"He's still pissed at you": What happened to the men who kidnapped Frank Sinatra Jr.

Anchor, the publisher of James Kaplan’s Frank: The Voice, calls Frank Sinatra the “best-known entertainer of the twentieth century,” and he was also a man whose godfather, Willie Moretti, was underboss of the Genovese crime family. On paper, his son was about the worst target in America for a get-rich-quick scheme. Yet the men who kidnapped that son came out of it remarkably lightly, and the ringleader’s send-off was a joke from John Stamos, who posted on Instagram with a warning about meeting Sinatra Senior wherever he had landed: “run! He’s still pissed at you.”

That ringleader was Barry Keenan, and the short answer goes like this. He, Joe Amsler and Johnny Irwin were in FBI hands within days of taking Frank Sinatra Jr. from a Lake Tahoe hotel room in December 1963, and all three were convicted of kidnapping and handed long sentences, then served only a sliver of them. Keenan, the mastermind, drew life plus 75 years, walked out after four and a half once he was found legally insane at the time, and then did rather well for himself in real estate.

His later years are well documented, mostly in his own voice. The 2021 podcast Snatching Sinatra, made by Stamos, ran long interviews with him and left the two men close friends. He had already gone over the affair on BBC Radio 4’s Witness in January 2014, and he told Ira Glass he had first meant to earn the money back over the years and repay it. David Arquette and William H. Macy, meanwhile, had starred in Stealing Sinatra, Showtime’s 2003 movie based on the kidnapping.

He made an unlikely criminal. At 21 he was already the Los Angeles Stock Exchange’s youngest member, until a car accident left him penniless and addicted to painkillers, and he eventually cooked up the plan and recruited help. He also had a psychiatric condition that made him hear voices, felt God had blessed the scheme, and, since he meant to pay the money back one day, saw nothing immoral in it.

The father could hardly have been having a worse year. Nevada’s Gaming Control Board suspended his gambling license in 1963 after Sam Giancana was spotted at the Cal Neva Lodge, and his close friend John F. Kennedy had been assassinated only weeks before the kidnapping. Sinatra was shooting Robin and the 7 Hoods with the Rat Pack when, on December 8, his 19-year-old son was taken from Room 417 at Harrah’s, and the strain had him seriously considering shutting the picture down, though it was eventually finished.