A Mob Boss Told Dean Martin to Sing a Specific Song — Dean’s Reaction Enraged the Mob Boss D

Las Vegas, Nevada. October 14th, 1962. 8:47 p.m. The note was on the dressing room table when Dean Martin arrived. It had not been there when Phil Barker had checked the room 30 minutes earlier, which meant someone had placed it in the interval, which meant someone with access to the backstage of the Sans Hotel copper room had placed it there.

And the specific list of people with that access was not long. And the specific implications of that list were not ambiguous. Phil was standing near the window when Dean came in. Dean noticed Phil’s posture first. The specific stillness of a man who has seen something and has decided to wait rather than speak. Dean looked at the table.

The note was on a piece of paper that was not Sans’s hotel stationary. It was plain white paper folded once. His name was not on it. He crossed the room and unfolded it. two words and two initials open with Chicago VF. He read it once. He set it back on the table. He sat down in the chair in front of the mirror and looked at his own reflection for a moment with the expression of a man who is doing arithmetic.

Before I tell you what Dean Martin sang when he walked onto the Copa room stage 14 minutes later and what happened in the 40 seconds after the first note when Vincent Ferrara’s table realized which song had started. If you’ve ever been in a room where someone asked you to be something you weren’t and you chose to be exactly who you were instead, subscribe to this channel right now.

This is what we do here. and hit that like button for Dean Martin, who looked at a note from one of the most dangerous men in Las Vegas and set it back on the table without a word. Now, back to the dressing room. October 14th, 1962, 8:47 p.m., 14 minutes to the show. Vincent Ferrara had been in Las Vegas for 4 days. He was not from Las Vegas.

He was from Chicago where he had spent 30 years building the specific kind of presence that was built in Chicago through the specific mechanisms that Chicago used for such building, relationships, money, patience, and the occasional deployment of consequences that made the patience unnecessary going forward. He was 61 years old.

He was heavy in the way that men who have eaten well for a long time are heavy, not unfit, but substantial, the physical presence of someone who had never needed to appear otherwise. He had interests in two of the Las Vegas hotels that were not the Sands, and he was in the process of developing an interest in a third, and the trip had been going well enough that he was in a good enough mood to want an evening of entertainment.

The coper room was the obvious choice, not because he needed Dean Martin in particular, but because the coper room was where you went if you were in Las Vegas in 1962 and you wanted the best room and the best performer and the specific environment that said, “I am someone for whom the best room is the obvious choice.

” He had reserved the booth nearest the stage left entrance, table two. It was not the table a tourist reserved. It was the table you were given when the person making the reservation was the kind of person whose reservations were received in a specific register. He had arrived with four men. Three of them were the kind of men who arrived with men like Ferrara and whose function in the room was understood without being stated.

The fourth was a man named Carlo Esposito who was Ferrara’s point of contact for the entertainment industry in Chicago and who had across a decade of this function developed a specific understanding of the relationship between men like Ferrara and men like Dean Martin which was the relationship between men who owned rooms and men who performed in rooms and the specific negotiation of power that relationship contained.

It had been Esposito who placed the note. He had known a man who knew the backstage of the Sands, which was the specific kind of knowing that money and relationship and time produced in Las Vegas in 1962. The note had gone in through a side door during the production meeting in the window between the stage manager’s last check and Phil Barker’s arrival.

The note was not a request. This was the specific distinction that Esposito understood and that he had considered when drafting it. A request had a refusal as its opposite. The note was simply a statement of what was going to happen, phrased as an instruction, but understood by everyone who would read it in its proper category, which was the category of things that happened because the person who wanted them to happen was the kind of person whose wants generally became events. Open with Chicago.

Chicago was not Ferrara’s song in any formal or acknowledged sense. It was not associated with him publicly, but it was the song of his city, the city that had made him what he was, and in the specific economy of the coper room, a room where the performer chose the opening song, and the opening song told the room something about who was setting the tone.

Chicago would have said what Ferrara wanted said. It would have said, “This room is aware of me.” The man on the stage opened with my city’s song. This room understands who is in it. This was not an unusual request in the context of Las Vegas in 1962. Men of Ferrara’s category made requests of this kind with reasonable frequency, and those requests were generally honored with the specific smoothness that came from everyone understanding the nature of the request and the nature of the honoring.

It was one of the ways in which the coper room and rooms like it navigated the specific relationship between the entertainment they provided and the money that kept the lights on above the stages where the entertainment happened. Phil Barker had understood all of this when he found the note before Dean arrived and had read it and set it back down and waited.

He had not told Dean what to do. He had not told Dean what not to do. He had waited because in 14 years of working beside Dean Martin, he had understood that certain things did not require management. They required presence, and then they required whatever Dean decided, and then they required Phil to handle what came after.

Dean looked at the note on the table for approximately 30 seconds after setting it down. Then he looked at Phil. Phil said nothing. Dean said, “Who’s at table two?” Phil told him. Dean looked at the table for another moment. He said, “What else is a table two?” Phil told him what he knew, which was not everything, but was enough.

Dean looked at his own reflection in the mirror again. He was 45 years old. He had been performing in rooms since he was 17. He had been performing in Las Vegas rooms, specifically since 1952. He had been performing in the coper room of the Sans Hotel since it had been the kind of room worth performing in, which was most of that decade.

He knew the Copa room the way you knew a place after 10 years of returning to it. Not only the physical geography, but the specific social geography, the invisible map of who sat where and what that meant and how the interactions between the stage and the room worked. He knew what the note meant.

He also knew something else which was a thing he had known for 28 years of performing and that he had never articulated to anyone but that governed his relationship to every stage he had stood on. The stage was his. Not the Sands hotels, not the mobs, not the audiences. His in the specific sense that mattered, the sense in which the person standing on the stage was the person who decided what happened on it.

And anything that contradicted this fact was not something Dean Martin accepted. This was not arrogance. It was something quieter than arrogance and more total. The specific understanding of a performer who had been performing long enough to know that the only thing that worked on a stage was the truth of whoever was standing on it, and that any compromise of that truth compromised everything that followed.

and that the compromise was visible in the way that falsehood is always visible to the people who are actually watching. He could open with Chicago. He could open with Chicago and Ferrara’s table would know he had opened with Chicago because of the note and the room would be Ferrara’s for the evening in the specific way that the note intended.

And the evening would proceed with that understanding in the air above every table. And the performance would be the performance of a man who had opened with a song because he had been told to, and not one of the 500 people in the coper room would be able to name what was different about it.

But every single one of them would feel it. Dean Martin set the note to the side of the table. He straightened his bow tie. He picked up his glass. He said to Phil, “Tell them we’re starting on time.” Phil said, “The opener’s already done.” “I know,” Dean said. He set the glass down. Tell them we’re starting on time.

He looked at his reflection one more time. Same set, he said. Phil went to the door. The copa room held 512 people. On October 14th, 1962, table two, nearest the stage left entrance held Vincent Ferrara and his four men. Ferrara was in the seat that faced the stage most directly. Espazito was to his right.

The other three men were arranged in the specific configuration of people whose function in the room was understood without being stated. Ferrara had a drink in front of him. He had eaten before the show. He was in the specific mode of a man who has arranged for what he wanted to happen to happen. Comfortable. He was not expecting anything other than the evening he had set in motion.

The house lights dimmed at 9:00 and 7 seconds. The Copa room orchestra began the introduction. Every introduction to a coper room show had a specific character, a handful of bars that established the key and the tempo and the feel of what was coming. The introduction that night was not Chicago. The people at table two who recognized such things registered this in approximately four bars, which was approximately 4 seconds.

And in those four seconds, there was a specific quality of stillness at table two that was different from the stillness of the rest of the room. Dean Martin walked onto the stage. He was wearing a dark charcoal suit jacket over a crisp white dress shirt with a dark tie loosened slightly at the collar.

Not the tuxedo, the slightly more informal version of himself that he deployed for coper room performances when he wanted the room to feel like a conversation rather than a ceremony. He walked to the vintage chrome corded stage microphone at center stage with the unhurrieded certainty of a man who knows exactly where he is going.

He looked at the room and he began, “Return to me.” The Italian song, the song of his mother’s kitchen, of the abuso region of the specific Italian-American heritage that Dino Crocheti from Stubenville, Ohio had carried across 30 years of performing under a different name. the song that was his entirely and without ambiguity. Not the song of any city that was not the city his parents had left behind in Italy.

Not the song of any arrangement made for anyone else’s benefit. At table two, Vincent Ferrara’s expression did not change. This was itself an expression. Esposito to Ferrara’s right was watching the stage with the specific focused attention of a man doing mathematics. The mathematics were not complicated. The song was not Chicago.

The song was Return to Me. The opening song was not what the note had said the opening song would be. The Copa Room audience received Return to Me, the way the Copa Room audience always received it, with the warm recognizing pleasure of a song they knew, performed by the man they had come to hear perform it.

They did not know about the note. They did not know about table two. They received the song as what it was, the opening song of a Dean Martin coper room performance. Dean Martin sang Return to Me. He sang it with the ease that was not casual, but that contained the full weight of 30 years of performing something until it became genuine again with the specific authority of someone who was in his own room on his own stage doing his own work.

He sang it looking at the middle of the room, which was where he always looked. The peripheral reading of a performer who knew how to give a room the feeling of being seen without focusing on any single part of it. He did not look at table two. This was also a statement. The show lasted 94 minutes.

Dean performed the set he had planned, the songs he had chosen in the order he had chosen them with the pacing he had developed across 10 years of Cooper Room performances. And that was his in the same way everything else that happened on that stage was his. He was very good. He was by the accounts of the people who saw him many times across the 1960s and who compared specific nights better than usual that night.

Not in any technical sense, not in any way that could be measured, but in the specific quality of certainty that certain performances had when the man giving them had made a decision about himself before walking onto the stage, and was still inside that decision at every moment of the performance. The coper room audience gave him what coper room audiences gave when they had received something.

Warm, sustained, genuine applause. That was not the polite acknowledgement of a performance completed, but the specific response of people who had been somewhere they were glad to have been. He took his bows. He walked off stage left. Carlo Esposito was in the backstage corridor when Dean came off.

He was not supposed to be in the backstage corridor. The backstage of the coper room had clear protocols about who was permitted in it during and after performances, and Esposito’s presence in it was itself a communication, the communication of a man who was there on behalf of someone for whom protocols were information rather than instruction.

Phil Barker was between Esposito and the dressing room door. This was not accidental. Esposito looked at Dean. Dean looked at Esposito. Mr. Ferrara enjoyed the show. Esposito said he said it in the specific tone of someone who is saying something that is not what it sounds like. Dean said I’m glad.

Esposito said he was hoping for Chicago. Dean said I don’t open with Chicago. Esposito said he made a specific request. Dean said I know there was a silence. Dean looked at Esposito with the specific quality of attention that was not confrontational and was not submissive and was not anything that could be described as performing either of those things.

It was simply the direct attention of a man who had said what he had to say and was waiting for whatever came next. Esposito looked at Dean for a long moment. He said, “Mr. Ferrara will be in town through Thursday.” Dean said, “I hope he enjoys the rest of his stay.” Esposito said nothing further. He left the corridor.

Phil Barker watched him go. He did not say anything until the sound of Esposito’s footsteps had moved far enough down the corridor to establish distance. Then he said, “Dean.” Dean said, “I know.” Phil said he’s going to I know. Dean said. He went into the dressing room. He sat in the chair in front of the mirror.

He was wearing the performance itself still, the specific quality that a 94-minute set left on him, the weight of that much sustained presence, the particular kind of tired that came from giving a room everything you had. He looked at the note that was still on the corner of the table. He picked it up.

He folded it the way it had been folded when he found it. Once in half. He put it in the inside pocket of his suit jacket. He sat for a while. Phil came in at some point and said something and Dean answered and they talked about the logistics of the next evening, the practical mechanics of the performances ahead. Dean was professional and present and entirely himself.

He did not mention the note again. Phil did not mention it either. Vincent Ferrara was in Las Vegas through Thursday. As Esposito had said, he attended the Copa room on Wednesday evening. He sat at table 2 again. He watched Dean Martin perform. He did not send a note. The Wednesday set opened with That’s Amorei. Dean’s choice.

Ferrara left Las Vegas on Friday morning. He did not make another request of Dean Martin in the 13 months he continued to have interests in Las Vegas before his circumstances changed in ways that reordered his available time and attention. The story moved through the specific closed circuit of Las Vegas insiders.

The people who worked the backstage, the floor managers, the specific community of people whose professional lives placed them in the corridor between the public life of the copa room and its private one. It moved through this circuit the way such stories moved person to person, without documentation, over drinks, and over years.

It arrived at the ears of a floor manager named Robert Delgado, who had been at the Sans Copper Room for 11 years, and who had seen most categories of backstage incident, and who had been in the corridor on October 14th, 1962, 30 ft from where Dean and Esposito had their exchange. Delgado told the story accurately and consistently across the decades of his retirement.

He told it to anyone who asked, and to some people who didn’t. He told it the way people told stories they had been given to carry with the specific care of someone for whom the truth of the story was the reason for the telling. In 1994, a researcher working on a project about the social history of Las Vegas Entertainment spoke to Delgado who was 81 years old and living in Henderson.

Delgado told the story in the same way he had always told it. He described the corridor, the note, the exchange, Espazito’s departure. The researcher asked, “Why do you think he did it?” Delgado said, “Because it was his stage.” He said it simply in the way of someone stating the most obvious available fact. He wasn’t brave.

Delgado said brave suggests he was afraid. I don’t think he was afraid. I think he just knew the difference between what was his and what wasn’t. And the stage was his, the song was his, and no note on a table changed that. He paused. He put the note in his pocket, Delgado said. I always thought about that.

He didn’t throw it away. He kept it. He shook his head slightly. I don’t know why he kept it, but I’ve always thought it was because it reminded him of something he already knew. That the thing about who you are is that it doesn’t change because someone tells you to be something else. He was quiet. He sang, “Return to me.

” Delgado said, “First song like it was always going to be. Return to me.” Like there was never any other song. The note, the song, the corridor. Three words to Esposito. I don’t open with Chicago. That was the whole of it. That was always the whole of it. The stage was his. The song was his.

And no piece of paper changed what was true about either of those things. That is who Dean Martin was in every room he ever stood in, on every stage he ever walked onto. That is who he was. There is one piece of this story that Robert Delgado mentioned at the end of his 1994 interview almost as an afterthought that the researcher noted in the margin of her transcript because she was not certain where it belonged.

Delgado said, “You know what? I always wondered whether Ferrara understood.” The researcher asked what he meant. Whether Ferrara understood what Dean was doing, Delgado said, not as a refusal, as an answer, a different kind of answer, he thought for a moment. Because Return to Me is an Italian song, and Ferrara was Italian, and Dean was Italian, and Chicago would have been Chicago was the city.

It was Ferrara’s city. It was what Ferrara wanted to put in the room. He paused. But return to me is a different kind of Italian. He said it’s not city Italian. It’s the old country Italian. It’s where we came from, not where we ended up. And I always wondered if Ferrara heard that. If somewhere at table two, listening to Dean sing to me instead of Chicago.

Ferrara understood what was being said. He shook his head. I’ll never know. He said Ferrara’s been dead since 79. Esposito died in ‘ 86. Nobody left who was at that table. He looked at the researcher. But I’ve always thought men like that, men who came up through the old world and the new world both.

They understood things that weren’t said. They had to. It was how they survived. He was quiet for a moment. Maybe Ferrara Herd returned to me and understood that Dean was saying, “We’re both Italian. We’re both from somewhere that is not this city. And this stage is where I am from and you don’t send notes into where I am from. He paused.

Maybe that’s why he didn’t send another note. Delgado said not because he was afraid of Dean Martin, but because he understood what Dean had said and he respected it in the way that men of that world respected things that were stated clearly. He looked at the researcher again. Return to me, he said.

That’s the whole message. 30 years of dino crocetti from Stubenville, Ohio in three words from an Italian song. He smiled slightly. You can’t argue with that. And Ferrara didn’t. The researcher wrote this in the margin of her transcript. She did not know in 1994 where it belonged. It belongs here.

The note in Dean Martin’s pocket. The song Dean Martin chose the Italian that said what three words of English could have said, but that carried more weight because it was the Italian of a man who had come from somewhere real and had never fully left it. Not in any room he stood in, not on any stage. Return to me.

That was the message. That was the whole message. And Ferrara, who understood messages, understood this one. And the stage remained what it had always been. Dean Martins.