Jukebox Empire

The Mob and the Dark Side of the American Dream

By David Rabinovitch

Jukebox Empire 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.”

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.

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.

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

December 2023

242 pages

16 illustrations

Hardback

978 1 5381 7259 9 eBook

978 1 5381 7260 5

True Crime • Organized Crime

Informing with clarity, persuading with conviction.

The Brookings Institution and its scholars are known worldwide as a source for original and innovative thought in foreign policy, American politics and governance, current affairs, metropolitan policy, economics, and development. In turn, the Brookings Institution Press helps bring the knowledge and research by scholars from within and outside the Institution to a wider audience of readers, researchers, students, and policymakers through its books and journals. The Press publishes about forty books a year that harness the power of fact and rigorous research to start conversations, inform debates, change minds, and move policy.

Backlist highlights

Publishing has been an integral facet of the Brookings Institution mission since its founding in 1916. The Brookings Institution Press grew from its beginning as an outlet for institutional research to a full-fledged scholarly press publishing an impressive variety of peer-reviewed titles, and by 1958 it had joined the Association of American University Presses.

In recent years, the Press has published such exciting, successful titles as Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That is a Problem, and What to Do About It by Richard V. Reeves, Diversity Explosion: How the New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America by William H. Frey, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin by Clifford Gaddy and Fiona Hill, and Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympic and the World Cup by Andrew Zimbalist—in other words, books that address real-world issues and get people talking.

The Rise of the Global Middle Class

How the Search for a Good Life Can Change the World

By Homi Kharas

The middle class is the most successful group in world history. Sometime before 2030, the fifth billionth person will join the middle class. What started a little over two hundred years ago as a search for a better life has fueled unprecedented global transformation. In his new book, Homi Kharas looks at how this powerful dream captivated generations through history, but its demands have led younger generations to ask if it is all worth it. Can the middle class continue to thrive, or will it falter under the stresses of automation, consumerism, pollution, and political strife?

Homi Kharas is a senior fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development, housed in the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings.

The history of the middle class from its origins in Victorian England to present day India.

Brookings Institution Press

November 2023

192 pages

Hardback

978 0 8157 4032 2 eBook

978 0 8157 4033 9

Business & Economics • Economic Conditions