FOR A YEAR TOMMY JAMES WAS BIGGER THAN THE BEATLES. THEN THE MAFIA RUINED EVERYTHING:
On Saturday July 15, 1972 American rock legend Tommy James played a gig at the Paramount Theatre in Brooklyn. After the show, James and his friends from the group Grass Roots were driving to a party in their stretch limousine.
At exactly the same time, six blocks away, Thomas ‘Tommy Ryan’ Eboli, the acting boss of the Genovese crime family, was leaving his girlfriend’s apartment when an assassin pumped six bullets into his head and chest from point-blank range. That would be the last time he ever screwed up on a heroin deal.
The afternoon before, James and Eboli had been slapping shoulders in the off-Broadway offices of Roulette Records, James’s label. Roulette boss Morris ‘Moshe’ Levy looked on and smiled. High on drugs and dollar bills, everyone seemed hunky dory, unless you knew that Levy was ‘the Godfather of the Music Business’, a man so feared it was said there were six major crime families in New York City: Gambino, Genovese, Colombo, Lucchese, Bonanno and Moshe’s Roulette.
Levy was the nastiest person in show business. He had a radioactive personality inside a Teflon overcoat. Moshe made latter-day managers like Peter Grant and Don Arden look like wusses. If a major label had a problem with a distributor, they’d call up Mo. Radio stations playing hardball? Call Morris. For an appropriate fee, Levy and his accomplice, record exec Nate McCalla, would gather baseball bats and, whack!
Don’t mess with Morris. He was the architect behind the payola scandal that sank American DJ Alan Freed, the man who’d invented the term ‘rock’n’roll’. Back in the day, Morris’s brother Irving had been shot dead in a gambling dispute at the notorious Birdland jazz club, which they ran. Levy bided his time, then visited his brother’s killer and disembowelled him with a butcher’s knife.
And speaking of the Beatles:
John Lennon was another visitor to Levy’s farm. In 1973 Levy and Lennon had become friends, but that didn’t stop the Roulette owner from serving the former Beatle with a plagiarism writ. Lennon’s 1969 song Come Together, on The Beatles’ Abbey Road album, began with the line ‘Here come old flat top, he come grooving up slowly,’ which had been appropriated from Chuck Berry’s 1956 single You Can’t Catch Me.
Levy owned the publishing on the original. He sued Lennon and won. As part of an ad-hoc settlement, Lennon gave Morris rough mixes of a rock’n’roll album he’d worked up with Phil Spector during his ‘lost weekend’ phase. The tapes were crap, but Levy put them out anyway, with Lennon’s permission, as a shoddy mail order LP called Roots, on subsidiary label Adam V111, named after his son.
Lennon was secretly delighted at the arrangement. He thought he’d make some easy money. Capitol didn’t see it that way and counter-sued Levy. The case dragged on for two years while Lennon, who was still getting off his heroin addiction by taking vast amounts of novocaine, slumped into his habitual depression.
During a particularly nasty stage in the trial, Levy invited Lennon to his farm, ostensibly to enjoy some quality rehearsal time for the unstable musician’s Walls And Bridges album. When Lennon arrived with May Pang (Yoko Ono’s replacement at that time), Levy threatened his life in no uncertain terms.
Read the whole thing, which reads like a cross between Scorsese’s Goodfellas and his HBO series, Vinyl.