On December 8, 1963, the son of 'The Voice' is kidnapped by two gunmen after his performance at a hotel in Lake Tahoe, between California and Nevada.
Frank Jr. was the product of the union of Frank Sinatra and his first wife, Nancy Barbato.
Solvent crooner, with a voice very similar to that of his father but a different repertoire in which, he liked to joke, "we always include a Sinatra song so that people don't confuse me with Liza Minelli." She managed without much difficulty to get her own show at the Las Vegas casino hotels such as Harrah's Lake Tahoe at a very young age. It was there where, on the night of Sunday December 8 to Monday December 9, 1963, he was kidnapped.
It happened like this:
Frank was preparing to perform when someone knocked on his bedroom door. The trumpeter of the orchestra, Joss Foss, as soon as he opened the door, encountered a man dressed in ski clothes holding a revolver who, without almost saying a word, forced him to enter the room and throw himself on the floor and, moments later, leave. the place taking Frank with him, forcing him into a car parked at the door.
As soon as the news was heard, his dad, Frank Sinatra Senior, about to start filming a new movie, hurriedly cancels all his commitments and heads on his private plane from Palm Springs to Zephyr Cove, a town near Lake Tahoe, where the police had already established their headquarters, assuming that the kidnappers could not have gone too far from the scene of the crime.
A reasoning based on the rapid action of the authorities, the large number of troops deployed – more than eighty police officers –, the closure of the main roads and the participation of the FBI, the body responsible for investigations related to kidnappings since, in 1932, Charles Lindbergh's son was kidnapped.
Despite all this, the authorities' negligence was considerable. By the time the operations center is established in Zephyr Cove, the captors have already avoided the police siege and are in Los Angeles, where they had Frank Jr. hidden.
As if that were not enough, the police were also not very clear about what the motive for the kidnapping could be, which prevented them from directing the search in a certain direction.
Economic reasons are being considered, but it is also suspected that the event could be related to a conflict between Sinatra senior and the mafia, after Salvatore Giancana, one of the big bosses of that organization, had stayed in a casino hotel in Las Vegas. Vegas owned by the singer.
In the early morning of December 12, 1963, while making his usual rounds, one of the private security guards in the neighborhood where Nancy Barbato lives runs into a young man of about 20 years old. The boy asks her please if he can take him to Nimes Road, the street where her mother's house is located.
45 minutes after Frank Sinatra Senior deposits the ransom amount on Wilshire Boulevard in West Los Angeles, his son enters his mother's house.
