Awards

• Winner of Crime Writers of Canada awards 2024

Overview

Jukebox Empire follows the many twists and turns in one man’s pursuit of the American dream, from a self-taught electronics genius to money launderer for the mob. This book exposes how the jukebox industry became the vertically integrated business model for organized crime at a time when there was a jukebox in every restaurant, diner, bar, barracks, arcade, and canteen throughout the country. Anyone can afford a nickel for a song and every week the jukeboxes generate millions of dollars in cash, untaxed income, that needed to be laundered.. Beneath this wholesome veneer lies a seamy underworld of juke joints, operators’ routes, smoke-filled showrooms, and violence. Rabinovitch reveals the details of the mob’s international money-laundering scheme to finance running guns to Cuba. The investigation pieces together an epic puzzle that begins in Chicago with the invention of a jukebox and spans the casinos of Havana and the financial giants of Europe, leading to what the FBI called “the biggest bank robbery in the world.”

Full Product Details

9781538172599

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Reviews

This is a brilliant depiction, in evocative prose, of the corrupt juke box industry as controlled by the mob. Anyone interested in how the mob can launder money through a seemingly innocent American past time should read Jukebox Empire. -- Jeffrey Sussman, author of Sin City Gangsters, Boxing and the Mob, and Big Apple Gangsters

Author Information

David Rabinovitch is a winner of the EMMY, Peabody, and Gemini awards. Significant films include the documentary Politics of Poison, which was screened for a Congressional committee and resulted in the suspension of the domestic use of the chemicals Agent Orange, and the mini-series Secret Files of the Inquisition, which dramatized a thousand years of intolerance by the Catholic Church, based on newly accessed archival files. David hails from the town of Morden, Manitoba.

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