Well, hey, welcome, all you wiretappers. Good to be back here in studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit, detective and later sergeant. And I have one of our friends, one of our repeat customers, if you will, our many friends from New York City, Jeffrey Sussman, who is a prolific mob author. Just go to Amazon. I've got a link before to his YouTube, I mean, his Amazon author's page, and you'll see all the books he's got.
We'll talk about him a little bit here, but mainly we're going to talk about his most recent book, Backbeat Gangsters. Backbeat Gangsters. So, Jeffrey, welcome. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you again, Gary. Well, Jeffrey, you have covered the waterfront in organized crime in the United States, Las Vegas and California and New York. You've really covered it with boxing. You've done the mob and boxing and you've done the mob in Hollywood, the mob in Vegas.
Now you're doing mob in the music business, which I think is a fascinating topic. I did a bunch of research and made a bunch of notes on this about two or three years ago, and I just never got back to it. So, you know, we're going to do that show now that I've been wanting to do a long time. I learned a lot about Morks Levy and the jukebox business back then. And you know even more because you've written it out in this book. How did you get started with this?
Was there some other thing, or you just thought it was interesting? Well, a couple of things. I did think it was interesting, but when I was in high school, at my high school graduation, there was a party afterwards. And Frankie Lyman, Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers, sang at my graduation. Right back over our shoulder here. Right, yeah, the little guy right over your shoulder. He had been a big star before this, and he sang for $50. And that was in 1960. He had two big hit records.
The most popular one was called Why Do Fools Fall in Love? He worked for Morris Levy, who owned Roulette Record. Morris Levy stole 50% of the writing credit for this song from the two backup singers who actually composed the song. That one song produced over a million dollars in potential royalties for him, and he never got a penny of it. Morris Levy kept a good portion of it. Frankie Lyman got hooked on heroin. And whatever money he had was going to feed his habit.
And by the time he sang at my high school graduation, he was absolutely broke and desperate for whatever money he could get. It was a very sad case. He became a big star at the age of 15. He really didn't know what he was doing. The policy at Roulette Records was, we'll attract these young kids who want to become a rock and roll star. We'll take advantage of them. You know, we'll give them, you know, a few thousand dollars to sign a contract.
Maybe we'll give them a brand new car and then we never have to give them anything again. They'll just sing and we'll promote the records and collect all the money. So that was the first thing that got me interested. And then because I had written about the chin in my book, Big Apple Gangsters, I was fascinated when I learned he was partaking of the music industry.
And what happened is that when rock and roll burst on the scene in the early to mid-1950s, none of the major record companies wanted to get involved in it. Capital didn't want to. Decca didn't want to. Columbia didn't want to. RCA didn't want to.
They thought that rock and roll was just a passing trend. The mob, which controlled all the jukeboxes, they said, we'll take out all the old 78 RPM records, we'll refit the jukeboxes to play 45 RPM records, we'll start record companies that just produce these 45 RPM records, and we'll sign all these kids who want to be rock and roll singers, we'll control the whole market. And they did. They absolutely controlled it, and they took advantage of all these young people who recorded for them.
I can't imagine a mob taking advantage of anybody. Can you? Now, speaking of Vincent The Chin, over my other shoulder, that's him. But I didn't really recognize him at first. So you got a story about that. Tell us that story about why he looks so fat. Well, when he was working for Vito Genovese, who was head of the Genovese crime family, Genovese was at war with Frank Costello. Genovese wanted to get rid of Costello, so he gave the job to Vincent the Chin Gigante to assassinate him.
Now, Gigante didn't want to get recognized as the assassin, so he gained a lot of weight. His weight went up to about 300 pounds. He shot Costello in the lobby of Costello's apartment building. As Costello was waiting for the elevator, Gigante ran into the lobby as well as a 300 pound man can run, sort of lumbering in there. And he looked at Costello and he said, this is for you, Frank, whereupon Frank turned his head.
Just at the time that Gigante fired his gun and the bullet just creased Costello's head, Gigante ran out of the building after that, not succeeding in killing him, and jumped into a car. So when the police came, they asked the doorman, and he said, oh, yeah, this big fat guy with a gun. And that's a picture of Gigante as a pretty overweight guy right there. He slimmed down later. You know, in his early career, he was a light heavyweight boxer and not a bad one, actually.
And he had quite a number of wins, but he was in much better shape then than he looks in that picture there. A little side like that story. I just talked to another mob researcher the other day, and he said that actually Costello and Gigante became friendly over the next the rest of Costello's life because he got out of the crime business after that. like Genovese wanted. And he and Costello actually could be kind of friendly to each other. So go figure.
It's not, it's not business. I mean, it's not personal. It's all business, right? Exactly. Nothing is personal in that business. Really? You know, Costello really wanted to get even with Gigante. You remember the Appalachian conference? Yeah. With Genovese, he wanted to get even with Genovese. Yeah. He wanted to get even with Genovese.
Costello and And Luciano, who was then living in Italy, having been deported, and Meyer Lansky, they were the ones who notified the state troopers in upstate New York that this Appalachian conference was taking place. And so the police raided it. And it was a terrible embarrassment, Vito Genovese, because he was then going to sort of declare himself the boss of bosses. And now he was the fool of fools.
All these guys are running through the woods in their silk Italian suits that are being torn up by the bushes and so forth. And it was all Genovese's fault to really put the nail in Genovese's coffin. What they did is they hired this guy. His last name was Cantaloupe, who was a drug dealer. And they got him to sell drugs to Vito Genovese and to testify against him. The deal was that Meyer Lansky would pay him.
And even though the guy, Cantaloupe, might go to prison, he would make sure that Cantaloupe had an annuity for the rest of his life for doing this favor. They arranged for Genovese to go to prison, And Genovese spent the rest of his life there. He got, you know, 15 years and he died in prison. And it was all a setup by Costello, Lansky, and Luciano, who were angry at him, you know, for trying to take over what had been the Luciano family originally.
Interesting. Interesting. Well, we digress. Let's go back to Morris Levy, who was partnered up with Gigante in the end. But tell us about Morris Levy. Tell us a little more. Who is this guy? What kind of guy was he? I've heard some stories that he could be a pretty brutal guy to these young teenage musicians. He was a very brutal guy. He grew up very poor in the Bronx, New York, and he met, actually, Gigante when he was a young man.
Quit school at an early—well, he was kicked out of school because he was very good at math. He was only one of two students in the class that did well on a math test, And yet the teacher made everyone stay after school because they didn't do well on the math test. And he was annoyed that he had to stay after school because he did very well.
So he went up to the teacher and he started yelling at her. And then he pulled out an ink bottle and poured the ink over her head and got thrown out of school for that. And basically he never went back to school again. And he worked down in Florida for a while. First he had, it was like a hat check concession in a nightclub. And then he got to do the photo concession and he learned a little bit about
the nightclub business. He came back to New York and he worked in a jazz club on 52nd Street off of Broadway. And learned more about it and he understood uh how to operate and he got a number of mob guys to invest for him in opening a nightclub and the nightclub they they opened was a fairly famous one.
And called called birdland still exists today but under you know entirely a different management there was a famous musician named george shearing and he got george shearing to write a a song for Because he also arranged for a regular radio program to be on that was broadcast from Birdland. And he got George Shearing to write a song that became a big hit called Lullaby of Birdland. Morris Levy stole the writing credit for that song.
He let Shearing keep the composition, the musical composition part, but Levy stole the words for it and continued to get royalties. He did very, very well with that. And he was putting on jazz concerts and making a lot of money. And then when rock and roll started and Gigante opened Roulette Records, and they bought up a couple of small other record companies. I think one was called Dot. And I think another one was called I forgot. Actually, I forgot what the other
one was called. But altogether, they had seven small rock and roll labels, and they hired young kids like Frankie Lyman and the teenagers. They would then bribe the local disc jockeys to play certain songs. One of those disc jockeys was a guy named Alan Freed, who became the biggest rock and roll disc jockey in the 1950s. And as a result of him, there was something called the Paola Scandal, where all these disc jockeys were arrested because they were taking bribes in order to play music.
But the bribes, most of them would seem to be generated by Morris Levy and his companies, made their records into hits because Alan Freed would play whatever record Roulette wanted them to play almost every hour that he was on the air. And if he was on the air for five hours, he was playing a particular song every hour for five hours, and that would make it a hit. And then Alan Freed started having rock and roll concerts.
He had the first rock and roll concerts in New York, first at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater and then at the New York Paramount Theater. And Morris Levy was an investor in those and was also taking probably 50% of the money that came in from those concerts. And then Morris Levy opened a chain of record stores, 70 of them, called Strawberries.
To also get out of having to pay royalties, he made counterfeit copies of his own records and flooded his stores with the counterfeit copies of his own records. He collected the money from the sale of those records, but because they were all counterfeit, there was no record of the money having to go to a singer. So he kept all that money. It was royalty-free money for him. You know, he was just an incredible crook.
And when when people tried to to get their money from him, he had all these mobsters, either from the Genovese family or the New Jersey part of the Genovese family hanging out in his office.
And they would threaten to beat up anyone who who demanded royalties and then occasionally they did and you'd see a guy you know leaving morris levy's office with a pair of black eyes and a bloody nose and getting kicked in the asses he was walking out the door i mean it was just terrible so there was this one singer jimmy rogers who uh had a song that became a number one hit called uh kisses sweeter
than wine sweeter than wine oh i remember that one yeah he never got his royalties from Morris Levy. So he quit Rulet Records and he moved out west. And he figured, you know, I'll be, you know, on the other side of the country, they won't bother me. And I'll pursue my career out here. So one night he's coming home from a party and he gets stopped by a cop car. And he figures, you know, maybe, you know, my taillight is not working where they think I've been drinking or something.
So the cop comes up to him and tells him to get out of the car. Then the cop takes a metal pipe and starts beating Jimmy Rogers over the head with a metal pipe and fractured his skull and sends him into a coma. The cop leaves and puts Jimmy's body back in the car, makes him look like a drunk who passed out in the car. Jimmy Rogers was in a coma for several weeks. When he got out of the coma, he suffered brain damage and he wasn't able to sing.
For two years, he had to relearn how to use his voice and how to sing again. It wasn't until, I think it was Sony Music, perhaps, that eventually bought the rights to his song. And so many, many years later, his family started getting the royalties that had been withheld from him, from Morris Levy. But that was just an example of the kind of brutality that Morris Levy would indulge in. And you could never leave his label. It was like a commitment to the mafia.
Once you're in, you're not out. And once you're signed up with Roulette Records, forget it. That's your label for the rest of your life. And if you don't like it, too bad. You can't get out. And then he did another thing. There was a guy named Sal the Swindler. Sal the Swindler was how he was known. And he got a job at MCA Records. They don't know how he got a job there, but he became a big deal at MCA Records, even though he never had any business and the record business.
And he had been a convicted felon in the drug business. And there was something in the music business where you would sell a cutoff album, you know, they cut off the corner, which means that the album can no longer be sold in a record store. It's like a remaindered book. He arranged maybe $11 million worth of cutoff albums. To be sold to a distributor in Pennsylvania named John Lamont.
And they promised him that, yeah, there would be a lot of records from unknowns and singers that didn't go anyplace. But we would also throw in a lot of albums of famous singers and famous groups that you'll be able to sell for top dollar. And the others, you know, you can go in these stores, we'll sell them the albums for $1.98. So 11 truckloads of albums arrived at John Lamont's warehouse. And when he went through the albums, the good stuff that they had promised him
wasn't there. They had taken it off and sold it to somebody else. But they demanded that he pay the $11 million. And he refused to pay it. Morris Levy and a couple of his gangster cohorts went and they saw him. And they beat the crap out of him. And they sent him into the hospital for several days. And eventually, this guy wound up testifying against them and then had to go into the witness protection program to avoid any kind of retaliation.
Eventually, Levy was convicted of extortion and bookmaking and shylocking. I think he was sentenced to 10 years in prison, but he had cancer at the time. And he died shortly before he was able to begin to serve his prison sentence. Wow. That guy was crazy. Wasn't there some story about him and Tommy James and the Shandells? Yeah, Tommy James wrote a book about him because he was one of the people who made a lot of money, Morris Levy. And he was sort of like Morris Levy's favorite singer.
And he would constantly talk him into...
Continuing with the record company he he eventually got his money but they really put him through the ringer i mean and he he did not have an easy time with them you know that like all the other singers he was threatened and and and money was kept from him like there's a famous story about him hanging some musician by his heels out he's out of uh high-rise window i don't know did you run into a story like that i've heard that yeah yeah yeah that that was one of the hip-hop record producers.
Out in Los Angeles. Oh, okay. He wanted the rights to a hit song that this hip-hop singer had made into a hit, and the hip-hop singer wouldn't give it to him, and they were on the 14th floor of a hotel in Los Angeles. So he hung the guy out the window, and he said, you better give me the rights or we're going to drop you. So he gave him the rights. Okay. That probably doesn't have anything to do with the Genevieve's crime family,
But it's a good story. And yeah, I'm glad to get that straightened out in my mind. So, you know, these jukeboxes, the mob has historically, they like these coin-operated machines. That's long history in every major city of the mafia and having a coin-operated machine, routes and businesses, you know, and, you know, cigarette machines, pinball machines, which are hand in hand. Next step is slot machines. Tell us a little bit more about their incursion into the jukebox.
Because it seemed like in Chicago, the war ever in Worcestershire was somehow the outfit got some piece of that action. You know about that? Began with Meyer Lansky in the East. He had a company, I think it was called EMB. That had the exclusive rights to sell Wurlitzer jukeboxes throughout the entire eastern part of the United States. And eventually, the outfit got an exclusive deal also, and that was more for the Midwest and the Southwest of Wurlitzer.
So, I mean, basically, the mob was controlling all the jukeboxes. They would go into restaurants, bars, even college fraternity houses, bowling alleys, social clubs, fraternal organizations, and say, you've got to take out jukebox. Initially, they would promise them 50% of the receipts that the jukebox would make, and eventually it went down to 25%.
They started a union of servicemen who would service the jukeboxes, and the people who had the jukeboxes, they had to put a special label on their jukeboxes showing that they were serviced by this mob union. Otherwise, they couldn't keep the jukeboxes. And then they also had to pay a monthly service fee to the union to guarantee that their jukeboxes would be serviced properly. So they controlled the whole thing.
And then when rock and roll came on the scene in the 1950s and they had all these jukeboxes lined up already, they said, hey, we We have the outlet for all these, uh, singers, you know, we'll take originally the jukeboxes had 78 RPM records in them. We'll take out the 78 RPMs, we fit them, retrofit them, put, uh, 45 RPM records. We own the 45 RPM records. So, you know, every time they're played, we're going to get a royalty. Yeah. They were, they were set. They were set already in, in,
uh, in place for this all happened. It's just, uh, it's just amazing. What they did. That payola thing, I remember that when I was a kid. There was a big investigation. It was in Life Magazine or Reader's Digest or somebody printed a whole series of articles about the payola. Guys, if you're at a certain age, you'll remember this payola scandal. Yeah. And Alan Freed partnered with Morris Levy. He had the biggest rock and roll radio show in the country, in New York.
It was originally in Cleveland, and then it moved to New York to a larger audience. And at that time in the 1950s, it was on a station called WINS Radio, which by the 1960s became an all-news radio station. He was on every evening. When I was a kid, I used to listen to it. Alan Freed had so much money coming in that he put it in his closet. And if you opened the closet door, the money just came falling out. It was in stacks and stacks and piles and piles.
And some of it was from his rock and roll concerts. And a lot of it was from the bribery from the payola to play to play the records that he was told to prep. But what was interesting, even though these charges were brought against him for payola, technically payola was not illegal at that time. They made it retrospectively illegal because it wasn't until a couple of years or a year later that a law was passed making payola illegal. But they were so upset by it that they passed the law.
What they did is they kind of humiliated these disc jockeys. They publicized how corrupt they were and how corrupt the radio stations were. So the radio stations were forced to drop these disc jockeys and find these more clean cut disc jockeys. That's how Dick Clark from American Bandstand got started because he was like an all-American clean cut guy. And he was not the kind of guy who's going to take bribes in order to play records.
Alan Freed turned into an alcoholic and went from one obscure radio station to another and then eventually died of alcoholism. He was broke. And I remember he tried to borrow some money from Morris Levy. I think Morris Levy sent him a check for $1,000 and then refused to ever have anything to do with him after that. But Morris Levy had made a ton of money from Alan Freed and for Alan Freed.
And it was kind of sad in a way, because when the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame started, they had a special tribute there to Alan Freed. And eventually they even took that down and removed him from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I guess they thought he was an embarrassment to them as well. Maybe that's where Dr. Johnny Fever came from. Maybe he was on the run from a Paola scandal from the WKRP in Cincinnati, you know? Could have been. Could have been.
Well, it's really interesting. Some of those stories you've told, there's a lot more in this book. Trying to think, what about drugs? What about drugs and the music business all go hand in hand? I had one story about Jimi Hendrix, and it's probably not part of your book, but where he was being fed heroin by some kind of lower level mob guys that kind of like made him into their pal for a while.
You've got a chapter on drugs and music. Yeah, I do have a chapter on drugs and music, and Jimi Hendrix is one of the people that I mentioned there. When I graduated from college, I got a job doing public relations for rock groups with a company. One of their clients at that time was Jimi Hendrix. He was up in the office there. And he fell asleep on the couch in my boss's office. He was just stoned out of his mind on drugs. I mean, you just couldn't wake him up.
And he was a big star at that time. There were also a lot of producers who fed their singers drugs so they wouldn't have to give them royalties. You know, the drugs became a substitute for royalties. And the other thing is that a lot of these producers, then they took out life insurance policies, million dollar life insurance policies on their singers. And when their singers died of drug overdoses, the producers collected the money.
A lot of the record companies found that once a singer died from a drug overdose, he actually became more popular in death than he was in life. And they sold more records afterwards than they did before. So it worked out to their advantage that the guy died of a drug overdose. Just look at Elvis Presley. That guy, that dude made a lot more money for his estate after he died of drugs. You know, his manager, the colonel, a gambling habit.
And so he made a deal, I forgot which casino it was in Las Vegas, that they would give him carte blanche to gamble as much as he wanted. And they would cover all of his debts in exchange for which Elvis Presley would sing there and get paid $150,000 a week, which to us is a lot of money. But at the time, someone like Frank Sinatra was getting $400,000 a week. So they saved $350,000 by letting the colonel gamble and run up debts. Jesus, you got some stories in this book, my friend.
And you got some really great stories, uh, kind of like, uh. Look across the, uh, a huge part of, of our lives and, and all this was going on in the background. I mean, you're talking, you're dropping all these things. I was, I was like 13 years old when you first start getting into rock and roll, you know, Frankie Lyman and teenagers and, and then Tommy James and the Shondells and, and those were, you know, such huge Jimmy Rogers and, uh, kisses sweeter than wine.
I, you know, I can still, you're, you're, I'm like, Flashing back to those days of the seventh, eighth, and ninth grade when you first discover girls and go to dances and rock and roll and music. And you've got a radio in your car and it's just riding around, you know, and cranking that baby up. I mean, it's a real trip through the back streets of all of our lives. I'm really looking forward to actually sitting down and reading it. I haven't done it yet, but it's really American graffiti.
American Graffiti, yeah, the backstory, the sewer that runs underneath American Graffiti, if you will, that we all are interested in. We're all drawn to this. Guys, I know you are out there, and so am I, and so is Jeff. So we're all drawn to this kind of seamy underbelly of life and to know what was really going on behind the scenes. And it was amazing how the effect that it had on American culture. I mean, you know, anyone who was coming of age at that time and was being influenced
by rock and roll and that whole music was like a soundtrack for one's life. Yeah. We had no idea the dirt that was behind it. Yeah. What was really going on behind it and who was manipulating it. Jeffrey Sussman, the name of the book is Backbeat Gangsters. Is there a tagline to that, Jeff? Yeah, it's Backbeat Gangsters, The Rise and Decline of the Mob in Rock Music. Great. I'm really looking forward to this. Is it out right now?
It comes out April 15th. But anyone who wants to, they can go to, for example, to Amazon and they can pre-order it. They can buy it now if they'd like to. All right. And actually, this probably won't get out until about April 15th anyhow. But it's always good to know and remind people that you can't do that.
So I look forward to that. I don't know. Anything else, any other stories you remember out of that that you really want to impart to entice people to buy the whole book and read the rest of them? There was a theater in Westchester, New York called the Westchester Premier Theater. Oh, yeah. That was connected, really heavily connected. Connected to the Gambino crime family. They weren't doing well. And one of the capos in the Gambino crime family called Frank Sinatra, who was singing in...
Chicago at the time, had a two-week engagement there. And he told Sinatra, we need you here in Westchester to sing, we need to beef up the audience. And Sinatra said, I can't have this two-week engagement here. And this guy from the Gambino crime family said, you better get your ass here and be here tomorrow. And Sinatra was there the next day. And the Gambino crime family, they were skimming money like you wouldn't believe from this theater. They had 400 seats in the theater.
Well, they listed the theaters only having 250 seats. So they only declared income from 250 seats. And then they skimmed the money from another 250 seats that weren't listed as being part of the theater. Eventually, the theater went into bankruptcy, which is, I guess, what they wanted to do. And they also tried to go public. They actually sold investments in the theater to all the famous recording artists who sang at the theater. By the time they finished selling investments to these people,
they had sold more than 100% of the theater. And when the theater went bankrupt. The investors were left with absolutely nothing. All right. Jeffrey Sussman, thanks a lot for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. It's my pleasure, and I enjoy being on the show. It's always wonderful to do your show. And please let me know when you're going to be in New York. I will. I will. Guys, that was... I always like having Jeff on. He's got a lot of my books out there.
You'll see the links to find them down below, and he's a good friend. Oh, what do you think about the background? I did this. He sent me these pictures, so I thought, well, I'll figure out how to do a background. I'm going to start trying to do that. I think it's kind of interesting. I think it's kind of cool looking.
Don't forget, I like to ride motorcycles, so look out for motorcycles when you're out there on the streets, especially when you're driving your big 10,000-ton SUVs and pick F-150s and all that. I feel like sometimes I'm on the highway, and I just feel like this little mouse running around between all these elephants, between that and the regular big trucks. You feel pretty vulnerable out there on those things, but I guess I wouldn't have any other way. I like that itch.
If you have a problem with drugs or alcohol or you have a problem with PTSD, be sure, and if you're a veteran, be sure and go to the VA website and get that hotline number. And if it's drugs or alcohol and you're not a veteran, veteran VA will help you with the drugs and alcohol too. But if you're not a veteran, you might have some fun with our friend, Anthony Ruggiano, who is a drug and alcohol counselor down in Florida now. And he has a hotline, which if you're on YouTube, you can see that.
Otherwise, just go to his website. If you have a problem with gambling, you know, there's 1-800 bets off in Missouri. I don't know every state that's got gambling, I'm sure. And I think that's every state, which everybody used to go to jail for. Now it's totally legal. You know, go figure. Poor guy has spent, years and years in jail. You know, that was like, that was the, the, the way to get to a mob go on. I mean, gambling, if you think about it, you got to use telephones.
You got to have relationships with people, with people not in the family. Many times the gamblers out there, they're all weak sisters. If you get a case on them or even get a DUI on them, you get anything on them, they're going to tell you something. They're going to tell you who their bookie is. And then you go to the bookie, the bookie's got to get on the phone or he's got to drive somewhere and contact, uh, whoever he turns his bets over to.
And, and so it's, you know, it's a way to take down a whole crime family because that is the weak link, but that was also pretty darn good money for him for a long time. I guess the state gets all that money now. I don't know. Don't forget. I got to sell something here. Don't forget. I've got books out there. I've got links to my author page. Like I have links to Jeff's author page down below.
Uh, I've got the book of, uh, podcast stories, the stories I've done in my podcast, one for Chicago, one for New York. I've got my book about the Kansas City view of the skimming from Las Vegas. Casino is the Las Vegas view and the kind of the romantic story of Lefty and his wife and the triangle between them and Tony Spolatro and those kinds of things. Well, this story is the real story and how it got started what started in the Tropicana.
Uh, and, and that's how the Bureau got on that whole thing and took that whole thing down. So I, you know, I got a, I got a pretty good following in my, go to the YouTube channel, like, and subscribe and make comments. I like to answer those comments. If you notice, I, I answer a lot of comments. I read every one and click a like on it, but, uh, I also will answer a lot of comments. So if you've got any questions, I'm always happy to have questions and maybe,
you know, suggestions for stories, those kinds of things. So thanks a lot, guys.