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How the Mafia Built the Music Industry: Jukeboxes, Radio & the Mob's Secret Grip on America | Sleep Story · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back to Sleepless History.
• 0:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we are going to a part of American musical history that almost never makes it into the glossy documentaries and the well-lit museum exhibits.
• 0:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is the story of juke boxes and backgrounds of night clubs paid for with bootlegging money of independent record labels bankrolled by men who never once appeared on a company letterhead.
• 0:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is the story of how, for the better part of five decades, organized crime did not simply brush up against the American recording and radio industry.
• 0:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: It helped build it, financed it, corrupted it, and eventually slowly was pushed out of it by federal prosecutors, congressional hearings, and the quiet arithmetic of changing technology.
• 0:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: We will move through five long chapters tonight.
• 0:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first will take us back to the era of prohibition, when the outlawing of alcohol created an entire generation of criminal entrepreneurs who would later turn their money and their instincts toward nightclubs, and from nightclubs toward music itself.
• 1:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The second chapter will bring us into the strange and largely forgotten world of the jukebox racket.
• 1:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: when control over a coin-operated machine in the corner of a diner or a tavern was worth fighting over.
• 1:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes, literally, because it meant control over what America listened to.
• 1:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The third chapter will take us into the Payola scandals of the 1950s and 1960s.
• 1:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the practice of paying DJs to play certain records, collided with congressional investigators and brought down some of the most powerful men in radio.
• 1:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The fourth chapter belongs almost entirely to one man.
• 1:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: a record executive named Morris Levy, whose career traces the clearest and most well-documented line between the mafia and the mainstream record business of the 20th century.
• 2:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the fifth and final chapter will carry us through the quieter grinding decline of organized crimes grip on the industry.
• 2:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: through counterfeit records, return fraud schemes, and the racketeering prosecutions that finally, gradually, closed the book on this era.
• 2:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: We begin, as so many of these stories do, with a law that was supposed to make America more virtuous, and instead made it considerably more interesting.
• 2:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 1, prohibition and the birth of an unlikely industry.
• 2:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: To understand how organized crime came to have such a deep and lasting influence over American radio and recorded music, you first have to understand a piece of legislation that on its surface had nothing to do with music at all.
• 2:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: In January of 1920, the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution went into effect.
• 3:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: and with it, the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages became illegal across the entire country.
• 3:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The stated goal was moral improvement.
• 3:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The actual result was the creation of the most lucrative black market in American history up to that point.
• 3:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the men who filled that market with product would go on in the decades that followed to become some of the most important and invisible financiers of American entertainment.
• 3:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Prohibition did not end the demand for alcohol.
• 3:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: It simply moved that demand into the shadows and shadows require organization.
• 3:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Bootlegging operations sprang up in every major American city, and the men who ran them needed trucks, warehouses, corrupt police officers on the payroll, distribution routes, and above all, places where the product could actually be consumed.
• 4:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is where the Speakeasy was born, the hidden bar or club operating outside the law, often disguised behind a legitimate looking storefront, a laundry, a tailor shop, a soda fountain with a door in the back leading somewhere else entirely.
• 4:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And a speak easy, unlike a legal saloon, needed something extra to draw people in, and keep them there for hours at a time, paying premium prices for a legal liquor.
• 4:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It needed entertainment, it needed music.
• 4:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the first and perhaps most important thread connecting organized crime to the American music business.
• 4:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The men who ran bootlegging operations in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, and dozens of smaller cities discovered that live music was an essential ingredient in a successful speak easy.
• 4:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: A good band or a talented singer could turn a mediocre illegal bar into the hottest ticket in town.
• 5:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so these men, almost by accident, became talent bookers, club owners,
• 5:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: something resembling entertainment executives.
• 5:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even though most of them had no formal training in anything except violence, intimidation and the movement of illegal goods.
• 5:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Consider the career of a man like Only Madden, one of the most notorious bootleggers operating in New York City during the 1920s.
• 5:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Madden had come up through Manhattan's gang world as a young man, eventually taking control of a substantial bootlegging operation that supplied beer and liquor to speak eases across the city.
• 5:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: But Madden's real and lasting historical significance comes from a nightclub he took over in Harlem.
• 5:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: a club that would become one of the most important venues in the entire history of American music.
• 5:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: That club was the cotton club.
• 5:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The cotton club, under Madden's ownership, became the premier showcase for African-American musical talent in New York City during the 1920s and into the 1930s, even as the club itself.
• 6:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: in a bitter irony that historians have written about extensively, enforced a policy that barred black patrons from attending as customers while showcasing black performers on stage.
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was at the Cotton Club that a young band leader named Duke Ellington built the national reputation that would make him one of the most important composers in American history.
• 6:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was at the Cotton Club that cab Calaway became a national sensation,
• 6:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The club's broadcasts carried over the radio airwaves from its stage, directly into homes across the country, introduced millions of Americans who would never set foot in Harlem to the sound of big band jazz.
• 6:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Think about what that means for a moment.
• 6:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the most important incubators of American jazz, one of the venues most responsible for bringing that music to a national radio audience.
• 7:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: was owned and operated by a bootlegger who used the profits from illegal liquor sales to fund the operation.
• 7:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The relationship between organized crime and American popular music did not begin as some sinister infiltration of an existing industry.
• 7:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: It began because criminal entrepreneurs flush with prohibition era cash and needing entertainment to fill their illegal bars, became patrons and financiers of musical talent almost by necessity.
• 7:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: This pattern repeated itself in city after city.
• 7:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Chicago, the operation controlled by Al Capone and his associates, similarly financed nightclubs that featured live jazz and blues performances,
• 7:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: as one of the essential cities in the development of American jazz, alongside New Orleans and New York.
• 8:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The south side of Chicago, in particular.
• 8:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It became home to a thriving nightclub scene that drew on both the great migration of African American musicians moving north and the bootlegging money that kept the clubs operating and the musicians paid.
• 8:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth pausing here to understand why this mattered so much for the structure of the music industry going forward.
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Legitimate businessmen in the 1920s, the kind who ran department stores or manufacturing companies,
• 8:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Generally viewed the entertainment business and jazz music in particular as disreputable, low class, and not worth serious investment.
• 8:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Banks were reluctant to lend money to nightclub owners or to musicians.
• 8:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The entertainment industry, especially at its more adventurous and innovative edges, was underserved by legitimate capital.
• 8:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Organised crime figures by contrast had enormous amounts of cash generated by illegal liquor sales,
• 9:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: cash that in many cases could not be easily deposited into banks or reported as legitimate income without inviting scrutiny from law enforcement.
• 9:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nightclubs and later, as we will discuss, jukeboxes and record labels offered something extremely valuable to men in this position.
• 9:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: They offered a plausible, caching tentative, difficult to ward it business into which illegal proceeds could be funneled and made to look legitimate.
• 9:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the basic mechanism of what we now call money laundering and the entertainment industry with its unpredictable revenues, its cash transactions.
• 9:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: and its general lack of sophisticated accounting oversight in this era was almost perfectly suited to the purpose.
• 9:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: When prohibition finally ended in December of 1933, with the ratification of the 21st Amendment, the men who had built vast bootlegging empires suddenly found themselves without their primary source of income.
• 10:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: but they did not disappear and they did not go legitimate in any complete sense.
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead, many of them redirected their capital and their organizational infrastructure toward other enterprises, increasingly into music, nightclubs, and eventually the recording industry itself.
• 10:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: This transition mattered enormously for the shape that American popular music would take over the following decades.
• 10:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The infrastructure that organized crime had built during prohibition, the networks of trucks and drivers used to move liquor, the relationships with corrupt officials, the experience running cash businesses that operated partly or entirely outside legal scrutiny, all of this proved remarkably transferable to the business of moving records, controlling
• 11:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is another dimension to this history worth sitting with for a moment, and it concerns the musicians themselves.
• 11:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many of the most important figures in early jazz, swing, and later rhythm and blues, found themselves performing in clubs owned, financed, or protected by organised crime figures, whether they fully understood the nature of that ownership or not.
• 11:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some musicians developed close, even friendly relationships with the men who ran these establishments.
• 11:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Louis Armstrong, in his memoirs and interviews later in life, spoke with a surprising degree of fondness about some of the gangster figures he had known in his early career.
• 11:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: crediting them in certain cases, with providing opportunities and protection that a young black musician in the 1920s and 1930s could not easily find elsewhere in a deeply segregated entertainment industry.
• 12:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is an uncomfortable but historically important nuance.
• 12:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: For African-American musicians navigating an entertainment industry built on the foundations of Jim Crow segregation, organized crime figures, whatever their other moral failings were sometimes among the few entertainment industry players willing to pay black performers fairly to provide steady work.
• 12:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: and to offer a measure of physical protection in an era when black entertainers faced constant threats of violence and exploitation from legitimate society as well as illegitimate.
• 12:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: This does not excuse the exploitation that also occurred within these same relationships, and there were plenty of instances of organized crime figures, short-changing, or mistreating the musicians who worked for them.
• 12:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the full picture of this era requires acknowledging that the relationship between organized crime and the early jazz world was neither purely predatory nor purely benevolent.
• 13:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the time the 1940s arrived, the pattern was well established.
• 13:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Organised crime figures owned or controlled a significant number of the nightclubs where popular music was performed, particularly in major cities like New York and Chicago.
• 13:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: They had experienced running cash-intensive businesses that could obscure the origin of illegal funds, and they had developed genuine relationships, however transactional, with musicians, band leaders, and the broader entertainment world.
• 13:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: All of the pieces were in place for organised crimes influence to expand beyond the nightclub and into the recording industry proper and into an invention that would prove in its own way.
• 13:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: To be one of the most contested pieces of technology in the entire history of American popular music, that invention was the Duke box and it is where our story turns next.
• 14:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 2, The Duke Box Wars.
• 14:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: If the story of prohibition explains how organised crime first developed a financial and cultural relationship with American music, the story of the Duke Box explains how that relationship became something closer to outright control.
• 14:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: This chapter of our story is, in many ways, the least discussed and least understood peace of this entire history, and yet it may be the single most important, because for a period of roughly two decades, control over due boxes meant something close to control over which songs actually reached the ears of everyday Americans.
• 14:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Duke box, as a piece of technology, developed gradually from the late 1800s through the 1920s and 30s, evolving from early coin-operated phonographs into the electrically amplified.
• 15:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: multiple selection machines that most people picture when they hear the word today.
• 15:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the mid 1930s, Duke boxes were appearing in bars, diners, drug stores, dance halls, and roadhouses across the entire country, and the business of manufacturing, and placing, and servicing these machines had become genuinely significant, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue by the end of the decade.
• 15:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here is the crucial detail that made the jukebox business so attractive to organized crime and so central to the shape of the American music industry.
• 15:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: A jukebox in this era was placed in a business, a bar or a diner or a drug store through an arrangement between the jukebox operator who owned the machine and the business owner who provided the physical space.
• 16:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The revenue generated by the nickels and dimes, fed into the machine, was typically split between the operator and the location owner.
• 16:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: This meant that the Duke Box operator,
• 16:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: The person who decided which records went into which machines held enormous power.
• 16:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: They decided which records got played over and over, thousands of times, in bars and diners across entire cities and regions.
• 16:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And because Duke Box plays were, for much of this era, one of the single most important metrics by which record sales and radio-airplay decisions were influenced.
• 16:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Controlling Duke Box placement meant controlling to a very real degree which songs became hits.
• 16:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Organized crime figures recognise this power very quickly, and they move to control the jukebox business, with the same methods they had used to control bootlegging routes during prohibition, territorial division, intimidation and outright violence when necessary.
• 17:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: In cities across the country, particularly in the northeast and the Midwest, organized crime families divided up the jukebox territories, much as they had divided up bootlegging routes.
• 17:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: assigning specific neighborhoods, specific streets, sometimes specific individual establishments, to specific operators who paid tribute up the chain to organised crime leadership, a bar owner who wanted to install a jute box or who already had one from an independent operator,
• 17:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: might receive a visit from representatives of the organised crime family that controlled Duke Box placement in that particular neighbourhood.
• 17:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The message was rarely subtle.
• 17:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Either the bar owner would switch to the Duke Box supplied by the organised crime affiliated operator.
• 17:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: or the bar owner might experience a series of unfortunate events, vandalism, threats, difficulty obtaining other supplies or services necessary to run the establishment, or in more extreme cases, actual violence.
• 18:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was, in essence, a protection racket applied specifically to the business of placing coin-operated music machines, and it proved extraordinarily lucrative.
• 18:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The City of Chicago provides one of the most well-documented examples of this dynamic.
• 18:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Organised crime control over the Duke Box business in Chicago during the 1930s and 40s has been the subject of extensive investigative reporting and later congressional inquiry.
• 18:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Revealing a highly organized system in which specific crime family associates control jukebox placement across defined territories within the city.
• 18:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Collecting a steady stream of revenue from thousands of machines while using violence and intimidation to prevent independent operators from competing for the same locations.
• 19:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: New York City told a similar story.
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: with different organised crime families controlling Dukebox territories in different burrs and neighbourhoods.
• 19:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: The garment district, the docks, various ethnic enclaves across Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, each had its own Dukebox arrangement.
• 19:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its own operator, paying tribute to a particular organised crime figure.
• 19:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: and its own informal but rigidly enforced boundaries that other operators dare not cross.
• 19:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: What made this system so significant for the broader history of American music was the way it intersected with the emerging science, if we can even call it that, of measuring musical popularity.
• 19:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the 1930s and 40s, the primary ways that record labels radio programmers and the broader industry judged whether a song was popular were record sales, sheet music sales, and jukebox play counts.
• 20:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Trade publications like Billboard magazine began tracking and publishing jukebox play statistics as a genuine measure of a song's popularity.
• 20:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Treating jukebox performance data with the same seriousness that streaming numbers receive in the modern era.
• 20:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: This meant that an organized crime figure who controlled Duke Box placement across a significant swath of a major city had, in effect, a meaningful ability to influence which songs appeared to be popular, simply by ensuring that certain records were placed prominently in Duke Boxes across their territory, while others were left out entirely.
• 20:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: If a record label wanted a
• 20:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: alongside legitimate radio promotion, was to ensure that the record found its way into Duke boxes controlled by organised crime affiliated operators.
• 21:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes through direct payment, sometimes through favours.
• 21:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes through relationships that had developed over years between record-label executives and organised crime figures, who had, by this point,
• 21:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: This dynamic also created opportunities for organized crime figures to move directly into the record business itself.
• 21:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: rather than remaining purely on the distribution and placement side.
• 21:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you controlled a significant number of dupe boxes across a city, and you understood better than almost anyone, which kinds of songs performed well in which kinds of establishments, you possessed valuable market intelligence that could inform decisions about which artists to sign, which songs to promote, and which independent record labels might be worth financing
• 22:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Several organized crime figures who began their careers in the Duke Box business eventually moved into direct ownership stakes in record labels and record distribution companies applying the same territorial and financial logic that had served them so well in placing Duke Boxes to the broader business of manufacturing and distributing records.
• 22:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Duke Box business also intersected with the labour side of the music industry in ways that further entrenched organized crime influence.
• 22:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The American Federation of Musicians, the primary labor union representing professional musicians in the United States, found itself at various points during this era, entangled with organized crime influence, particularly around issues of jukebox royalties and compensation for musicians whose recordings were played in coin-operated machines across the country.
• 23:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: musicians receive no direct royalty from Duke Boxplay under the copyright law of this era, a point of significant contention that led to major disputes between the musician's union and the broader recording industry.
• 23:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Disputes that organised crime figures given their extensive involvement in both the Duke Box business and various entertainment unions.
• 23:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: were sometimes positioned to influence from multiple angles simultaneously.
• 23:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The scale of the duke box industry by the end of the 1930s is worth appreciating fully.
• 23:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Estimates from this era suggest that there were several hundred thousand duke boxes operating across the United States.
• 23:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: consuming a substantial share of all records manufactured and pressed by American record companies.
• 23:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some historical estimates suggest that Duke Box is accounted for a very significant portion.
• 23:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: In some tellings, as much as half of all records sold in the United States during certain years of this period, which, if accurate, would mean that the men who controlled dukebox placement across major American cities were, in a very real sense, among the most powerful and influential figures in the entire American recording industry.
• 24:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: More influential in many respects than the record label executives, whose names actually appeared on the record labels themselves.
• 24:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Law enforcement and government investigators were slow to fully grasp the scale and significance of organised crimes control over the Duke Box industry, though by the late 1950s congressional investigators, including the same committees that would later turn their attention to payola in radio, began to examine Duke Box racketeering as part of broader investigations into organised crimes infiltration of legitimate businesses.
• 24:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: These investigations revealed extensive evidence of territorial control, extortion, and violence connected to jukebox placement in cities across the country, though prosecutions proved difficult.
• 25:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: In part, because so many of the business owners who had been coerced into particular jukebox arrangements were reluctant to testify against organized crime figures who remained capable of retaliation.
• 25:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Duke Box's cultural and commercial importance began to decline gradually, as home record ownership became more affordable and widespread.
• 25:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: As television absorbed more of American's leisure time and disposable income, and as radio, rather than Duke Box play, became the dominant mechanism by which new music reached mass audiences.
• 25:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: This decline in the jukeboxes importance did not mean that organised crimes influence over American music disappeared.
• 25:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: It simply meant that the primary battlefield shifted, moving from the corner of the diner to the radio studio, where a new and in many ways even more consequential form of influence peddling was already well underway.
• 26:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: That shift,
• 26:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the scandal that eventually exposed it to the entire nation forms the subject of our next chapter.
• 26:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 3, Paola and the Fall of the Great DJs.
• 26:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: As the influence of the jukebox slowly faded through the 1950s, radio rose to take its place as the single most important gatekeeper standing between a newly recorded song and the ears of the American public.
• 26:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And where there is a gatekeeper, there will always be those willing to pay for passage.
• 26:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: This chapter tells the story of Peola, the practice of paying DJs, radio programmers and radio station executives to play particular records.
• 27:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: A practice that had existed in various informal forms for decades, but that exploded into a full-blown national scandal by the end of the 1950s, in snaring some of the most famous names in American radio and revealing, for the first time in a truly public way, just how deeply intertwined, organized crime figures and money had become with the machinery of the recording industry.
• 27:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The term Peola itself is a portmanto, combining the word Pei with the suffix found in the name Victorola, the popular brand of phonograph that had become almost synonymous with recorded music in earlier decades.
• 27:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The practice it described was straightforward in concept, even as its actual mechanics grew increasingly elaborate and hidden over time.
• 27:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Record labels, hoping to get a particular song played frequently on the radio, would pay DJs or radio programmers sometimes in cash.
• 28:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: sometimes in the form of gifts, sometimes by listing the DJ as a co-writer on a song, thereby entitling them to a share of songwriting royalties, even though they had contributed nothing to the actual composition.
• 28:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The rise of rock and roll in the mid-1950s dramatically intensified the stakes of the paleo-system.
• 28:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: As rock and roll, exploded in popularity among American teenagers.
• 28:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Independent record labels proliferated rapidly.
• 28:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many of them, small operations run on shoestring budgets, competing against the much larger and more established major labels for a limited amount of radio airtime.
• 28:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: For these smaller independent labels, many of which had connections, direct or indirect, to organised crime financing.
• 29:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Payola represented one of the only viable paths to getting their records heard on major radio stations, since they lacked the promotional budgets, the established relationships, and the institutional credibility of the major labels.
• 29:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The DJ who became most closely and most famously associated with the Payola scandal was a man named Alan Fried.
• 29:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fried was by nearly every account, one of the most important and influential figures in the popularisation of rock and roll music among white American audiences in the 1950s.
• 29:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Working first in Cleveland and then in New York City freed used his radio programs to introduce a broad audience to rhythm and blues and rock and roll music.
• 29:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Much of it recorded by African-American artists who had previously struggled to find airplay on stations catering primarily to white listeners.
• 30:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Freed is widely credited, in fact, with popularising the term rock and roll as a description for this new style of music.
• 30:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And his influence over what teenagers across America were listening to during the mid to late 1950s was almost impossible to overstate.
• 30:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was precisely because of this influence that Freed became such an attractive target for record labels seeking to pay for airplay.
• 30:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it was precisely because of this influence that freed's eventual downfall.
• 30:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: When congressional investigators turned their attention to Payola in the late 1950s became such a significant national story.
• 30:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The congressional investigation into Payola grew out of a broader set of hearings, examining corruption and rigged outcomes across various forms of American entertainment and media.
• 30:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hearings that had already exposed scandal in the world of television quiz shows, where it was revealed that certain popular game shows had been secretly providing answers to favored contestants in order to manufacture more compelling television drama.
• 31:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Having exposed corruption in television, congressional investigators working through a subcommittee of the House of Representatives turned their attention to radio.
• 31:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: and specifically to allegations that DJs across the country were accepting payments in exchange for playing particular records.
• 31:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The hearings which took place primarily in 1960 revealed a paleo-system that was far more extensive and more deeply embedded in the structure of the radio industry than most casual observers had previously understood.
• 31:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Witness after witness testified about the routine practice of record labels providing cash payments, gifts, and other forms of compensation to DJs and radio programmers in exchange for airplane.
• 32:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The investigation revealed that Payola was not an occasional or isolated practice confined to a few corrupt individuals, but rather a widespread and in many markets.
• 32:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Essentially institutionalised
• 32:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: through which independent record labels, in particular, competed for the limited resource of radio airtime.
• 32:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Allen Fried became one of the most prominent casualties of these hearings.
• 32:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fried refused to sign an affidavit that had been circulated by his employer, a New York radio station, denying that he had ever accepted payment for playing records.
• 32:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: A refusal that many historians interpret as an implicit acknowledgement that he had, in fact, participated in the pale
• 32:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fried was subsequently fired from his radio position, and in 1962 he was formally charged with commercial bribery in connection with the Payola investigation.
• 33:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: He eventually pleaded guilty to two counts of commercial bribery and paid a modest fine.
• 33:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: a legal resolution that, on paper, seems disproportionately small, given the scale of his subsequent public disgrace and the collapse of his career that followed.
• 33:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The human cost of freed's downfall was severe, and in the view of many music historians disproportionate to his actual culpability relative to the broader paleo-system in which he had operated.
• 33:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fried had difficulty finding work in radio following his conviction, struggled financially in the years that followed, developed serious health problems, and died in 1965 at the age of just 43, a broken and largely forgotten figure at the time of his death.
• 33:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even though his historical importance to the popularisation of rock and roll would later be recognized, when he became one of the inaugural inductees into the rock and roll Hall of Fame.
• 34:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth pausing to ask why the Peola scandal, and Alan Freed's downfall in particular, generated such intense public and congressional interest.
• 34:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Part of the answer lies in the broader cultural anxiety of the era surrounding rock and roll music itself, which many older and more conservative Americans viewed with deep suspicion, associating the music with juvenile delinquency, racial mixing and a general erosion of traditional values.
• 34:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The payola hearings provided a convenient and in the eyes of many contemporary observers
• 34:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Satisfying narrative in which rock-and-roll's popularity could be at least partially attributed to corrupt manipulation, rather than genuine artistic merit or organic public taste.
• 34:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: A narrative that fit comfortably alongside broader establishment discomfort with the cultural changes that rock-and-roll represented.
• 35:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there was also a real and substantive connection between the Payola system and organised crime.
• 35:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: One that congressional investigators uncovered, even if it did not always receive the same degree of sustained public attention as the fall of a famous DJ, like Fried.
• 35:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Several of the independent record labels, most heavily implicated in the PEOPLE investigations, had documented or strongly suspected financial ties to organized crime figures.
• 35:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Continuing the pattern established decades earlier during prohibition and extended through the Duke Box era.
• 35:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: For these labels, Payola represented simply the latest and most effective tool for exerting the same kind of market influence and control that Duke Box placement had once provided.
• 35:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Adapted to a new technological and cultural landscape, in which radio airplay had become
• 36:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Congressional hearings ultimately led to significant regulatory changes in the American radio and recording industries.
• 36:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1960, Congress amended the Communications Act to explicitly criminalise undisclosed payola, requiring radio stations and broadcasters to disclose any payment received in exchange for playing particular content.
• 36:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Federal Communications Commission was granted expanded authority to investigate and penalize stations that violated these new disclosure requirements.
• 36:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: These regulatory changes did not eliminate payola entirely, and indeed, variations of the practice would continue to surface periodically in subsequent decades.
• 36:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Evolving into more sophisticated and legally defensible forms, such as independent promotion arrangements, in which record labels paid third-party promotion companies, rather than DJs directly.
• 37:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: A structure that provided a legal buffer,
• 37:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: while still achieving much the same practical effect.
• 37:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the 1960 hearings did mark a genuine turning point.
• 37:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Establishing for the first time a clear, legal framework criminalizing the most blatant forms of pay for play radio corruption.
• 37:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: and forcing the practice further underground and further away from direct organized crime involvement, even as more sophisticated forms of influence continue to operate at the margins of legality for decades afterward.
• 37:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Payola scandal also had a lasting effect on the structure and centralization of American radio programming.
• 37:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the years following the hearings, many radio stations moved away from the model in which individual DJs had significant personal discretion over which records to play.
• 37:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead adopting more centralized and standardized playlist systems developed by station management or outside consultants, a shift that was justified in part as a corruption prevention measure.
• 38:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Reducing the ability of any single DJ to be individually targeted for Paola, even as it also had the effect of reducing the individual creative influence and personality-driven programming.
• 38:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: that had characterized the golden age of rock and roll radio under figures like Alan Fried.
• 38:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: As the direct, cash-in-hand version of Payola receded somewhat from public view following the 1960 hearings, organized crimes influence over the recording industry did not disappear.
• 38:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It simply consolidated further into direct ownership and control of record labels themselves, rather than relying primarily on external influence over independent radio programs.
• 38:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: and no single figure better represents this consolidation and the deep, well-documented, decades-long relationship between organised crime and the mainstream American record business than the man at the centre of our next chapter, a record executive whose name became for federal investigators and music industry inside as a like, virtually synonymous with mob influence in the record business.
• 39:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: His name was Morris Levy, and his story takes us deeper into the underworld of the recording industry than perhaps any other figure in this entire history.
• 39:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 4 Morris Levy and the roulette record story.
• 39:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you wanted to construct from historical factor loan, the single clearest example of organized crimes direct ownership and operation of a mainstream American record label, you would struggle to find a better case study than Morris Levy and Roulette records.
• 39:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Levy's career span more than four decades in the music business, during which he built and controlled one of the most commercially significant independent record
• 40:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: all while maintaining documented, extensively investigated, and ultimately criminally prosecuted ties to organized crime, specifically to the Genevieve Crime Family.
• 40:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: one of the most powerful organised crime families operating in New York City throughout this era.
• 40:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Morris Levy was born in New York City in the mid-1920s and began his career in the entertainment business, not in the recording studio, but in the nightclub world.
• 40:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Working in various capacities at jazz clubs in Manhattan during the 1940s, a career path that echoes directly back to the prohibition era pattern we discussed in our first chapter, in which organised crime money flowed into night clubs and night club operators.
• 40:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: In turn, developed close relationships with musicians and eventually moved into the broader business of music.
• 41:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Levy became involved with Birdland, one of the most famous and influential jazz clubs in New York City history, located on Broadway, and named after the legendary saxophonist Charlie Parker, whose nickname was Bird.
• 41:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Levy's role at Birdland connected him to some of the most important jazz musicians of the era and gave him an intimate, ground level understanding of how the business of live music actually operated, including its darker financial undercurrents.
• 41:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: from his position in the nightclub world, leaving moved into music publishing.
• 41:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: and eventually into record label ownership, co-founding roulette records in the mid-1950s.
• 41:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Roulette records would go on to release music across an extraordinarily wide range of genres over the following decades, including jazz, rock and roll, and eventually disco, working with a roster of artists that included some genuinely significant figures in American popular music history.
• 42:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The label achieved real commercial success, releasing hit records and building a catalogue that, purely as a commercial and cultural asset, held substantial legitimate value.
• 42:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the story of roulette records, almost from its very founding, was inseparable from allegations, investigations, and eventually criminal convictions connecting the label and its founder to organized crime.
• 42:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: and specifically to figures within the Genevieve's crime family.
• 42:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Investigative journalists, federal law enforcement agencies, and congressional investigators spent decades documenting what they described as Levi's role as a frontman and business partner for organized crime interests within the legitimate record business.
• 42:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: A role that allegedly involved using roulette records and Levi's broader business empire,
• 43:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: which eventually grew to include music publishing companies, nightclubs, and other entertainment ventures.
• 43:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: As vehicles for laundering organized crime proceeds, and for exerting the same kind of coercive market control over the record business, that organized crime had previously exercised over Duke Box placement and radio payola.
• 43:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the most persistent and well-documented allegations against Levy concern the treatment of songwriters and artists who worked with roulette records and Levy's associated publishing companies.
• 43:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: numerous artists and songwriters across many years and many separate legal proceedings alleged that Levy and his organization used intimidation threats and outright fraud to deprived musicians of songwriting credits and royalties that rightfully belong to them.
• 44:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Credits and royalties that Levi allegedly redirected to himself, or to his business partners instead.
• 44:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: These were not vague or unsubstantiated rumors circulating within the music industry gossip mill.
• 44:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many of these allegations became the subject of formal lawsuits and in several documented cases.
• 44:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Artists who attempted to challenge Levi's business practices or to reclaim royalties, they believed they were owed reported experiencing threats and intimidation, that they attributed directly to Levi's organised crime.
• 44:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Connections.
• 44:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps the most famous and most extensively documented example of this pattern involves the songwriting credit and royalty history of the song that would eventually become one of the most successful and enduring songs in the history of American popular music.
• 44:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The song had originally been written and recorded by a do-wop group in the mid-1950s, but through a series of business maneuvers that music historians and legal investigators later scrutinized extensively.
• 45:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Songwriting credit and the resulting royalty stream for the song were eventually attributed at least in part.
• 45:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: to Morris Levy himself, despite significant evidence and testimony suggesting that Levy had contributed nothing to the actual composition of the song.
• 45:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: This pattern, in which Levy or his associates were listed as co-writers on songs they had not actually helped to write, thereby entitling them to a permanent share of songwriting royalties.
• 45:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Record across numerous other songs and artists associated with roulette records and Levy's publishing companies over the years.
• 45:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: forming one of the clearest documented examples in the entire history of the American recording industry of a business practice that combined legitimate corporate structures with the kind of coercive extraction that organized crime had.
• 46:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Long applied to other industries.
• 46:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Levy's connections to organized crime were not merely a matter of business practice or informal association.
• 46:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Federal investigators spent years building a case against Levy for direct criminal involvement with organized crime activity.
• 46:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in 1988, this investigation culminated in Levy's conviction on federal charges related to an extortion scheme involving the wholesale record distribution
• 46:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The case centered on allegations that Levy and his organised crime associates, including a documented member of the Genovies crime family, had attempted to extort a substantial sum of money from a wholesale record distributor as part of a broader scheme to control and profit from the distribution side of the record business.
• 46:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: An area that much like Duke Box placement decades earlier,
• 47:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Offered organised crime figures, significant leverage and profit potential were precisely because of the difficulty, legitimate businesses and law enforcement faced in monitoring and regulating the movement of records between manufacturers, distributors and retailers.
• 47:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Levy was convicted in this case in the summer of 1988 and sentenced to 10 years in federal prison.
• 47:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: A sentence that represented one of the most significant and well-publicized criminal convictions of a major American record-label executive on organized crime-related charges in the entire history of the recording industry.
• 47:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Levi died in May of 1990, while his conviction was still under appeal, meaning that he never actually served the prison sentence that had been imposed.
• 47:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: A fact that some observers at the time viewed as a final, almost fitting end to a career that had spent decades operating in the space between legitimate commercial success and criminal enterprise, always managing to remain just
• 48:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: of the consequences that seem to be closing in around him.
• 48:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The broader significance of Maurice Levy's career beyond the specific details of his convictions and his treatment of individual artists lies in what it reveals about the structural relationship between organized crime and the mainstream American record business during this era.
• 48:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Levy was not some marginal, disreputable figure operating entirely outside the legitimate music industry.
• 48:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was, for decades, a genuinely significant and influential player within that industry.
• 48:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Someone whose record label released Real Hits, whose business decisions shaped the careers of numerous artists.
• 49:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: and whose presence at industry events, award ceremonies and business gatherings was accepted and in many cases actively courted by figures throughout the legitimate music business establishment.
• 49:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is perhaps the most important and most uncomfortable lesson embedded in Levi's story.
• 49:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Organized crimes influence over the American recording industry during this era was not a matter of criminal outsiders, occasionally corrupting another wise clean industry from the margins.
• 49:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was, in significant respects, woven directly into the industry's core structure, accepted, tolerated.
• 49:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in many cases, actively utilized by figures throughout the business who found organized crimes particular combination of capital, ruthlessness, and willingness to operate outside conventional,
• 50:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Other record-label executives and music industry figures of this era faced similar, though generally less extensively documented and prosecuted, allegations of organized crime connection.
• 50:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: The broader pattern that emerges from congressional investigations, federal prosecutions, and investigative journalism spanning several decades suggests that Levy's case, however extreme and well documented.
• 50:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: was not an isolated aberration, but rather the most visible example of a much broader pattern of organised crime involvement across the independent record-label sector in particular, a sector that, as we discussed in earlier chapters, had always been more vulnerable to organised crime influence than the larger
• 50:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: more heavily capitalised major labels.
• 50:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Precisely because independent labels needed the kind of flexible, high-risk capital that organized crime figures were uniquely positioned to provide.
• 51:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And because independent labels operated with less institutional oversight and accountability than their larger corporate counterparts.
• 51:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: As we move into our fifth and final chapter, we will trace the gradual decline of this era of direct, organized crime involvement in the recording industry, following the story through the counterfeit record schemes and distribution fraud of the 1970s into the broader racketeering prosecutions that finally, over the course of several decades,
• 51:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Pushed organized crime toward the margins of an industry, it had once helped to build and to control.
• 51:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 5 Cutouts, Counter-Fits and the Long Decline.
• 51:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the 1970s, the most visible and dramatic forms of organized crime involvement in the American recording industry.
• 51:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The direct control of nightclubs, the territorial division of jukebox placement.
• 52:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The widespread cash payover of the DJ era had each in their own way, either faded in significance, or been driven at least partially underground by regulatory reform and shifting industry structures.
• 52:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: But this did not mean that organised crimes influence over the record business had disappeared.
• 52:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had simply adapted once again, moving into new areas of the industry, where the same basic advantages that had always attracted criminal investment, namely large cash flows, limited institutional oversight, and complex distribution chains that were difficult for law enforcement and legitimate industry auditors to monitor and continue to offer significant opportunity.
• 52:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the most significant of these new areas was the business of counterfeit and bootleg records.
• 52:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: As the record industry grew into an enormous commercial enterprise over the course of the 1960s and 70s, generating billions of dollars in annual revenue across the United States, it became an increasingly attractive target for a very old and very simple form of criminal enterprise.
• 53:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Manufacturing unauthorized copies of popular records and selling them through informal or semi-legitimate distribution channels thereby capturing profit from an artists and record labels work without paying any royalties or licensing fees whatsoever
• 53:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Organised crime figures, drawing on decades of experience in the record distribution business, developed sophisticated counter-fitting operations during this era, establishing pressing plans.
• 53:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some legitimate businesses secretly running unauthorised production alongside their legal work.
• 53:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Others operating as entirely clandestine facilities,
• 54:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: that churned out unauthorized copies of popular albums for sale, through independent record stores, flea markets, truck stops, and other informal retail channels across the country.
• 54:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: These counterfeit operations were particularly prevalent and particularly profitable for extremely popular artists and albums, where the volume of legitimate demand
• 54:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: created a correspondingly large opportunity for counterfeit sales to blend into and siphon off.
• 54:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: a portion of that demand without attracting excessive attention from either law enforcement or the legitimate recording industry.
• 54:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Congressional and federal investigations conducted throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s documented extensive organized crime involvement in record count of fitting and piracy.
• 54:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: With federal law enforcement agencies, eventually identifying counterfeit record production and distribution as a significant and growing source of organized crime revenue.
• 55:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: estimated at various points during this era to cost the legitimate recording industry many hundreds of millions of dollars annually in lost sales and royalties.
• 55:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The scale of this problem eventually prompted significant legislative action, including amendments to federal copyright law during the 1970s, that specifically strengthened criminal penalties for unauthorized record duplication
• 55:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Reflecting a growing recognition among lawmakers that record piracy had become a substantial organized criminal enterprise, rather than merely a matter of isolated small-scale infringement.
• 55:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Alongside outright counterfitting, organized crime figures also became heavily involved in a related but somewhat more legally ambiguous practice known within the industry as the cut-out and returns racket.
• 56:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Legitimate record labels in the ordinary course of business regularly needed to dispose of excess inventory records that had been manufactured but had not sold through normal retail channels.
• 56:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Either because an album had underperformed commercially or because a label had simply overestimated demand.
• 56:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: These excess records, known within the industry as cutouts, were typically sold off at steep discounts to specialise distributors.
• 56:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: who would then resell them through discount retail channels at prices far below the original list price.
• 56:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: This entirely legitimate secondary market for excess inventory created substantial opportunities for fraud and organized crime figures with their established distribution networks and their experience navigating the less regulated corners of the record business.
• 56:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: moved aggressively into this space during the 1970s.
• 57:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Various fraud schemes developed around the cut-out business, including operations in which organized crime affiliated distributors would purchase legitimate cut-out inventory.
• 57:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: But would then supplement that legitimate inventory with much larger quantities of counterfeit copies manufactured separately.
• 57:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: selling the combined inventory through the same distribution channels in a way that made it extremely difficult for retailers or investigators to distinguish between the legitimately purchased cutout records and the illegally counterfitted.
• 57:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Additions mixed in alongside them.
• 57:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: are related and similarly fraud-prone area of the business, involved record returns.
• 57:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Understanding industry practice, retailers were generally permitted to return unsolved records to distributors or labels for credit.
• 57:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: A system designed to reduce the retailers' financial risk when stocking new releases of uncertain commercial potential.
• 58:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Organized crime figures involved in record distribution developed various schemes to exploit this return system fraudulently, including submitting fraudulent return claims for records that had in reality, already been sold through legitimate retail channels, effectively allowing distributors to collect payment for the same records twice, once through the original sale
• 58:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: These distribution side frauds, while perhaps less dramatic and less well remembered by the general public than the earlier eras of jute box racketeering or paola scandals.
• 58:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Represented a very significant ongoing revenue stream for organized crime figures who had built up decades of infrastructure and relationships within the record distribution business.
• 58:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Infrastructure that proved remarkably adaptable to new forms of financial exploitation, even as the specific mechanisms of that exploitation evolved with changes in industry structure and technology.
• 59:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: The eventual decline of organized crime's influence over the American recording industry, which accelerated significantly through the 1980s and into the 1990s.
• 59:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Resulted from a combination of several distinct factors working together over an extended period of time.
• 59:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Federal law enforcement, building on the investigative and prosecutorial tools, developed through the broader organized crime prosecutions of this era.
• 59:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: including the racketeer influenced and corrupt organizations act, commonly known by its acronym RECO, which allowed prosecutors to pursue organized crime figures for patterns of criminal activity across multiple related businesses and enterprises.
• 59:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: rather than requiring separate prosecution for each individual criminal act, proved increasingly effective at building comprehensive cases against organized crime figures involved in the record business, exemplified by the successful prosecution of Morris Levy that we discussed earlier.
• 1:00:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Beyond law enforcement pressure,
• 1:00:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The structure of the recording industry itself was changing in ways that gradually reduced the specific vulnerabilities that organized crime had historically exploited.
• 1:00:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The major record labels grew increasingly large, increasingly corporate, and increasingly integrated into large multinational media conglomerates during the 1980s and 1990s.
• 1:00:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Bringing with them more sophisticated financial oversight, more rigorous accounting practices, and more comprehensive legal departments that made the kind of informal, cash-based, loosely documented business practices that organized crime had long relied upon considerably more difficult to sustain.
• 1:01:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Independent record labels, while continuing to exist, and continuing to play an important role
• 1:01:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Also, generally became more professionalised and more integrated into legitimate distribution and financial systems, reducing their vulnerability to the kind of predatory financing arrangements that organized crime figures had historically offered.
• 1:01:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Technological change, too, played a significant role in undermining the specific business models that organized crime had exploited for decades.
• 1:01:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: as physical record and later compact disk distribution gradually gave way over the following decades to digital distribution and eventually streaming.
• 1:01:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many of the specific vulnerabilities that had made the physical record distribution chain so attractive to organise crime, the ability to counterfeit physical product.
• 1:02:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The opportunities for fraud embedded in the cut-out
• 1:02:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: The territorial control possible over physical duke box placement simply ceased to exist in anything resembling their original form, replaced by an entirely different set of business structures, and eventually an entirely different set of challenges around piracy and unauthorized distribution that took shape in the digital rather than physical realm.
• 1:02:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the time the recording industry entered the 21st century,
• 1:02:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Organized crimes, one's extensive and deeply embedded influence over American radio and record labels, had receded into something closer to historical memory than ongoing operational reality.
• 1:02:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Though echoes and legacies of this era persisted in various forms, including in some of the ownership structures, royalty arrangements, and industry practices that had been established decades earlier under organized crime influence,
• 1:03:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: and that, in some cases, continued to affect the financial interests of artists, songwriters, and there are states for years and even decades after the original organized crime figures involved had died, been imprisoned, or simply faded from relevance, as the industry moved on without them.
• 1:03:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Looking back across the entire span of this history,
• 1:03:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: from the Prohibition era Speakies' that first drew organized crime money into the world of live music, through the territorial jute box wars that gave criminal figures unprecedented influence over which songs Americans actually heard, through the peole scandals that brought this hidden influence briefly and dramatically into public view.
• 1:03:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Through the career of a figure like Morris Levy, who embodied the deep and lasting entanglement between organised crime and mainstream record-label ownership, and finally through the counterfitting and distribution fraud schemes that represented organised crimes last major sustained foothold in the physical record business, a clear pattern emerges.
• 1:04:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Organized crime was drawn again and again, across more than half a century of American musical history, to the same basic structural features of the recording and radio industries.
• 1:04:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: large cash flows, limited regulatory oversight, complex and difficult to monitor distribution chains and an entertainment business culture that was for much of this period, more comfortable operating in gray areas and informal arrangements than the more heavily regulated and audited sectors of the American economy.
• 1:04:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: The music itself, of course, that emerged from this era, has long since been absorbed into the celebrated canon of American popular culture, studied in universities, preserved in archives, and enjoyed by generation after generation of listeners who in most cases have little or no awareness of the extent to which organised crime money, organised crime muscle.
• 1:05:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: and organised crime business practices helped to shape the industry that produced and distributed this music to them.
• 1:05:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: This does not diminish the genuine artistic achievement of the countless musicians, singers, songwriters and band leaders whose talent and creativity produced this extraordinary body of work.
• 1:05:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it does complicate the simple and comfortable narrative
• 1:05:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: organically and innocently, from the creative genius of its artists alone.
• 1:05:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The truth, as is so often the case in history, is considerably messier, considerably darker in places, and considerably more interesting than the simplified version most of us grew up believing.
• 1:06:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so, we come to the end of tonight's journey through the underworld's long, quiet involvement in American radio and recorded music.
• 1:06:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have traveled from the smoky species of the 1920s, through the coin-operated Duke boxes that once dictated the popular taste of an entire nation, through the peole scandals that toppled some of radio's most powerful and beloved voices.
• 1:06:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: into the office of a record label executive who spent decades moving between legitimate commercial success and organized criminal enterprise.
• 1:06:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And finally, through the slow grinding decline of this entire era as law enforcement, corporate consolidation and changing technology gradually closed the doors that organized crime had spent half a century holding open.
• 1:07:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you are still with us, thank you for staying with this story as long as you have.
• 1:07:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you drifted off somewhere along the way, that is exactly as it should be.
• 1:07:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: This has been Sleepless History.
• 1:07:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rest well, and we will meet again in the next episode.