You Don’t Know Mo

Mo Levy, arguably the most notorious record executive in music history, held Tommy James off the ground by his collar. Dangling from his balcony, the rock ‘n roll icon behind legendary tunes like Crimson & Clover, Mony Mony and more than twenty other Gold singles could hear the New York traffic below and feel the wind blowing in his face.

Do you know what I did to the bum who killed my brother? I fucking took a knife and stuck it in his fucking stomach and twisted it. I stuck it in his fucking stomach until his guts came out.

James began to laugh. Yeah, he was high on a cocktail of pills and booze, but he was also used to Mo threatening him by this point and he knew the stories. Just a few years before, Mo had arranged for an off duty cop to pull over Jimmie Rodgers after he repeatedly demanded his unpaid royalties. The cop left him with a fractured skull and in need of multiple surgeries.

Eventually, high atop the NYC balcony, Mo let Tommy go. He packed up the Browning .22 magnum machine gun and the other dozen or so guns lying around the apartment, and left for his farm upstate. James knew he would never see his royalties. Roulette Records, the label Mo owned and a front for the Genovese crime family, had made Tommy James and 40 million was apparently the cost of doing business.

Morris “Mo” Levy was once described by Billboard as "one of the record industry's most controversial and flamboyant players." Variety called him “The Octopus” for having such far-reaching control in every area of the industry. But it was his close ties to the mob families of New York and New Jersey that would eventually earn him his most lasting nickname - “The Godfather of the American Music Business.”

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