The truth will out is one of those maxims that puts an asterisk on family lore. The mechanism of its outing can be a commercial genetic test, a lost and found letter, or—in the case of writer and Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker David Rabinovitch—his own dogged curiosity.
For Rabinovitch, who lived in Marin County for decades (and now spends his time in Baja and the Pacific Northwest), the story starts with a legendary uncle who was essentially excised from his family history—until now.
There were breadcrumbs, however, and over a period of years, Rabinovitch was able to reconstruct a portrait of his charismatic uncle, Wolfe Rabin, which is captivating and ultimately tragic. The result is Jukebox Empire: The Mob and the Dark Side of the American Dream, an eminently readable accounting of an aspiring tycoon who partners with a racketeer to build a jukebox that makes millions, then takes the fall for the largest money laundering scheme in history.
Caught between the Mob and the feds in a plot to save the casinos in Havana from Castro’s revolution, Wolfe Rabin pulls the biggest money-laundering scheme in history, but his hubris leads to the conspiracy unraveling in a sensational trial.
Rabinovitch will appear at Corte Madera’s Book Passage next Monday.
“I’ve been incredibly curious to have a close relative, my father’s brother, who we never met. So it starts with that. And I have an incredible curiosity in all the work that I do,” says Rabinovitch, who’s no stranger to research-driven deep dives. His mini-series, The Secret Files of the Inquisition, required working with thousands of archival files relating to the Catholic church—in Latin. For Jukebox Empire, Rabinovitch obtained a “huge dump of files” declassified by the FBI. “Journalistically, it was very similar,” he notes.
“I’m like a dog with a bone that way; I can’t let go,” says the author. “But in terms of motivation, the deeper I got into it, the more incredible it became.”
Naturally, as a filmmaker, Rabinovitch initially intended to tell his uncle’s story onscreen. “I was writing a screenplay, and the more I got into it, I said, I can’t do justice to the material, the limitations of a screenplay, because screenplays are about what you leave out,” he recalls.
Now that the book is out and garnering raves (“…A scandalous, entertaining and worthwhile read” –Winnipeg Free Press), Rabinovitch and an entertainment industry colleague are working on bringing the story to a streamer near you.
“I think ultimately he’s a tragic figure. For someone who had so much promise, so much extraordinary ability,” says Rabinovitch. “He was one of those people, I think, that just lit up a room whenever he came into it. He turned his focus on somebody, and he had that charisma and that ability that made people want to believe him and want to buy into what he was promoting. So there’s kind of a turn. It’s a long, slippery slope, and I think he went down.”
When asked how he thinks his uncle would react to the project, Rabinovitch laughs, saying, “He’d probably want royalties from the book.”
David Rabinovitch will appear in support of ‘Jukebox Empire: The Mob and the Dark Side of the American Dream,’ at 4pm, Monday, May 13 at Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera.
