Sinatra nearly got caught with Mafia money: new book

NEW YORK (AFP) - Frank Sinatra had close links to the Mafia and once nearly got caught carrying 3.5 million dollars in mob cash, according to a new book excerpted by Vanity Fair magazine.

Entertainer Jerry Lewis told the authors of a new biography "Sinatra: The Life", due to be published on May 16, how the legendary performer, who died in 1998, volunteered to be a Mafia "messenger".

"He almost got caught once ... in New York," Lewis was quoted as saying in the excerpt from the book by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan.

Lewis told how Sinatra was going through customs with a briefcase that contained "three and a half million in fifties". But there were so many people crowding around the singer and actor that they aborted the search.

"We would never have heard of him again" if the money had been discovered, Lewis said.

According to the new book, Sinatra's grandfather came from the same Sicily town, Lercara Friddi, as mobster Lucky Luciano.

The authors said Sinatra always claimed his family was from Catania or Agrigento and that Sinatra may have deliberately caused confusion because of his family's involvement with bootlegging during Sinatra's childhood.

But Summers and Swan also said Sinatra had a longtime, intimate relationship with Luciano, according to Vanity Fair.

The book says the authors found christening and marriage records which indicated the Luciano and Sinatra families lived on the same street in Lercara Friddi.

The book quotes Sinatra's valet, George Jacobs, as saying Sinatra and Luciano clearly knew each other well and that he remembered them meeting at a Rome hotel where the gang leader rose from his chair and kissed Sinatra.

Summers and Swan wrote that Hollywood studio head Harry Cohn was pressured by the Mafia into giving Sinatra the part of Private Angelo Maggio in the movie "From Here to Eternity".

The book, which is published by Alfred A. Knopf, said that by 1961, when Sinatra was a friend of President John F. Kennedy, the singer had sought to distance himself from his Mafia associate.