Who Murdered Elvis?. Stephen B. Ubaney
needed to control the release of information in the entertainment industry. That put him face-to-face once again with the only source that controlled it, the mob. Once again they had saved Elvis Presley, but debts were mounting. By 1960 the time had come for Elvis to appear on television again and Tom Parker received a call from those who held the organized crime strings in the entertainment industry.
Their favorite son, Frank Sinatra, had teamed up with ABC and Timex for a four show special starring Sinatra as the host, and the series was in trouble. Sinatra's first three shows had flopped and this, his fourth and final show, needed to be a hit. The long-awaited return of Elvis Presley was a guaranteed ratings grab and Parker owed the mob a favor, so Elvis appeared for the first time in 3 years at a much reduced rate.
The show was a great success with 41.5% of the ratings as everyone clamored for a look at "the cleaned-up Elvis" who was fresh out of the Army. Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra shared a checkered past. When Elvis first appeared on the music scene, Sinatra was less than kind to him in saying, "His kind of music is deplorable," and that it was "A rancid-smelling aphrodisiac." The public was surprised to see the two of them together looking like old friends, but to anyone who knew what was really going on, it was no surprise at all. Elvis and Frank were both owned by the same people. It was little wonder that the rest of the Rat Pack were also repeatedly featured on the ailing TV show.
It was during this time that rumors began to circulate that Elvis was dating Nancy Sinatra, another clever ploy by Tom Parker. That way even if news of Priscilla were leaked, it wouldn’t have been believed. The connection between Frank Sinatra, Tom Parker, Elvis Presley and mafia crime bosses was very real and cannot be over emphasized. So real in fact that Sinatra’s FBI file is a whopping 2,403 pages in length and the verbiage is peppered with associations to organized-crime figures.
On October 8, 2000, the CBS show 60 Minutes conducted an interview with Sinatra's daughter entitled Tina Sinatra: Mob Ties Aided JFK. In the interviews, the famous singer's daughter is quoted as saying: "Frank Sinatra served as a liaison between John F. Kennedy's 1960 campaign for president and mobster Sam Giancana in a scheme to use Mafia muscle to deliver union votes."
The interview continued: "Tina Sinatra, 52, says her father told her that Kennedy patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy wanted the Mafia's help in delivering the union vote in the 1960 West Virginia primary, in which John Kennedy, then a U.S. senator, faced Sen. Hubert
Humphrey of Minnesota. The elder Kennedy asked Frank Sinatra to make a request to then-Chicago crime boss Sam Giancana.” “Giancana told Frank Sinatra he would do it, telling the singer, according to his daughter, 'It's a couple of phone calls.' Soon after Kennedy won the tight race for president, the deal brokered by Sinatra came back to haunt him when the Kennedy administration cracked down on the Mafia – an effort led by Robert Kennedy, the president's brother and attorney general.”
For those of us who were born after ‘the good old days’ and have no recollection of the way America really functioned, it could be easily said that a handful of men and their minions ran America from behind the scenes. They could make or break movie stars and politicians at will. They could fix any sports event and were quite competent at running casinos and major industries. These men were intelligent, powerful and for the most part kept very silent.
Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley were the two biggest legendary acts in American history and they were huge cash cows. There was simply no way their management would be allowed to stray as they were nothing short of obedient servants to the powers that made and kept them.
Immediately after the "Welcome Home" television appearance with Frank Sinatra, Elvis was commanded to star in as many motion pictures as humanly possible to fulfill his “contract” and quickly sign another. Initially Parker promised that none of the music in the movies would be sold on record, but Parker double-crossed Elvis and acted against his client's wishes with an RCA Victor side deal.
Elvis was embarrassed about the movie singles and never thought that they were up to the quality of his other songs. When he learned that they were going to be released for sale, and that his movie scripts were continually getting poorer, he was furious and flatly refused to do any more movies. Soon, the management relationship took an ugly turn.
RCA Victor, plus the entertainment powers behind them, accompanied by Tom Parker, burst into Presley’s California mansion for a surprise meeting. During the meeting it was made forcefully clear to Elvis that they owned him and if he resisted he wouldn’t be around too do anything else. In the DVD Elvis by the Presley’s Jerry Schilling tells of the conversation he had with Elvis over his movie scripts.
Schilling remembered Elvis’ comments: “Two pictures ago I was a racecar driver, the last picture I was a speed boat racer, this picture they want me to be a motorcycle racer. It’s the same script!” Jerry Schilling continues: “He was furious. He didn’t go to the studio the next day. This was one of his first times to rebel, and it wasn’t long that the studio came up, Colonel came up, and I even think there was somebody from the record company, and bottom line, it was put to Elvis, you will do this and you will do your contracts or you won’t do anything.”
They weren’t threatening Presley’s career, they were threatening his life. From the moment Elvis Presley kowtowed to those powers, his life would never again be the same, and in 1964 when the Beatles invaded America he was already locked into a ridiculous multiyear movie contract that was not in the best interest of his career.
The money continued to flow from the B rate films, which padded the pockets of the hidden powers but Elvis felt neutered and humiliated. They were prostituting the greatest star in the world for their own personal gain and making him into a laughing stock in the process.
Elvis despised musicals and never wanted to sing in his movies. His true ambition was to develop into a serious dramatic actor and when Barbara Streisand offered him the lead role in A Star is Born, Parker quickly killed the idea. Parker jacked the price on Elvis appearing in the film up so high that it made Elvis’ chances of getting the part impossible.
Parker had no management experience handling Hollywood actors and he would have lost his meal ticket. He feared that if Elvis went in that direction he would have been out of his element so he found a way to kill the idea. Parker's job was to keep Elvis under his authoritative thumb so RCA-Victor and the William Morris agency could keep the gravy train rolling, and roll it did.
With William Morris taking 10% off the top of his musical beach movies, and Parker filling his pockets as well, Elvis' chances of breaking into serious acting were virtually impossible. Just in case anyone thought that Elvis Presley wasn't a great actor, think again; he managed to make everyone believe that he was having a good time making B-rate movies when he was truly in misery.
Photo permission: University of Nevada, Las Vegas Library, Special of Collections
Pictured in this 1960 photograph taken on the set of GI Blues from left to right are Moe Dalitz, Elvis Presley, Juliet Prowse, Wilbur and Toni Clark, Cecil Simmons and Joe Franks (standing behind Wilbur Clark); you’ll notice that the only person in the photograph not smiling is Elvis Presley.
His somber facial expression exemplifies the pressure that these figureheads, led by Tom Parker, had on his life. From the late 1950s through the late 1960s, no one had more power in Las Vegas than Moe Dalitz. Morris Barney "Moe" Dalitz ran a leading criminal organization of gangsters called the Cleveland Syndicate known for its violence and criminal ways while running liquor from Canada and Mexico during prohibition. In Las Vegas, Dalitz bought The Desert and The Stardust so he could be a “hands on ally” to Jimmy Hoffa, Meyer Lansky and their entire organized crime network.
John L. Smith of the Las Vegas ReviewJournal writes of Moe Dalitz: "Early in his life, Dalitz was a bootlegger and racketeer mentioned in the same breath as Meyer Lansky and Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel. In Cleveland, one longtime member of law enforcement would tell the Kefauver Commission, "Ruthless beatings,