Crime: There’s Nothing to Be Sorry For

The phone rang. Young Frank answered, then said: “You have the wrong room. This is 417.” But the caller didn’t have the wrong room. He had asked the switchboard operator for Frank Sinatra Jr., and Frank had inadvertently told him what he wanted to know.

In the next 30 minutes, while the kid napers were setting themselves up and closing in, Frank Sinatra’s 19-year-old son ate a room-service chicken dinner. A professional singer himself for all of seven months, he was traveling with the Tommy Dorsey orchestra, which was in the sixth day of a three-week stand at Harrah’s Club in the Sierra Nevadas. The club is on a neon-lit casino strip called Stateline, a non-town that straddles the California-Nevada border along Lake Tahoe’s south shore.

No swinger like his dad, young Frank doesn’t drink or gamble. So the merchandised vices of Hurrah’s held little interest for him, and he had been spending his free time in his room in one of the motels that Harrah’s maintains for performers and guests, watching TV, drinking Cokes, and listening to tapes of his own performances and his father’s, whose way with a lyric has long been to him the canon of perfection.

The Action. With him was a trumpet player named John Foss, 27, and in the overheated room, Sinatra was dressed only in a T shirt and shorts. There was a rap on the door. A young man with dark hair and a long face came in, saying that he had a package for the singer. He bent over, set the box down, and stood up waving a revolver at Sinatra and Foss. Then came an amateur touch. Risking life imprisonment, or death in the gas chamber if he should kill the boy, and obviously planning a ransom play that would involve thousands, the kidnaper began by searching Sinatra’s wallet; he found only $11.

After taping Foss’s wrists and eyes, the kidnaper, who by this time had been joined by an accomplice, got Sinatra about two-thirds dressed—shoes but no socks, trousers and a topcoat but only the T shirt beneath. They ripped out the phone, took Sinatra outside and disappeared into a blustering snowstorm. It was Sunday, 9 p.m.

Frank Sr. got the news at his big home in Palm Springs, 400 miles away, and turned ashen. He said later that he had once worried constantly about kidnapers, but that he hadn’t thought about it for years because his children were nearly all adults. He had sold his private plane several months ago, so he hired the first thing he could find: a twin-engined Beechcraft. But when he arrived at Tahoe, the blizzard was so thick that the plane was deflected to Reno. Switching to a car, Sinatra started up into the Sierras. But the storm stopped him again (“You couldn’t see the hood of the car,” said the driver), and he had to turn back.

With FBI encouragement, Sinatra set up a listening post in a sixth-floor suite in Reno’s Mapes Hotel, while radio reports announced where he was. For 16 hours he sat by the telephone, smoking cigarette after cigarette and gulping coffee; his only food was a cup of soup.

The Negotiations. The first call came Monday at 6:50 p.m. An assured voice told him that his son was alive. The second call came the next morning, and Sinatra was allowed a couple of words with his son. Less than three hours later, the kidnapers called again and directed Sinatra to go to a Carson City gas station 30 miles away to receive another call. He went, was told that his son was in Los Angeles and that the hoods wanted him there too.

He flew south and went to the home of his ex-wife Nancy, the boy’s mother. The kidnapers soon ordered him out to more gas stations. He became familiar with the voice on the other end—”It was a firm voice, 20 or 25 years old, a bit between baritone and tenor. He articulated well. He made statements such as ‘Discretion will be the demeanor.’ ”

As the drama continued to unfold, there were rumors that it was all a publicity stunt or some other sort of hoax, and indeed that was one of the first avenues of investigation probed by the FBI. Then, too, there was the matter of Frank Sr.’s genial flirtation with a kind of shadow Clan of his own, consisting of high-echelon hoods. No one figured out the connection, if any, but many were prepared to view the kidnaping as something less than the real thing. They were wrong.

The “Drop.” When the kidnapers finally named their terms, it was after banking hours on Tuesday afternoon—and they wanted $240,000. Frank got his friend Al Hart, president of Beverly Hills’ City National Bank, to get the money together. Hart had it photographed for serial numbers. Then the FBI saw to it that the “drop” was made without alarming any trigger fingers, leaving the money between two school buses parked overnight near a service station. About 12:30 Wednesday morning the kidnapers picked up their prize of $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 bills—12,400 notes in all, wrapped in an 18-in.-square package—and about two hours later released young Sinatra at a San Diego Freeway exit.

Frank Jr. started walking toward home, hiding when cars came by for fear that the kidnapers might have changed their minds and come back for him. In one car was his frantic father, out cruising the area looking for him. Finally, Frank reached the elegant Bel Air district and hailed one of the private patrol cars that the community maintains. To smuggle him past the crowd of reporters, Patrolman George C. Jones popped him into the car’s trunk and proudly delivered him to his waiting mother and father.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” said young Frank. Said Frank Sr., embracing him: “You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”

The Solution. Later young Frank confronted the massed reporters with poise, but revealed little, under orders of the FBI. He had been blindfolded for most of his ordeal, kept in the trunks of automobiles for long periods, but he was in good health. “I was scared. I was a little bit nervous, naturally,” he said. But so were the kidnapers. “By the way they talked, I think they were even more afraid than I was.”

They had reason to be. At week’s end, barely 72 hours after young Sinatra had been released, the FBI had arrested three men, charged them with the kidnaping, and recovered all but $6,114.24 of the ransom.

The three accused snatchers were not the most professional in the business. One, Barry Keenan, 23, of Los Angeles, a stockbroker’s son, had graduated in the same high school class as Nancy Sinatra, young Frank’s sister. An unemployed salesman and divorced, he had been charged with petty theft in the past. The other two were equally smalltime. Joseph Amsler, 23, an abalone fisherman from Playa del Rey, had been pinched for a liquor-law violation, mumbled, when asked if his parents could provide $50,000 bail: “I don’t think they would be interested.” The third man, John Irwin, 42, of Hollywood, a house painter, had a record of arrests from Maine to California for a mixed bag of crimes ranging from assault and battery to nonsupport.

The FBI was not in any hurry to divulge details of how it got onto the kidnapers’ trail, but agents apparently felt they were at the end of it. Said one: “I think we’ve got them all.”