There was an old black and white photograph of my father and his brother that was kept hidden in a strongbox. It intrigued me because I had never met Uncle Bill, which was unusual because I knew all my other aunts and uncles. In the photo, he is counting money. When I asked my father about it, he said, look closely, those are $1,000 bills. Where did the money come from, I asked? He made a fortune making a jukebox, dad told me. He barnstormed the country in a plane, selling the jukebox. What happened? My father became stoic. He made and lost a million four times over, he told me. That was as far as I got.

When I started researching my uncle, I first came across headlines in Billboard, the music industry journal, of the lawsuit over patents between my uncle and the jukebox pioneer David Rockola. That led me to the history of the jukebox and the competition to continually improve the mechanics and design of the coin-operated music machines. Remember, there were no cell phones or even earphones back in the 1940’s, so a location with a jukebox was a popular place to socialize. At this point my view was that the story was about invention and entrepreneurship in 20th century America – kind of like Tucker: The Man and his Dream.

He’d been successful making car radios, and then made a lot of money producing radio equipment during World War II. So he knew about electronics. After the war he was approached by a racketeer from Pennsylvania, Sam Mannarino, who had plans for a jukebox from a dead inventor. Because racketeers controlled all coin machines, Mannarino wanted to go into manufacturing, and Wolfe was the man who could actually build a jukebox. For Wolfe, the deal was seductive, and for the Mob, it was the beginning of vertical integration of organized crime in a legitimate business.

Americans have always been attracted to the stories of outlaws, of anti-heroes who
challenge the system, who pull off feats that most of us would never have the nerve to perform. My uncle had the charm to pull off a con, and the balls to go for a big score. And he also had substance. I think he was gifted. He earned a university degree, he had an intuition for electronics, he got a pilot’s license. But he was an outsider – to the Mafia, to law enforcement, and even to some in his family. And he wasn’t a sociopath. I came to see him as a rogue, but not a villain.

Wise guy is a term that’s used by both criminals and police to identify a “made man” or member of a Mafia family. A Jew could never be a wise guy because that was a privileged rank for Italians. But a Jew who could be trusted was referred to as a half assed wise guy. Usually that meant earning that trust by taking care of business in a brutal manner. Wolfe Rabin was never a half assed wise guy. But Norman Rothman, who managed casinos for the mob, and was indicted with Wolfe for money laundering, was a half-assed wise guy. That answer the question?

The deeper I dug into my uncle’s story, the more detail emerged. I determined that a book offered the opportunity to engage readers with the complexity of plot and characters that fascinated me in the original research, to make the connections from the jukebox to blasting into a bank vault to selling bonds in Europe to running guns to Cuba. The story is full of larger-than-life characters, and the book permits them to speak, often in their actual words.

It’s like Ocean’s 11 meets Boardwalk Empire. A diverse crew pull off an epic caper – the biggest bank robbery in the world, and the largest money laundering scheme in history – and then it comes undone through hubris, and it descends into the dark side of the American dream. My uncle’s business partner takes out a contract on his life, because it was better to kill a friend than risk betrayal. These are film noir themes.

The concept for a coin-operated music machine goes back to the 1890’s. One of the greatest American inventors, Thomas Edison, had invented the phonograph. Others developed the coin-op mechanism. Electricity was in its infancy, machines could play only one recorded cylinder, and there was no amplification, so people listened through acoustic headphones. It wasn’t until the advent of radio in the 1920’s that the concept for the amplified jukebox was born. But the capacity was limited. The competition among tinkerers and inventors to make a machine that could play up to ten discs resulted in the jukebox phenomenon of the 1930’s. Even in the Depression, anyone could afford a nickel for a song. When Wolfe Rabin built the Maestro with its 30-disc selection after World War II, it was a sensational breakthrough. As was the use of jet-age plastics and aluminum replacing the traditional wooden cabinets.

Gangsters owned all the hotels and casinos in Havana, under a revenue-sharing agreement with the dictator Batista. When Fidel Castro’s revolution gained popular support, one of the goals was to close the casinos, viewing gambling as exploitation of the Cuban people. Racketeers like Sam Mannarino and Norman Rothman came up with a plan to send arms to Cuba, to both sides – to the dictator Batista and to the revolutionary Castro – figuring that by doubling down they would keep the casinos. Like any business deal, they needed the weapons, they needed shipping, and they needed cash to finance the enterprise. Wolfe’s role was to make the bonds stolen from the Brockville Trust fungible by opening accounts with Swiss banks which had a reputation for discretion.

He had incredible chutzpah, along with charm and a certain savoir faire. A banker testified that Wolfe had offered to buy his bank, explaining that he had access to unlimited financing – which came from the unreported income collected from jukeboxes and other coin machines. The Senate committee investigating racketeering estimated the value of that unreported income at $2.5 billion – in 1958!

There is an unlikely and remote connection. The Kennedy Assassination Records
Act of 1992 mandated that any FBI or CIA files related to the JFK assassination be released within 25 years. Approximately 18,000 files were released in 2017-2018. William Rabin appears in many of those files, particularly the FBI investigations into the trail of bonds from the Brockville bank robbery, and the gun-running those bonds financed. These are all in the years prior to Kennedy’s election, so no, Wolfe had no connection to the assassination.

When Wolfe arrived in Chicago at the end of the 1920’s, he had a relationship with a young woman, who would later become an artist of some repute. When she got pregnant, she kept the baby, who was my first cousin. Their secret was kept for 90 years. I learned that Wolfe had grandchildren, so I have cousins I’ve never met, although we have been in touch. Much later, when Wolfe flew to Europe to negotiate the bonds deal, he travelled with a former beauty queen who was married to one of his business friends. When I spoke to her, she denied the relationship, but the FBI had tracked them together throughout the affair. It’s all in the book!