The journalist David Leon Chandler, in his book Brothers In Blood, wrote how then-Lousiana Governor Jimmie Davis helped local Mob boss Carlos Marcello open casinos in New Orleans. In addition to being Governor, Davis was also a country singer. After this favor, Davis’s recording of the song “You Are My Sunshine” suddenly appeared in various Mob-controlled jukeboxes around the country. Twenty years later, the FBI dredged nearly one hundred thousand records from the East River—most of them being copies of Jimmie Davis’s “You Are My Sunshine.” The FBI came to the conclusion that the discarded records had been originally bought by the Mob and placed into jukeboxes as payment for Davis helping the casinos open.
Read the full story here: The dark history of the jukebox: how the Mafia used murder to build music machine empires
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