Sinatra and the Mob

The height of summer is celebrated by the television networks telling us things we already know. Such as, Frank Sinatra was in hock to the Mafia. Actually, Sinatra: Dark Star (shown on Thursday, BBC1, though made as a co-production with American, German and French money) was a perfectly entertaining trot round a familiar block — the Mob threatening Tommy Dorsey with extreme violence if he didn’t release the young Sinatra from his contract; the promise to prevent From Here to Eternity being made if Sinatra didn’t get a part. I hadn’t known that his family came from the same street in Sicily as Lucky Luciano, nor perhaps realised how near the end his career had been — thanks to his links to organised crime — just before he won his Oscar, in 1953. Nor the humiliation the gangsters visited upon their star — for example, making him quit his bed to gamble with a big winner at a Mob casino so that the man would lose his money back again.