Dec. 11, 1963 | Frank Sinatra Jr. Kidnap Story

Dec. 11, 1963 - Frank Sinatra Jr., kidnapped Sunday night at a Lake Tahoe gambling casino, was released unharmed about 3 a.m. today after his father had paid a $240,000 ransom. Young Sinatra’s first words on being reunited with his parents were: “I’m sorry” — to which his father replied: “You don’t have anything to be sorry for.” The 19-year-old singer had spent the preceding 53 hours blindfolded. He also had been given sleeping pills and had made a number of trips in automobile trunk compartments — including, apparently, the 400-mile drive from Lake Tahoe, on the northern California-Nevada boundary, to Los Angeles. The FBI office in Los Angeles declined to comment on a report that a man had been arrested in the case. Los Angeles Police Chief William H. Parker expressed indignation that his department had been left in the dark about the ransom arrangements, in which the FBI apparently had a key role. Chief Parker intimated that if the LAPD had been brought into the operation, more might have been done about catching the kidnappers. Young Sinatra was let out of a car at the crest of the Hollywood Hills only a couple of miles from his mother’s West Los Angeles home, where she and his father, the 47-year-old singer, were waiting. The Sinatras are divorced. A private neighborhood protective patrol car picked the young man up as he was walking along a road and drove him to Mrs. Sinatra’s home. An hour earlier, his father and several unidentified men had made a trip to an undisclosed location “near the Veterans Hospital” on Wilshire Boulevard in West Los Angeles with the ransom in bills from $5 to $100. The elder Sinatra said he did not know how the $240,000 sum had been arrived at.

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