By Paul Krassner

The June issue of Vanity Fair includes an excerpt from a new biography, Sinatra: The Life, by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, in which Jerry Lewis is quoted: "Ol' Blue Eyes was a mob bagman and nearly got busted while smuggling $3.5 million into New York."

Lewis claims that Sinatra "volunteered to be a messenger" for organized crime, which was no big surprise to me. Twenty years ago, a reliable Mafia source told me that the FBI has a photo of Frankie-boy delivering a suitcase full of money to Luciano in Havana.

When I was an adolescent misfit, Sinatra became my role model after he made a short film, The House I Live In, decrying prejudice. The lyrics of the title song summed it up: "All races, all religions, that's America to me/The right to speak my mind out, that's America to me." ÊI would sing his love songs to myself: "Saturday night is the loneliest night of the week," and, "It was just a ride on a train but, oh, what it seemed to be." I even went to a masquerade party dressed as Sinatra—wearing a jacket with padded shoulders, an oversized bow tie and pegged pants, crooning into my broom-cum-microphone. I won first prize and continued to comb my hair like his, with a blatant pompadour.

I became disillusioned with Sinatra in 1960, when he fired Albert Maltz at the request of the liquor-industry gangster, former ambassador to England and Nazi sympathizer, Joseph Kennedy. Maltz was the pilot case of the House Un-American Activities Committee in seeking contempt-of-Congress citations against Hollywood's "Unfriendly Ten" in 1947. Now Joe Kennedy considered him too subversive to write the screenplay for Sinatra's film production of William Bradford Huie's nonfiction book, The Execution of Private Slovik.

Maltz had stated to HUAC that he and others had been refused "the opportunity that any pickpocket receives in a magistrate's court—the right to cross-examine these witnesses, to refute their testimony, to reveal their motives, their history and who exactly they are....I will not be dictated to or intimidated by men to whom the Ku Klux Klan, as a matter of Committee record, is an acceptable American institution...."

Sinatra was on Maltz's side those days: "Once they get the movies throttled, how long will it be before the Committee goes to work on freedom of the air? How long will it be before we're told what we can and cannot say into a radio microphone? If you make a pitch on a nationwide network for a square deal for the underdog, will they call you a Commie? I wonder."

Sinatra needed to wonder no more when he himself silenced Albert Maltz, author of The House I Live In.