My first job was at a place called Frosty’s, the only real hangout in my small prairie town. The front third of the building was dedicated to cheeseburgers and soft ice cream; further back in the middle was a modest pinball arcade, while in the rear was a pool hall.
Many God-fearing townsfolk considered this to be three levels of Hell, descending from evil, dinner-spoiling sweets to money-sucking coin-operated amusements, to the domain of smokers, ne’er-do-wells, and hooligans.
In the middle of it all was a commercial jukebox, a beat-up thing with terrible audio, and about 50 records. A quarter got you three plays. Rob, one of the pool-playing regulars, would begin his hustling by changing a 10-dollar bill into quarters (the equivalent of almost $50 today), all of which were spent on the same song. If Rob was in the back, everyone else was guaranteed 75 plays of Elvis Presley’s Burnin’ Love.
Those of a certain age might remember jukeboxes with suspicion, too. My grandparents certainly did. These machines not only stole dimes and quarters in exchange for fleeting plays of the Devil’s Music (“You can listen for free on the radio!”), but the machines themselves once kept shady company. Very shady.
The first coin-operated music-playing machines first appeared in the late 1920s. The name “jukebox” was derived from the word jook, which came from the Gullah language of African-Americans living throughout the southeastern United States.
Jook — later juke — meant rowdy, wicked, disorderly, and all manner of bad behaviour. Juke joints were roadside shacks that started popping up in the 1920s. This is where one could enjoy plenty of drinking, dancing, and all kinds of carrying on. By the early ’30s, automated record-playing machines that almost replicated the juke joint atmosphere were referred to as “jukeboxes.”
These machines quickly became very popular with customers in bars, restaurants, and other public establishments, generating reliable cash flow one nickel at a time. For the recorded music industry, they were incredibly important. There were tens of thousands of machines across the continent, and at one point accounted for 75 per cent of all records produced in the United States.
If you wanted a hit record, you had to get into as many jukeboxes as possible. Manufacturers like Wurlitzer, Rock-Ola, Seeburg, and AMI/Rowe couldn’t make them fast enough.
The mob recognized the potential of jukeboxes early on. First, it was a cash business. Second, it was a business that scaled easily. And third, it was easy to lean on both record labels and the proprietors of establishments hosting jukeboxes to play ball.
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They bought up thousands of machines, either straight from the manufacturer or muscled in on a place that already had one. If you ran a label, you might get a visit from a good fella with an offer you couldn’t refuse. “You want plays on our machines? Then you gotta pay.”
Meyer Lansky, the gangster boss, controlled a vast network of gambling operations across the U.S., Cuba, and the Caribbean. He also owned a jukebox company that placed machines across the New York City region. If you were in a pool hall with a jukebox, there was a 100 per cent chance your dimes and quarters flowed to Lansky’s operation. His attempts to oust Castro after the 1959 revolution were partially financed by jukebox revenues.
Chicago had “The Outfit,” a mafia organization who employed a guy they called Fred “Jukebox Smitty” Smith. His official title was “Head of the Jukebox Division of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 134,” although he was in fact The Outfit’s “most accomplished extortionist.”
He had a soldier named Mike Dale, who oversaw the “Commercial Phonography Survey,” which charged enormous fees to establishments who wanted jukeboxes to entertain their customers. If a place refused to pay — again, up to 100 per cent of all revenues had to kicked back to the boys back home — the owner could expect a visit from goons with baseball bats and cans of gasoline. If that didn’t work, things escalated dynamite and acid attacks.
Thousands of machine were involved in similar schemes. It’s estimated that in the 1940s and 1950s, Chicago alone had 10,000 of them. Jukebox Smitty made bank through payoffs, kickbacks, bogus regulatory fees, and made-up “union-approved” stamps for every unit. More money was made from pinball machines and cigarette vending machines.
Jukebox makers were powerless. Milton J. Hammergren, a vice-president at Wurlitzer, was called to testify before Congress about the jukebox problem. He intimated that some people may have been killed over the placement of the machines. One such murder involved a guy named Johnny Kowalski in 1945 who ran afoul of the standard revenue splits.
There was more, too. Mobsters, including Lansky, owned sketchy record-pressing plants, which were used to make counterfeit copies of legitimate releases. Their jukeboxes were filled with these fakes, meaning that they had almost no overhead when it came to music.
When the jukeboxes were full, they’d sell these counterfeit records to stores at ridiculously low prices, undercutting the market. A mob guy names Charles English was very accomplished at this.
The best years for jukeboxes came in the 1950s when this new construct called a “teenager” couldn’t get enough of this new rock ‘n’ roll craze. The amount of money made controlling the jukebox trade was incredible.
How do we know all this? Because Fred “Jukebox Smitty” Smith turned into a rat. He became a confidential informant who helped the FBI identify the major players in the illegal jukebox business.
But it couldn’t go on forever. Every teenager soon had a transistor radio, allowing them to hear their rock ‘n’ roll wherever they went for free. No longer reliable money-makers, jukebox numbers began to dwindle. Per-machine revenues fell and the recorded music industry was no longer interested in jukebox plays when it came to compiling the official record charts. The cost of servicing and maintaining these mechanical monsters was no longer worth it.
Meanwhile, mobsters moved to more lucrative ventures, like drugs, prostitution, smuggling, protection rackets, and extortion. There’s no specific end date for the mob’s involvement, but my guess is that they were out of the business almost entirely by the 1970s.
Jukeboxes still exist, of course. The original mechanical machines are great for collectors and nostalgia buffs. There are a variety of companies that provide electronic music players for bars and restaurants.
Fun fact: My record collection began when my uncle, moonlighting from the Manitoba Telephone System servicing jukeboxes, gave me a box of worn-out records from his weekly rounds where he exchanged old records for new ones. As far as I know, he never had problems with any wise guys.
On Thursday, May 7, Alan will present a live performance of his podcast, Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry as part of the Departure music conference. The title of the podcast is Music and The Mob and will cover everything from jukeboxes to payola to extortion and more. Tickets for the event at the Jane Mallett Theatre are available here.
