Frank's been dead since 1998, and there is certainly an adult generation that wouldn't know who he was, much less have heard him sing.
The Quarter Deck restaurant is not an Italian restaurant by any stretch of the imagination. It is evocative of an old sailing ship, with a decor of huge timbers. The photo was not prominently placed, and truthfully, although I was in the restaurant a few years ago, it never caught my eye. Frank was arrested?
At 76 I'm well aware of Frank Sinatra and who he was. In the 60s growing up I'd rather listen to Frank than the Beatles. I still don't like much of the Beatles.
Frank was born the same year as my father, 1915. I grew up with his songs, his movies, his wives and love affairs, and the stories about his behavior, like when he teed off at a female Asian casino croupier. Frank had a temper and a salty mouth.
He paled around with J.F.K. until Jack's Attorney General brother Bobby didn't think it looked good that Jack was paling around with someone who was always thought to be connected to the mob, principally Sam Giancana. As Attorney General, Bobby had the F.B.I. reporting to him. J. Edgar Hoover was the Bureau's director at the time. In those days it was called a "bad look." Now it's called bad "optics."
Frank built an elaborate dwelling in Palm Springs expecting J.F.K. was going to be his guest. Bobby nixed the visit. Frank was mad.
I knew the stories about Frank and the bar Jilly's in New York. The owner Jilly Rizzo loaned Frank money in the 50s when Frank was at the low point of his singing career. The part in the movie From Here to Eternity changed that. It is alluded to the first Godfather movie.
Frank was an Italian-America with stature and respect. I can't imagine any restaurant in New York or New Jersey displaying a photo of a 1938 mug shot photo of Frank with numbers in front of him.
Rao's in East Harlem certainly wouldn't do it, nor Bamonte's in Brooklyn, where if you sit at the right table there's a small plaque on the wall that tells you it's from, "The Boys." Don Peppe's in South Ozone Park, hard by Aqueduct race track I'm sure does not display a photo of Frank being arrested for, get this, "seduction."
At the time seduction was a crime when a man had relations with an unmarried woman, ostensibly promising to marry her, then of course not marrying her.(Gee, really? The crime was leaving an unmarried woman soiled as a slice off a cut loaf.) A woman made the charge against Sinatra, thus the booking.
Frank was then re-arrested and charged with adultery. (How quaint.) It was now adultery because it was revealed that the woman making the complaint and the basis for the seduction charge was really married. (Oh boy.) Seduction therefore didn't apply, but adultery did—to Frank, who was yet to marry his first wife, Nancy Barbato in 1939. Nancy was the mother of Frank's three children, Christina, Nancy and Frank Jr. All charges were eventually dropped when a $500 bond was paid.
Nancy Barbato passed away at 101 in 2018, having never remarried after Frank. They remained life-long friends and she was his confidante. The kicker in Nancy's NYT obituary by Margalit Fox goes:
"Let Mrs. Sinatra, who hewed so long to steadfast midcentury propriety, have the last word. As Pete Hamill reported in his book "Why Sinatra Matters," first published in 1998, she was asked, later in life, why she never remarried.
Her answer was impeccable:
'After Sinatra?'"
I never knew any stories of his arrest this until I started looking into Frank's arrest based on the mug shot photo in a Cape Cod restaurant. I mean, he and Johnny Carson never discussed it on The Tonight show. No way. Next to the restaurant's photo is a reprint of the Bergen County News story about the initial arrest.
Growing up I always heard Frank claimed he would never sing in a New York City nightclub because the rules at the time required cabaret singers to be fingerprinted. It was always thought that Frank's reluctance to be fingerprinted was connected with his alleged mob pals, principally Sam Giancana.
Thinking about that years later, it is implausible that Frank would sing in The Persian Room, the Copa, The Algonquin or the Carlyle, all leading night spots of the era. Here's a guy who filled the Paramount theater on Broadway. How would a nightclub be big enough?
Maybe the fingerprinting reluctance was a product of being arrested, an event not widely remembered by many. And I mean by many. I never heard anyone refer to the Bergen County arrests, probably because they were so long ago, and they happened in New Jersey, and the charges went away.
None of this is the real reason for writing this posting. Whatever world I live in, there does seem to be some force at work that presents what some would surely call coincidences, but I just call the result of statistical probability. Remember, we live on a Möbius strip
So what is this "cosmic statistical probability" that brings me here today?
When on vacation I do not absorb any New York news. Generally, there are New York newspapers to buy, but I shun them for the local papers, however small.
Now the Boston Globe is not a small paper, but one day I did buy The Globe hoping to read news with a little more depth than the placement of sewage treatment plants and the local outrage (there is always local outrage).
That particular day there was a story about a bar, Savin Bar & Kitchen, in Dorchester, an area of Boston, that was taking major flak for displaying what is a famous mug shot photo of Whitey Bulger, a legendary New England crime boss that despite his ruthlessness, has his admirers. All crime bosses have admirers.
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| Stephen Osherow and photo of Bulger |
With no real interest, admiration or scorn in Whitey Bulger, I didn't think much of The Boston Globe story. I know a good deal about Whitey from the news of his long-time evasion from the Feds, (16 years) to his appearance as a wanted poster in Times Square, as if he was the latest underwear, jeans model for Calvin Klein, to this apprehension in a California condo where $822,000 in cash was found stuffed in the walls, to his murder in Federal prison, his eyes gauged out for being a informer. A rat.
Even the Boston Globe story did not provide impetus for this posting. But reading about Whitey Bulger and the bar in the New York Times on October 21 did.
The reporter, Jenna Russell, does a far better job rendering the story than the one I read from The Globe. It just shows you the reach of the NYT. We read about kerfuffles in Boston.
It seems Savin Bar and Kitchen and its owner Kenneth Osherow, are taking major flak for displaying Whitey's mug shot and another photo of one of Whitey's henchmen, Stephen Flemmi.
The NYT story is a large, five-column one, with two photos. The bar is in Dorchester, a tight knit residential community with many triple decker homes. all close together on relatively small plots of land. Your business is my business, and I'm minding yours.
My wife cousin's husband comes from the Dorchester neighborhood. He is of Scottish ancestry, as many of the people living there are, Irish as well. Lots of Irish.
The outrage is coming from locals who see the newly renovated bar with the photos as glorifying Whitey and his deeds. To me, it is interesting that it is even thought of to display a photo of so powerful a gangster. But I don't come from Dorchester.
I'm sure Sparks Steak House in New York doesn't have John Gotti's photo on its walls. Sparks is where Paul Costellano was headed to eat (a guy's got to, eat no matter who is) when he was gunned down in the street outside the East Side New York City restaurant (it is still there) in 1985 in a power struggle in the Gambino crime family. John Gotti was convicted of ordering the hit so he could, and did, take power (for a while). John Gotti died in prison of cancer.
But obviously the thinking in Dorchester is different, and Whitney is part of the area's history, as the owner Kenneth Osherow claims. Thus, the photos are staying. "The intent is not to glorify Whitey Bulger or the violence that scarred Boston, but to recognize a chapter in the complex gritty story of our neighborhood."
Many of the Dorchester residents who are most vocal about the restaurant's choice of decor are relatives of those who Whitey and his Wave Hill gang murdered during their heyday.
Ms. Russell reports the restaurant was featured in a Gordon Ramsey segment about the food and ambience that aired in August. Gordon Ramsey's take on things: "This used to be an old mobster hangout, so it's got that old 1970 mobster feel. There's nothing like this in the neighborhood, so it should stand out for the right reasons."
Is El-Gordo sniffing the sauce in the pots? A 21st-century renovated bar/restaurant with dark wood, double-glazed windows, ferns or no ferns, no smoking, no ashtrays, LED lighting, clean rest rooms, and a selection of craft beers on tap, is evocative of a 1970s wiseguy dive bar? Gordo's from Scotland, so what does he know? Where he's from the mobsters probably wear kilts commando style, funny caps. and blow into a sheep's bladder.
The bar's owners are trying to mitigate the fallout from stepped-on-toes by adding a sort of "editor's note" next to the photos: "The photos are not "smiling portraits" or a "tribute, but a reminder of the consequences." A least they don't show Whitey's eyes gouged out from his prison murder.
Neighborhoods change, and Dorchester is undergoing gentrification. The first generation Scotch-Irish are dwindling, and the memories of who Whitey and the Wave Hill gang was are shrinking as well.
One more generational advancement and Whitey will be like Sinatra. Who?
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