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records. Levy, for his part, gave the most famous payola fall guy, pioneering DJ Alan Freed, a quarter of the stock in Roulette. After congressional hearings in 1960, payola was made its own crime, separate from bribery. But the law was so weak that no one was convicted for decades, and the U.S. Federal Communications Commission specifically exempted “social exchanges,” a loophole that essentially killed the law’s usefulness. What’s worse, the payola exposures and the new law made the record executives get smarter. Instead of paying off radio programmers directly, they started funneling money to outside contractors called independent promoters, who did what they needed to do with cash, drugs, and hookers, leaving plausible deniability for everyone at the record firms’ headquarters in New York and Los Angeles.

Joe Isgro, one of the most powerful independent promoters and a former Levy employee, bragged of taking in $10 million a year to break records on the radio, out of a reported $60 million paid to the core group of promoters known as the Network. Isgro’s independent record label released hits by James Brown and other R&B acts, and his clout extended to Hollywood, where he served as a producer of the movie Hoffa. In real life, he didn’t play one of the good guys. Isgro was charged with racketeering and payola offenses in 1989. Employees of three different radio stations testified that they had accepted cocaine, cash, or both from Isgro’s business in exchange for airplay. The case was strong but was tossed out because the prosecution blew it: They hadn’t disclosed contradictory testimony from the trial of one of their many witnesses. Isgro returned to living the high life in Beverly Hills until he was sentenced to more than four years in federal prison in the fall of 2000 for loan-sharking. As part of that case, the FBI stated that he was a soldier in the Gambino family of the mob, an accusation Isgro’s lawyer denied.

How big a problem were the independent promoters for the record industry? A yearly tribute of $60 million might seem easily affordable to companies with collective sales of $15 billion. But profit margins are thin in the music business. After a failed boycott of the Network served to make the promoters only more essential to the business, top label CBS Records, later bought by Sony, was spending an estimated $17 million a year on promoters, according to Rolling Stone. In a decent year, that was more than 10 percent of the label’s pretax profit. In a bad year, it was

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