Frank Sinatra's youngest daughter presents the United States tomorrow with a snapshot of an era in which presidential election campaigns took a more relaxed view about where their funds came from than the Gore and Bush teams of today.
Ms Tina Sinatra says that her father, one of the most reliable targets each time the world goes looking for a tarnished hero, acted as a facilitator when John F Kennedy's election machine realised it could use a little help from the Mafia 40 years ago.
The singer, whose job as a go-between was set up by the Kennedy family patriarch Joseph, asked the Chicago crime overlord Sam Giancana to use the mob's muscle to deliver union votes.
It was thought to be "in Jack Kennedy's best interest if his father did not make the contact directly", Ms Sinatra (52) told the CBS current affairs programme 60 Minutes. "Dad was on an errand."
Sinatra, who died two years ago at the age of 82, received the call when JFK, then a member of the Senate, was fighting Hubert Humphrey for the Democratic nomination to run as president in 1960. His father believed that Giancana's influence could make the difference in the West Virginia primary.
Sinatra was chosen for the task "because Kennedy knew dad had access to Sam Giancana", his daughter said. The Mafia boss agreed to help, indicating that it was all in a day's work for him.
"It's a couple of calls," he said.
But Giancana felt betrayed after Kennedy won the primary and then the White House, and his brother Robert, the attorney general, turned against organised crime.
Ms Sinatra said: "Sam was saying `That's not right. You know he owes me' - he meaning Joe Kennedy. And dad, I think, said `No, I owe you. I asked for the favour'."
Her father repaid his debt to Giancana by agreeing to play the mobster's Chicago club, the Villa Venice, and made the apology more fulsome by bringing along Sammy Davis Jr and Dean Martin for an eight-night engagement.
Subsequently, the president, the performer and the persistent criminal were linked through the late Judith Exner, who had affairs with all three. Sinatra said that contact with underworld elements was all a part of the entertainment industry.
"In theatrical work, in nightclub work, in concerts," he told an interviewer.
"In restaurants you meet all kinds of people, so that there's really not much to be said about that. And I think the less the better."
Ms Sinatra said her father talked also of acting as a courier for the CIA. "Because he controlled his own air travel, [the CIA] would ask him and many others with that capacity to courier a body - a living person, you know, not a corpse, but a diplomat - or papers." But he never divulged any names.
The family begged Sinatra to stop performing in his old age but he could not resist making comebacks because he was convinced that he had to keep on making money, says his daughter, who publishes her autobiography next week. "The older he got, the more sickly he became, the less he enjoyed his life. None of us thought he would become that frail. It's funny how you delude yourself."