The Kidnaper Who Panicked

"It was," said Frank Sinatra Sr., "a fantastic job. The rapidity of the FBI in this case was just incredible." The FBI certainly did nothing to discredit this notion, and the facts seemed to bear out the idea. Only five days and a few hours after he was taken at gunpoint from a motel room on the California-Nevada state line in the Sierra Nevadas, Frank Sinatra Jr. was back home. Three men had been arrested and charged with his kidnaping, and all but $6,114.24 of a $240,000 ransom payment had been recovered. Besieged by newsmen's requests for details as to how its sleuths had caught up with the kidnapers, the FBI maintained a silence that seemed to betoken deep wisdom as well as becoming modesty.

A Terrified Confession. But as it turned out last week, a more likely reason for the FBI's silence was that it had been handed a solution to the case by a kidnaper who panicked, turned himself in, and blew the whistle on his confederates. John Irwin, 42, an off-and-on house painter with a record ranging from assault to disorderly conduct in four states, was racing south from Los Angeles in a Chevrolet station wagon purchased with $1,000 of the ransom money. As he drove, his fears that capture was inevitable and flight was foolish mounted to terror. In San Juan Capistrano, Irwin stopped, put in a frantic call to his younger brother James, 41, a school purchasing agent, at his home in Imperial Beach, only twelve miles from the Mexican border. The two had not seen each other for several months. But now, said John, it was urgent that they talk privately.

Next morning over breakfast in Imperial Beach, John told his story. "He seemed on the verge of collapse," recalls James. "He said he had gotten himself involved in the Sinatra kidnaping. He told me some of the ransom money was in the car." Within half an hour the two brothers decided what they would do. With John listening on an extension phone, James called the FBI in San Diego and told them the story. Agents arrived quickly, arrested John, and recovered $47,938 from a valise in the station wagon outside.

Still Talking. The FBI admitted that it had got some help from young Sinatra. In one of the rare moments when his blindfold was removed, Frank Jr. managed to spot the name of a restaurant on a bag of sandwiches his captors had just bought. That helped narrow the search for the house in which he had been hidden to Los Angeles' Canoga Park area. He carefully counted the aircraft that passed close overhead, helped to establish the fact that the house was in the approach path to an air terminal. It was, as it turned out, the Lockheed Corp. field in Burbank.

That information, plus the confession of Irwin, enabled the FBI to arrest two other suspects--sometime Salesman Barry Keenan, 23, and Beach Bum Joseph Amsler. And John Irwin was still talking. Twice before, he said, he had been involved in a plan to snatch Sinatra. "Once in Arizona," he said, "we just missed connections." On a second occasion, Irwin said, he had convinced his partners that the plan should be abandoned. Both Keenan and Amsler were charged by federal authorities with kidnaping, an offense punishable by a maximum life term in prison. But Irwin was charged only with "aiding and abetting" a kidnaping, a lesser offense punishable by a prison term to be set by the court.

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