A couple of days after JFK’s November 1963 assassination, Barry Keenan led Frank Sinatra’s son, 19-year-old Frank Sinatra Jr., out of his hotel room in Lake Tahoe at gunpoint. He drove him to a house in Los Angeles, where he locked him away for four days while demanding $240,000 in ransom from his superstar father. Keenan and his co-conspirators got their money, but were caught and arrested soon after Junior was released, and later convicted in a widely covered court case. A new Wondery podcast produced and narrated by John Stamos called The Grand Scheme: Snatching Sinatra retells the kidnapping from the perspective of Keenan, the mastermind behind the now infamous scheme. Keenan was 23 years old at the time of his plot. He was a UCLA student and a grade school classmate of Nancy Sinatra, Frank Jr.’s sister. After a car accident earlier that year caused a back injury and left him in chronic pain, Keenan became addicted to Percodan, muscle relaxers, and tranquilizers. His addiction bankrupted him, and so he concocted a plan to kidnap Frank Jr. for ransom—which he would invest, he said, and later, when he was back on his feet, pay back. “I decided upon Junior because Frank Sr. was tough, and I had friends whose parents were in show business, and I knew Frank always got his way,” Keenan told the New Times Los Angeles in 1998. “It wouldn’t be morally wrong to put him through a few hours of grief worrying about his… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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The True Story of the 1963 Kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr.
