NEW YORK - Maybe if his ears had been bigger, Jimmy Roselli's singing career would have been different, and it would have been he, not Frank Sinatra, who ascended to the show-business pantheon. Mr. Sinatra's ungainly ears, after all, were an essential part of the vulnerable image that made teen-age girls hysterical and teen-age boys so jealous that one Alexander J. Dorogokupetz hit him with three flung eggs at a concert in 1944, explaining, "It seemed like a good idea at the time." Or maybe if their nicknames had been reversed, and Mr. Roselli had been billed as "The Swooner" while Mr. Sinatra labored as "The Dynamic Belter of Song," things would have turned out differently. Sinatra's sibilant sobriquet lent itself naturally to the formation of fan clubs like rally to the formation of fan clubs like the Signing Society of Sinatra Swooners (although alliteration sometimes took a back seat to forthrightness as with the Flatbush Girls Who Would Lay Down Their Lives For Frank Sinatra Fan Club). Mr. Roselli's fans have been less well organized that Mr. Sinatra's, though no less ardent. "Jimmy" declares Doris Lardie, 62, of Fallbrook, California, "is better than Frankie. I mean it."
The Wise-Guy Anthem
As it happened, though, Mr. Sinatra became the most famous Italian-American balladeer born the only son of a prizefighter on Monroe Street in Hoboken, New Jersey, and Mr. Roselli the least famous. Not too surprisingly, Mr. Roselli has little use for Mr. Sinatra. "He looks like a cab coming down the street with the doors open," Mr. Roselli says, alluding to Mr. Sinatra's ears.
Readers involved in loansharking may have heard Mr. Roselli's music (his rendition of "Little Pal," not Mr. Sinatra's "My Way," is the authentic wise-guy anthem, according to law enforcement officials), but many more may not have. Mr. Roselli, a 65 year-old whose high tenor voice is still intact, has for the past 22 years been packing aficionados into sold out dates while being completely ignored by the public at large. And he has had to watch while his former neighbor - singing many of the same songs in much the same idiom - married Ava Gardner, capered with a Rat Pack of Hollywood sybarites, earned more money than he could count and was the subject of biographies by, on the one hand, his adoring daughter and, on the other, Kitty Kelley (whose "His Way" is considered definitive and is the source of the silly names in the story thus far).
Mr. Roselli's destiny is all the more curious because he embodies aspects of the Sinatra myth more thoroughly than Mr. Sinatra does. "They say Sinatra was a saloon singer," Mr. Roselli says. "I sang in saloons. In the Bronx. In the cellar. Believe me. I worked in joints they used to have to have intermission to take the wounded out."
They say Mr. Sinatra grew up a tough urchin in Hoboken, but he was actually the neighborhood rich kid, sometimes called "Slacksie" for his fancy tastes in clothes. Mr. Roselli, who was raised by his grandfather after his mother died in childbirth and his father ran off, used to lug his shoeshine box into local bars and sing for change.
They say Mr. Sinatra is the mob's entertainer of choice. But it was Mr. Roselli who sang last year at the Helmsley Palace wedding reception of John A Gotti, son of the reputed crime boss. Mr. Roselli says he has never done business with organized criminals, but he is resigned to the association between the Mafia and his music. "Every time they write a book, by the time you get to the fourth page there's a dead guy in a car with my tapes beside him on the front seat," he sighs.
By now Mr. Roselli is trailed by myths of his own, spun by fans to explain how a man can fill the Trump Plaza in Atlantic City with screaming, stomping fans one week and retreat into perfect obscurity the next. Some say he is afraid of flying (he isn't). Others say he got into a tangle over a mob-financed Carnegie Hall concert (never happened, he says). And they all say there is a sinister Sinatra influence at work. Mr. Sinatra declined to be interviewed.
Mr. Roselli actually is famous in some precincts. A magazine survey last year found that his photograph is the most commonly displayed celebrity head shot on the walls of restaurants in New York's Little Italy. Residents of MElbourne, Fla., recently collected 2018 signatures on a petition imploring him to sing a benefit concert there.
'He's a Miracle'
There are people who believe that Mr. Roselli's eclipse is deserved. "You play his records in the zoo, the animals will climb the walls," says Pat Cooper, a comedian who used to work with Mr. Roselli. "He's performing in London now because they're tone deaf over there."
But others are quite serious about Mr. Roselli's musicianship. "He has a larger, richer voice than Frank," says Sammy Cahn, the legendary songwriter. "He's a miracle."
"'Mala Femmena,' that's his song, that's the Italian-American national anthem," says Ernest J. Naspretto, a 32 year-old Queens police lieutenant. "The Neapolitan national anthem is 'Come Back to Sorrenta,' and he owns that song, too."
Critics were enthusiastic in 1965, when Mr. Roselli packed the Copacabana, appeared on the Ed Sullivan show and sold out Carnegie Hall. "Roselli is the gamest, most thrilling new talent I've heard in months," wrote the New York World-Telegram and Sun. "You're going to hear more and more of Jimmy Roselli," wrote the New York Journal-American.
Mr. Roselli signed a contract with United Artists Records, appeared with Jimmy Durante and worked with 50-piece orchestras, often in the presence of guys with bent noses, according to arranger Ralph Burns. "We used to record and they'd have the wine and the pastry set up, and the musicians loved it," Mr. Burns says. "There was never any question about budgets."
Sinatra's Mom
And then, in 1969, Mr. Roselli all but disappeared. What happened, he says, was this:
Mr. Sinatra's mother, Dolly, was organizing a benefit concert for the St. Joseph's School for the Blind in Jersey City in 1969. She wanted Mr. Roselli to donate his services, but instead of asking him herself she sent two proxies to track him down at his tailor. "I was a little insulted, so I said to the two guys, tell her I've got to get $25,000 and she's got to pay for the orchestra, 25 men," Mr. Roselli says. "Oh, she blew a fuse. She went and told Frank."
And does Mr. Roselli conclude that Mr. Sinatra, or Mr. Sinatra Mafia admirers, torpedoed his career? "I know I used to get played quite a bit on WNEW" In New York, he says after a long pause. "To get a record of mine played on that station now, the Lord has to intercede." (Mrs. Sinatra died in a plane crash in 1977. WNEW station manager Gary Brandt confirms that Mr. Roselli doesn't get air time but says "I seriously doubt" that the mob ever had anything to do with the station plays.)
"Sinatra supposedly had him blackballed," says Al Glasgow, a casino consultant in Atlantic City.
"The Sinatra story is real," says Lt. Naspretto of the Queens police department. "That was the end of everything. It totally ruined his career."
"We believe it was the Gambino family," says Joseph Coffey, a top investigator at the New York State Organized Crime Task Force.
But there is good news, according to the transcript of a conversation taped in Atlantic City last year by law-enforcement officials looking into the activities of an allegedly misbehaving high roller. On the tape, the high roller suggests in language we can't reproduce here that John Gotti has offered to settle any disagreements between Mr. Roselli and Mr. Sinatra.
"Whether (Mr. Roselli) has made peace with Sinatra's (admirers) I don't really know," says Mr. Coffey of the Organized Crime Task Force. "But recently he's become hot again."
Mr. Roselli has his own record company in Jersey City now. He has just released a new album, and is selling his 31 previous recordings by direct mail and on late night cable television. In the past few years he has sung for standing-room-only crowds at the Palladium in London, and last year he performed six shows at the Trump Plaza.
But whatever his chances for a come back, certain show business opportunities are lost to Mr. Roselli forever. If things had been different, Lt. Naspretto says, "I think he would have been part of the Rat Pack. I really do."
