A new musical opened in London this month. Sinatra arrived at the Aldwych Theatre on 3 June, with its press night on 24 June, and audiences will hear the songs they came for: “New York, New York,” “Come Fly With Me,” “My Way.” The show, made with the cooperation of the Sinatra family, tells the story of the rise, the fall and the comeback. It is, by design, a story about a voice.

But there is another Sinatra, and the West End is unlikely to dwell on him. He is the one who, on a winter night in 1948, carried a paper bag full of cash out the back door of a Manhattan nightclub and into the founding of the State of Israel.

The story comes from Teddy Kollek, who told it in his own memoir and who would later become the longest serving mayor of Jerusalem. In March 1948, weeks before independence was declared, Kollek was in New York on David Ben-Gurion’s orders, running the Haganah’s illegal arms procurement over an American embargo. An Irish ship captain sat in the harbour with a hold full of munitions bound for the Yishuv. He would sail, but only once he had been paid, roughly a million dollars in cash. Kollek had the money. What he did not have was a way to move it, because federal agents were watching his every step.

He was at the bar of........

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