Sinatra by J. Randy Taraborrelli

Author:J. Randy Taraborrelli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography / Entertainment & Performing Arts
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2015-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

Delusional Thinking

In the spring of 1997, thirty-four years after Keenan, Amsler, and Irwin planned to abduct the son of the most popular singer in the country, fifty-seven-year-old Keenan gave his first interview regarding the kidnapping and the events leading up to it. The scene of the interview was the same Polo Lounge in which the plot was concocted. At the time, Keenan was a real estate developer. He’d once been the youngest member of the Pacific Stock Exchange in Los Angeles, having received his securities license on his twenty-first birthday. His father was a prominent stockbroker with his own firm, Keenan and Company, operating from downtown Los Angeles.

Keenan’s middle-class existence in West Los Angeles was rocked by a 1960 automobile accident in which he suffered debilitating back injuries. Three years later, he was depressed, in chronic pain, addicted to drugs and desperate for Percodan. Indeed, narcotics addiction and alcohol abuse were his biggest challenges. His parents were disappointed in him; he owed money to them and to close friends. At the age of twenty-three, he recalled, he was “a washed-up stockbroker.” His thinking clouded by drugs, he was anxious to find a solution to his financial predicament and also to get enough money to feed his addiction. He considered robbing a bank, but decided it was too risky. Selling drugs? He didn’t have the street savvy for such an undertaking. “But I knew you could get a lot of money for kidnapping somebody who was rich,” he recalled.

In a mad, hazy state of mind, he compiled a list of potential victims, the wealthy youngsters with whom he had gone to school in Los Angeles. He finally settled on Tony Hope, Bob Hope’s twenty-three-year-old son.

“But after thinking about Tony for a few days I discounted him because Bob Hope had done so much for our country, with the USO tours and so forth,” said Keenan. “I felt it would be un-American to kidnap his son. I might have been planning a kidnapping,” he recalled, a grim smile settling on his face, “but I still thought of myself as a solid citizen. I also thought of one of Bing Crosby’s sons. We had palled around together for a while. But it didn’t seem right to do that to Bing. Somehow, he seemed too fragile to me. I didn’t think he could handle it.

“But Frank Sinatra, I thought, now there’s a tough guy,” Keenan remembered. “He could definitely take the stress of having his son kidnapped. Plus, I had seen him walk all over the parents of some of the kids at my school who were TV and film producers, so I rationalized that I didn’t care too much about him because he clearly didn’t care about anybody else. However, I wanted to make sure that Nancy Sr. and the girls didn’t have a traumatic experience, so I planned a short kidnapping, just twenty-four hours.”

A devout Catholic, Barry Keenan went to church weekly to pray for guidance in his endeavor. His agreement with

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