Star Bankers
Frank Sinatra, right, and Dean Martin leave the Bel Air home of Sinatra’s ex-wife Nancy as preparations were being made for a celebration for freed kidnap victim Frank Sinatra Jr. in 1963. Al Hart, then chairman of City National Bank, produced $240,000 to ransom Frank Sinatra Jr.
Chairman and CEO, City National Bank, Russell Goldsmith (right) and his father Bram Goldsmith the former chairman and CEO.
The City National Bank Building, Summerlin, Nevada.
It’s more than a curious footnote that City National Bank’s most recent ties to Nevada indirectly began more than half a century ago with the bungled kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr.
The criminal conspiracy that would partly define Frank Sr.’s son forever as the victim of an imbecilic abduction plot — never mind his later career as a singer, composer and eventual musical director for his dad — was hatched at roughly the same time as John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas.
The president’s murder on Nov. 22, 1963, was an outrageous shock that demoralized a nation, and much of the world, plunging millions into black melancholy and instantly eradicating a self-absorbed nation’s innocence amid the Cold War with the Soviet Union. For Frank Sr., it was a personal tragedy. JFK and his younger brother Bobby were Frank’s good friends.
But within days of that emotional trauma, Old Blue Eyes found himself in the middle of his own family crisis. It involved his 19-year-old son, whose singing career was just getting under way with a three-week gig at Harrah’s Club Lodge in Stateline, Nevada, near Lake Tahoe’s southern shore.
On Sunday, Dec. 8, 1963, “Junior” (his real name was Francis Wayne Sinatra; his father’s was Francis Albert Sinatra) was snatched. Two 23-year-old former Los Angeles high school chums had been shadowing Sinatra – in Phoenix and Los Angeles and now in Nevada – for some time.
The two kidnappers burst into young Sinatra’s dressing room that evening, tied up his friend (using ½-inch Johnson & Johnson adhesive tape) and hustled the singer out a side door and into the trunk of a waiting car.
The narrow medical tape used to bind up Sinatra’s friend was hardly adequate for the job, and the man quickly freed himself and notified authorities. Roadblocks went up. The captors were stopped. But they managed to bluff their way past police and head for a safe house in Canoga Park (West Hills today), a Los Angeles community in the San Fernando Valley.
FBI agents, meantime, set up shop in Reno, where Frank Sinatra Sr. had a room at the Mapes Hotel and was drinking coffee and chain-smoking cigarettes while waiting for the abductors to call.
Agents met with Sinatra, and separately with his ex-wife Nancy at her home in Bel Air, California. They recommended that Sinatra pay the ransom if a demand were made, which they believed would enable the Bureau to track the money and arrest the kidnappers. On Dec. 10, a third conspirator, brought in just for that task, phoned Sinatra Sr. and demanded $240,000 to get his son back.
Sinatra wasn’t a client of City National at the time. So he called his bank, after hours, and asked for help in obtaining the ransom money. No can do, he was told. Sinatra, desperate for his son’s safety, turned to his friend Al Hart, the first chief executive officer of City National, who could and did get the money — the marked bills, taken from the bank’s vault — that would help (along with some latent fingerprints) the FBI eventually track down the conspirators. The drop was made hours later at a Texaco station in Sepulveda (now North Hills), another San Fernando Valley suburb. The money was left between two parked school buses.
Once the conspirators were caught (one of them, worried about the ringleader’s mental stability and what it might portend for Sinatra Jr., had let the celebrity son go near Mrs. Sinatra’s home in Bel Air), much of the ransom money was recovered.
Frank Sr., not forgetting what Hart had done in the crooner’s hour of need, began urging his friends to take their business to City National. It gave the bank a foothold in the burgeoning entertainment industry.
“Twenty percent of CNB’s business today revolves around the entertainment industry,” says CEO Russell Goldsmith, a Harvard-trained lawyer with his own ties to the entertainment world. “That’s a whole division that works to provide both private and commercial banking services to one trade.”
Goldsmith has been CNB chairman and CEO since 1995, when he took over from his father Bram, whose own father, Ben Maltz, was one of CNB’s co-founders in Beverly Hills in January 1954.
Over the course of three generations, CNB has expanded its Southern California footprint, has operated in the Bay Area since 2000 and has maintained a presence in New York City since 2002. It bought the Business Bank of Nevada in 2007, Sun West Bank of Nevada in 2010 and Nevada Commerce Bank in 2011. It has had branches in Nashville and Atlanta since 2011. It merged with the Royal Bank of Canada in November 2015.
“For all the new opportunities this merger (created),” Goldsmith says, “City National nevertheless continues to operate essentially as it has for more than 60 years - providing complete financial solutions for our clients, their businesses and their families … ”
Goldsmith is married to Las Vegas native Karen Mack, a former entertainment attorney at Lorimar Television and Republic Studios in Los Angeles. She is also a producer and best-selling author. She is the daughter of Jerome Mack, who joined banker T. Parry Thomas in starting the UNLV land foundation that added 400 acres to the campus in 1967. When they later funded the campus basketball arena, it was named the Thomas & Mack Center in their honor. Karen’s mother is Las Vegas philanthropist Joyce Mack, and her paternal grandfather co-founded the Bank of Las Vegas.
Russell Goldsmith began his career as an entertainment litigator in Los Angeles, co-founding his own law firm; he was the chief operating officer and director of Lorimar Television at one point in his career, and was chair and CEO of Republic Pictures Corp. From 2008-11, he was on the Federal Reserve Board’s Federal Advisory Council. In 2010, he founded the Mid-Size Bank Coalition of America, which comprises more than 50 U.S. banks.
In 1995, CNB had $3 billion in assets, 1,300 employees and 24 offices in Southern California. Under Goldsmith’s stewardship, City National had assets of $36.4 billion, 3,700 employees and 75 offices, in five states, according to its latest financial reports. It also manages or administers $53.9 billion in client investment assets, and has been listed on the NYSE since Dec. 4, 2002.
The Goldsmiths and the Thomas and Mack families have used their collective financial acumen and leverage to help shape the Nevada economic landscape. And CNB employees have donated their time to ensure the success of the bank’s Reading Way Up literacy programs in schools.
CNB also offers grants to teachers to help K-12 students learn about managing their money. May marks CNB’s annual workplace giving initiative. This year, its employees’ payroll deductions provided $1.3 million for designated charities.
“The ladder, which is the bank’s logo and (was) designed by Goldsmith, is meant to represent the Way Up for clients, colleagues and all in the community, to help constituents climb to greater personal success,” says CNB executive Paul Stowell.
It seems to have worked and to have provided a path for so many, just as Al Hart’s “way up” all those years ago provided a way out for Frank Sinatra’s son.