Word: jukeboxes
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...want to be in business tomorrow, you better go today and purchase your records at Lormar." That, testified a witness at last week's Senate McClellan committee hearings into jukebox racketeering, was the slogan of Chicago's Lormar Distributing Co.-and not even Madison Avenue could have sharpened its message. Chicago jukebox operators, anxious to stay 1) healthy and 2) in business, bombarded Lormar with orders; a rival wholesale record firm in one year lost $800,000, or 90% of its trade. Principal reason: Lormar's was the property of Charles ("Chuck") English, a Chicago hoodlum...
...These Things Can Be Dangerous." In addition to buying records from Lormar, operators were forced to pay $3.60 per jukebox per year in protection money. In return they received the combined services of 1) Local 134, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, run by a business agent named Fred Thomas ("Jukebox Smitty") Smith, and 2) the Commercial Phonograph Survey Co. Commercial, assisted by Jukebox Smitty and a staff of ex-convicts, kept track of operators and their jukebox locations, ostensibly kept peace by preventing raiding. Estimated total shakedown cost to Chicago's operators: $100,000 a year...
...basic, underlying methods of operation will be greatly similar." McClellan expected to prove during a four-week investigation of the nation's $2 billion-a-year coin-machine industry that: 1) organized thugs are successfully moving in on big-city coin-machine operations, especially in the jukebox business and in pinball games; 2) principal tool of the thugs is the corrupt labor union, endowed with all the protection extended by law to legitimate labor. Said McClellan: "The ease with which some of these unions were created -not only locals but entire internationals . . . has no relation to the legitimate labor...
...Albert S. Denver, president of Music Operators of New York, testified that his association of 160 jukebox operators is gradually being driven out of business, in two years has lost 1,631 "cream" locations to the rival Associated Amusement Machine Operators of New York, whose Teamster bosses, declared Counsel Kennedy, are "successors to Murder...
...guitar, and hit the road to rustle up some cash. In Saskatoon, Duluth, Hawaii or Australia, wherever tall (6 ft. 1 in., 195 Ibs.) Johnny sounds off with his own "country" ballads in his deep, twanging baritone, the tour is sure to pay off. For these days the jukebox set is again on a crying jag: hangings, murders, deaths, burials and blighted loves are the subjects they want a man to sing about. And ever since Johnny Cash came out of the Arkansas delta, he has been singing about sorrow with spectacular success. In four years, half a hundred Cash...