agent in charge of Nevada. Robert Kennedy called, promising help. Sam Giancana also called. ("Please," Sinatra told Momo, according to J. Randy Taraborrelli's Sinatra: A Complete Life, "let the FBI handle this.")

The article is worth reading in full. It has an incredible exchange of correspondence between Sinatra and "Dame" Hoover (as one of our members refers to the late J. Edgar) (I don't think it is a "term of endearment").

The link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/natio...9/sinatra7e.htm

Edited December 6, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[Robert Howard]

The Junior kidnapping occured on December 8, 1963, forty-two years ago Thursday.

An interesting vignette I found in an on line article about the case:

The next night, a stricken Sinatra and Mickey Rudin met with four FBI agents, including Dean Elson, the FBI's special agent in charge of Nevada. Robert Kennedy called, promising help. Sam Giancana also called. ("Please," Sinatra told Momo, according to J. Randy Taraborrelli's Sinatra: A Complete Life, "let the FBI handle this.")

The article is worth reading in full. It has an incredible exchange of correspondence between Sinatra and "Dame" Hoover (as one of our members refers to the late J. Edgar) (I don't think it is a "term of endearment").

The link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/natio...9/sinatra7e.htm

After 43 years, recent releases of two JFK-assassination related books have brought November 22, 1963 back into the public arena, for the first time since Gerald Posner’s widely hailed Case Closed was released over a decade ago. Joan Mellen’s A Farewell To Justice’s debut cratered or so it seems, after a “footnote controversy” proved to be for JFK researchers what Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” was for last years Super-Bowl audience. Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK seems to have gained a great deal of interest with its revelation of a Kennedy brothers plans for a 2nd Cuban invasion, (The ill-fated Bay of Pig’s invasion being the first) which was to have taken place on December 1, 1963. It is the contention of the authors Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartman that the Mafia was privy to this information, as well as revelations of another assassination attempt, which was to have taken place in Miami Florida only day’s before Dallas. Both books seem to provide enough material to keep those fascinated by the story that won’t go away, to keep the debate flowing.

There have been, to those familiar with the assassination, allegations of perhaps as many as over a hundred “mysterious deaths” somehow related in some way to November 22, 1963, either individuals who knew Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby or were associated with the various investigations we have all come to be familiar with; the much-maligned 1964 Warren Commission, subsequent deaths in the 1960’s, with special emphasis on New Orleans around the time of the even more maligned Clay Shaw trial headed by New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison, up to the late 1970’s House Select Committee’s JFK investigation, when individuals such as mobster John Roselli, Oswald’s “friend” George DeMohrenschildt and even the FBI’s William Sullivan met sudden deaths. It has to some degree been conceded that DeMohrenschildt’s death was an “apparent suicide” after initial suspicions of foul play, although his widow Jeanne has stated in the past that she does not believe her husband “committed suicide.”

Now many researchers of JFK’s assassination have been able to separate the myth from the reality. Some, by no means all, prefer to point out that there is a “short list” of ten or so individuals whose death’s even after all these years have not been resolved, (including the ‘big one’ in Dallas) and most importantly, circumstances demand the assertion that their “untimely demise” took place not only under very suspicious circumstances, but had a “short circuiting effect” in resolving conclusively the case that is known as the “Crime of the Century.”

Indeed, it would be incumbent upon anyone who has studied, or at least kept up with the now 43 year old saga, to realize that several deaths, including the above-cited examples, have conclusively extended debate on the elusive “conspiracy angle, at least in the eyes of those who believe there was a conspiracy, giving added credence to the dissenter's, and not to the benefit of those who side with the Warren Commission and Gerald Posner.

On Saturday November 23, 1963, Jack Zangretti, the manager of a $150,000 modular motel complex near Lake Lugert, Oklahoma, remarked to some friends that “Three other men, not Oswald, killed the President.” He also stated that “A man named Ruby will kill Oswald tomorrow and in a few days a member of the Frank Sinatra family will be kidnapped just to take some of the attention away from the assassination.” Two weeks later, Jack Zangretti was found floating in Lake Lugert with bullet holes in his chest, and he had been dead for about two weeks.

Is the death of Jack Zangretti, one of those cases?

The kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr. took place on a Sunday December 8, 1963, little over two-weeks after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Two men, Barry Worthington Keenan, and Joseph Clyde Amsler who were both twenty-three, knocked on the door at Frank Junior’s Harrah’s Lodge in Reno Nevada. Frank was having dinner with Joe Foss a member of the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. The two men were posing as hotel room service attendants, armed with a sawed-off shotgun, and a .45-caliber pistol. After entering his suite, they bound and gagged Joe Foss and then carried Frank Sinatra Jr. at gunpoint, to a waiting car, a 1963 White Impala, but not before robbing Sinatra Jr. of $11 and Foss of one dollar. Sinatra was scheduled to perform at 10:00 PM that evening. Driving through a blizzard, they eventually holed up in a rented house in Los Angeles, after barely escaping detection at a police roadblock. The son of the music icon Frank Sinatra had been kidnapped and was being held for ransom. Eventually Joe managed to struggle free and called Harrah’s press agent, who then called the Reno police. Frank’s manager Tino Barzie, called the elder Sinatra at his Palm Spring’s home. The legendary singer chartered a plane and immediately flew to Reno, where he was met by the District Attorney of Washoe County at the time, Bill Raggio. From there, the two were joined by four FBI agents based in Nevada as well as Mickey Rudin and Jim Mahoney, Sinatra’s attorney and publicist respectively.

Frank Sinatra, through an intermediary Peter Lawford contacted Attorney General Robert Kennedy pleading for help in getting his son back, and RFK promised to do everything he could to get his son back to him safely. The blizzard had made Lake Tahoe inaccessible by car or plane, so Frank set up headquarters at the Mapes Hotel in Reno. Others who came to the Sinatra camp there included Jack Entratter and Jilly Rizzo. Sinatra called his ex-wife Nancy then his parents in New Jersey; then waited sixteen long hours before he heard from his sons captors. The first call came at 4:47 P.M. on Monday Dec.9th it would be followed by six more until the nightmarish saga ended. Another member of the group, who had kidnapped Frank Jr., called to tell Frank Sr. his son was safe his name was John Irwin, forty-two years old; he said that there would be another phone call soon.

When the ransom call came, Frank said to them “You can have anything, a million dollars….anything!”

Inexplicably, the kidnappers asked for only a paltry sum in comparison, $240,000 in used bills.

“Fine, fine, anything, okay,” Sinatra responded.

“We’ll make another phone contact about the exchange, discretion will be the demeanor.” Irwin said before hanging up.

Frank called Al Hart, to setup the payoff to the kidnappers. Hart was President of City Nat’l Bank of Beverly Hills. Sinatra then flew to L.A., and stayed with his ex-wife in Bel-Air. Reporters were outside to cover the biggest kidnapping since the Lindbergh baby in 1932.

After Hart put the money together at the Bank, Sinatra and a lone FBI Agent delivered it in a brown paper bag per the kidnapper’s complex instructions. Fifty-four hours later, on December 10, Frank Sinatra, Jr. was released, two miles from his mother’s home in Bel-Air. A police patrolman who recognized him placed him in the trunk of his car, in order to avoid reporters. A grateful father Frank Sr. gave the policeman a thousand dollars.

The three kidnappers were captured the next day, with most of the ransom money, as well. The kidnapping had been predicted before it happened, an unusual occurrence to say the least. Complete with a sinister link to the mysterious Jack Zangretti, who, in turn was ostensibly a link in the events of November 22, 1963, the whole affair seemed right out of the Twilight Zone, the trial was in many ways simply a continuation of the bizarre chain of events. Barry Keenan constructed a strange defense, alleging that the whole affair was simply a hoax perpetrated by the leader of the Rat Pack’s son, in an effort to boost his singing career.

The jury did not treat Keenan’s defense as being believable in any manner, as all three men were sentenced to life in prison. However, Keenan’s defense while not helping during the trial, created a pseudo-folk tale type of legacy, which dogged the younger Sinatra for years afterwards. When Britain’s Independent Television News took the allegations and broadcast them as gospel, the elder Sinatra sued them for libel and collected, according to Frank Sinatra, Jr.

Years later, Keenan himself admitted his defense was simply a ploy, and as it turned out had went to school with Nancy Sinatra, the Chairman of the Board’s ex-wife.

It would be interesting to know whether one of the kidnappers John Irwin, was related to Philip Irwin a private investigator who had been involved in the investigation regarding Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra’s alleged mistaken break-in of the apartment of Florence Kotz, (an apparent victim of mistaken identity). This took place the evening of November 5, 1954, when DiMaggio believed that Marilyn Monroe was having a lesbian affair. Sinatra was eventually subpoenaed and forced to testify to a State Senate Committee about the incident, the botched break-in which came to be known as the “wrong-door raid, apparently took place in an attempt to obtain evidence of marital infidelity by Marilyn to use against her in their upcoming divorce trial. Philip Irwin had went on record as saying that much of Sinatra’s testimony was false, and was subsequently “severely beaten” and as a result tried to meet with Sinatra to tell him that he had not leaked the story which had made the “headlines,” and which strongly aroused the curiosity of the Los Angeles County Grand Jury. Afterwards during a subsequent State Senate Committee hearing investigating activities of private investigators March 1957 see FBI Files FOIA 55 pages. Ironically, according to Sinatra’s testimony, Philip Irwin was one of the two investigators DiMaggio had hired to locate Marilyn’s alleged lover in the first place, (the other investigator was Barney Ruditsky.) Although Sinatra had his own attorneys he did nothing to improve his reputation for being tied to the Mafia, when he called and obtained help in the case from renowned mob attorney Sidney Korshak, a man who was reputed to be able to settle “problems” with just a couple of phone calls. Sinatra was represented by the law firm of Martin Gang and Mickey Rudin of Gang, Kopp & Tyre.

And so the story goes, but what about Jack Zangretti? Of him, very little is known, the original allegation concerning Zangretti’s foreknowledge of Ruby’s shooting of Oswald and the indeed, day’s later kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr. appears to have been the result of information obtained by Penn Jones Jr. a famous figure to those well-versed in conspiracy theories, but who had been known to pull a few rabbits out of the hat, so to speak. A search of the internet revealed nothing more than the fact that Jack Zangretti was, according to the United Kingdom’s Lobster magazine “a minor mob figure.”

But after digging, I hit the motherlode, the story had apparently was from a publication which was printed by one of the first, maybe even the first JFK researcher, a man who lived in Midlothian, Texas (near Dallas) named Penn Jones’s the publication was called “Forgive My Grief” Issue Volume 4. The sub-heading read

New Information on Strange Death No. 72 (although the number 72 seemed odd, I surmised maybe there had never been an original entry for Zangretti or this “update” was an addendum to an original story, if there indeed was an original story, I was unable to find it after perusing the previous three issues, anyway.)

May 31, 1973; and had what appeared to be an entire article which included the paragraph from above I had found on the internet. It read:

“In late 1962 a group opened a $300,000 restaurant and nightclub with all gambling facilities called THE RED LOBSTER, built in a cotton patch near Lake Lugert between Altus and Hobart, Oklahoma. The facility was equal to many Las Vegas Clubs.

A $ 150,000 modular motel complex was added and almost complete by November 22, 1963. Some of the rooms were occupied on weekends by persons arriving in chauffeured limousines. These people were stylishly dressed, and the men were accompanied by beautiful women. We are told the license plates were from the surrounding states, plus Arizona, Colorado and Kansas.

On Saturday November 23, 1963, Jack Zangretti, the manager of a $150,000 modular motel complex near Lake Lugert, Oklahoma, remarked to some friends that “Three other men, not Oswald, killed the President.” He also stated that “A man named Ruby will kill Oswald tomorrow and in a few days a member of the Frank Sinatra family will be kidnapped just to take some of the attention away from the assassination.” Two weeks later, Jack Zangretti was found floating in Lake Lugert with bullet holes in his chest, and he had been dead for about two weeks.

Early in 1964 foreclosure procedures began, and the motel was moved in 1966 to Frederick Oklahoma. The nightclub and restaurant were torn down, now only the foundation remains at the site.”

As an aside to the Zangretti story, below it there was the following.

Recently on Public Television, Earl Warren stated:

“There has been no evidence of any kind developed to contradict what was in our reports…..We have never been able to find one witness to add to what we found at that time…..” If Justice Warren will convene a Grand Jury, we can produce witnesses to contradict his report. [italics mine]

In light of what the American people have learned about the Warren Report, despite the best efforts of the “Warrenati” what I dubbed the so-called “journalists” who have made a career out of being apologists for every event of political intrigue that has bobbed to the surface of the media eye over the last 43 years; the words were like an dagger to the heart. Earl Warren’s “comment” reminded me of the plethora of lies, half truths and cover-ups that have hovered like unseen figures over the Ghosts of November, JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Dallas newspaper reporters who had gathered in Jack Ruby’s apartment, and…..well you get the idea.

Wow! If there was ever an article that seemed to include not so veiled references to organized crime, this would appear to fit the heading. So the question remained, why was this seemingly “very important” lead

relegated to the dustbin of history?

I continued my search.

Barry Keenan, who on the surface appears as the ringleader of the kidnappers resurfaced in 1998. It seems that his sentence which was officially “life in prison plus 75 years” was worse than it sounded. His sentence was “eventually reduced,” and he left prison and appears to have done pretty good for himself. In 1998 he was pitching a proposal to develop a casino resort at Deer Island, (near Gulfport) Mississippi, when his involvement in the Sinatra kidnapping became known to the local populace. A subsequent article stated that “an addiction to painkillers (after an automobile accident) in addition to financial problems” was one of the reasons that he had decided to participate if he was not actually the “main man” in the 1963 kidnapping. That same article stated that before declaring bankruptcy in Texas in 1986 over the oil bust there, his net worth was a cool 17 million dollars, and it appears to have only gotten better. By 1997 he was a “consultant” to the ongoing attempt to build the casino complex on Deer Island, and eventually nailed down the casino deal there with help from his partner Now in 2005, Barry Keenan at age 65, has ostensibly made it to the “top of the heap.” Apparently, the last ten years Barry has made quantum leaps into the casino business, in a March 2005 interview with The Midland Telegram Reporter, Keenan stated he has helped develop five casinos in Biloxi, Mississippi and for native-American tribes in Palm Springs, San Bernardino, Commerce and San Diego California, and was only in the spring of 2005 an “advocate” for a bill that was then pending in the Texas Legislature which would legalize gambling in the Lone Star State. After some haranguing, the bill was shelved, but it will no doubt not be the last word as far as gambling coming to the Lone Star State

In the interview Keenan, in response to arguments that gambling foments organized crime and prostitution and has destructive social effects says those are “myths” opponents use to fight it. It’s reassuring that America can put that issue behind us, now that we know conclusively that gambling has no harmful effects on society.

In conclusion, on December 5th 2005 I contacted via e-mail Craig Roberts who years earlier had written “JFK: The Dead Witnesses” this book contained a near identical passage to Penn Jones May 1973 article on Jack Zangretti, he wrote to tell me that he had confirmed the story of the Red Lobster near Lake Lugert and the subsequent death and discovery of Zangretti’s body from Lake Altus-Lugert in 1994, unfortunately, the police officers and officials who had been with the local police there, at the time of the case, had long since died or retired. The famous “quotation” expressing foreknowledge of those dark events from “a man named Ruby will kill Oswald tomorrow, to a member of the Sinatra family being kidnapped just to take some of the attention away from the assassination,” seems to be an elusive phantom. I thought how even visiting good old Lake Altus-Lugert would probably be fruitless, as far as obtaining verification of the infamous? quote.

Has the potential for verification of the quote went down the same rabbit hole, where other hopeful leads went, Gaeton Fonzi’s interview with George DeMohrenschildt that never took place, or the footlocker filled with evidence of Richard Case Nagell’s contacts with Oswald?

Does anybody know how to get a hold of those Sinatra Jr. trial transcripts?

To see information regarding how Barry Keenan successfully challenged the “Son of Sam Bill” see

http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/dfiles/file_229.pdf.

Edited December 6, 2005 by Robert Howard

[Tim Gratz]

To Robert:

Often trial transcripts are not prepared unless there is an appeal of the case to an appellate court.

Most interesting post, however.

[Robert Howard]

To Robert:

Often trial transcripts are not prepared unless there is an appeal of the case to an appellate court.

Most interesting post, however.

I may be mistaken, but I believe Anthony Summers recent epic Sinatra "The Life" makes reference to a Sinatra Jr trial transcript, but I wouldn't swear to it.