Chapter Eight
1 Frank Sinatra’s alleged ties to organized crime have been the subject of discussion for many years. Lucky Luciano was very specific in stating that the entertainer’s early career was funded by the Mafia. “He had a job working for Tommy Dorsey’s band,” Luciano will later recall about the young Sinatra. “He was getting about a hundred and fifty bucks a week. But he needed publicity, clothes, different kinds of special music things, and they all cost quite a bit of money. I think it was about fifty or sixty grand. I okayed the money and it come out of the fund, even though some guys put up a little extra on a personal basis. It all helped him become a big star.”
2 This came to pass. As a result of the Havana Conference, an alliance was formed between the Cuban government and the Mafia, which resulted in the building of several posh Mob-run casinos in Havana and a powerful Mafia presence on the island nation. This did not diminish until dictator Fidel Castro kicked the American Mafia out of Cuba in 1959.
3 More than forty years after Anslinger’s death, that competition between the FBI and FBN is still evident. The website of the Drug Enforcement Agency, as Anslinger’s FBN is now known, boasts that Anslinger was tracking the Mafia’s drug activities “long before the FBI even acknowledged that the Mob existed in the United States.”
4 Anslinger’s works remain unpublished. His papers are today held at the Harry Truman Library in Independence, Missouri.
5 Lucky Luciano settled in Naples. He did not resume his life of crime and eventually ran low on money. He petitioned his old friends in New York for financial help, but they refused.