Bring Italian immigrants, the Italian Mafia would hang around and when i told them i wanted to be a singer, they got me gigs in their clubs which got me on the radio and a record deal with Capitol and gigs with bandleader Tommy Dorsey but all the women who would become your future grandma's swooning and presenting their bodily parts to me made me realise that i could go alone but Dorsey was reluctant to let me go but a little visit from my friends from the bar persuaded him to think again and my career really took off but i was dogged by rumours of being part of the mob.
Posing for pictures with prominent members of the Chicago mafia in photographs and singing at the weddings of mob family members and giving famous gangster Sam Giancana a sapphire friendship ring kind of weakened my argument that i didn't know them but i didn't care, i was famous and was dating women like Judy Garland and Ava Gardner.
The limelight went away in the 50's and i got depressed and was found with my head in the gas oven one evening by my manager who persuaded me life was still worth living.
I became a campaigner for John F Kennedy but we fell out when i invited him to stay with me during a visit but he blew me off to go stay with Bing Crosby instead, that's Bing freakin' Crosby.
Something i hated in America was the public consensus that black people should absolutely have civil rights just so long as they didn't have as many as white people, i played benefit concerts for Martin Luther King Jr. and invited Nat King Cole to join me at a whites-only nightclub and when the manager said he couldn't stay i said me and my friends would personally knock him into the middle of next week if he tried, strangely he never.
When former boxer Joe Louis was broke and disgraced, i hosted a fundraiser to get his finances back in order, covering the medical costs for a much-needed heart surgery and later paying for his funeral services.
I regained my fame in the mid-50s, me and my fellow rat packers and i moved into casino ownership but my connections with the mob saw my license taken away soon afterwards.
One of my most iconic songs was my 1977 rendition of a song about New York, a city that never sleeps, never sleeps without banging all the rats out of the mattress first because 1970's New York was a mess but the public loved the song, if you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere but watch out for the rats, because they'll definitely eat your head while you sleep.
It was nice to hear that all the A-listers turned up for my funeral and my body was buried with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a pack of Camel cigarettes, a Zippo lighter and a dog biscuit, that would be Liza Minelli on the valium again.
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