Free The Prince of Paradise by John Glatt Page A

Fontainebleau head of security, Ronnie Mitervini, who became like a father to him. “Benji just hung on to him,” said Toby. “He now wanted to be a detective, and his whole life was security.”
    “He was like a mascot to the police,” recalled Officer Pat Franklin, “because his dad owned the Fontainebleau and would feed the cops for free.”
    Another Miami Beach police officer, James Scarberry, said that it was common knowledge that you had to take care of Benji if you wanted to keep getting the well-paying details at the Fontainebleau, along with the other perks. “We would be working at the hotel,” said Scarberry, “and he would just tag along with us. Benji always wanted to be a policeman.”
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    By the mid-1960s, the Mafia had quietly taken over the Fontainebleau hotel, reportedly paying Ben Novack $2 million a year as their frontman.
    “Because it was run by the Mafia,” Alan Lapidus explained, “there have probably been more movies and TV shows shot in the Fontainebleau than any building on earth. Jerry Lewis and all those guys made all their movies there to promote the building. Frank Sinatra had his own suite and there was definitely Mafia [involvement there].”
    At 4:20 P.M . on March 1, 1966, the Miami Beach Police Department received a warning that an assassination attempt would be made on Frank Sinatra during his performance at La Ronde that night. The FBI was immediately alerted.
    Sinatra “had received a telephone call from an anonymous male caller,” the FBI’s official report read, “who said, ‘a hand grenade will be thrown at Frank Sinatra sometime tonight during the show.’”
    That evening there was a heavy FBI and Miami Beach Police Department presence at the Fontainebleau, but nothing untoward happened.
    A year later, Sinatra filmed Tony Rome at the hotel during the day while performing at La Ronde at night. He did the same thing in 1968, with Lady in Cement.
    Whenever Sinatra and his entourage moved into the Fontainebleau, there was always an undercurrent of violence in the air. Sinatra was a heavy drinker, and unpredictable. He could explode at any time.
    Once, at an after-party in the Poodle Lounge, Sinatra and Ben Novack Sr. were drinking champagne when the star reached over to an ice bucket to refill his glass. Discovering that the bottle was empty, he threw a tantrum.
    “He was as drunk as a skunk,” recalled Lenore Toby. “So he picked up the bucket with all the ice in it and turned it over Ben Novack’s head, saying, ‘You run a lousy hotel.’”
    The Fontainebleau owner merely laughed it off, not wanting to upset the real chairman of the board.
    On another occasion, Sinatra took umbrage at something and threw all the furniture in his room off the balcony and into the gardens below.
    “Benji was later over there,” said Toby, “collecting the furniture off the ground.”
    Sinatra always roamed around the hotel with a team of armed personal bodyguards to do his bidding. One night, the comedian Shecky Greene was opening for the singer, and cracked a joke about him.
    “Sinatra got really pissed,” said Pete Matthews, another Miami Beach police officer who worked security at the Fontainebleau. “Frank had some of his friends bounce him around to express his anger at comments that he made onstage. Benji told me he saw Greene, and he’d got the shit beaten out of him.”
    Years later, the comedian incorporated the beating into his act, joking that Frank Sinatra had literally saved his life. He’d tell the audience that five guys were beating him up when he heard Sinatra say, “Okay. He’s had enough.”
    A couple of years before joining the Miami Beach Police Department, Pete Matthews had been driving along Indian Creek, by the Fontainebleau, when he spotted a young boy dressed in a full scuba diving outfit, complete with an oxygen tank, and wading around in the water next to the Fontainebleau’s Calypso houseboat.
    When Matthews asked what he was