The estate of the former A+ list host/entertainer/producer/creator still makes millions of dollars a year from him stealing from music artists.

He got all the money to buy them out because of payola, but of course never spent a minute in jail.

Dick Clark
Richard Wagstaff Clark was an American television and radio personality, television producer and film actor, as well as a cultural icon who remains best known for hosting American Bandstand from 1956 to 1989

The personal business that had kept deejay and rock-and-roll tribune Alan Freed from emceeing the concert was his fight to avoid prosecution for hyping records on air in exchange for under-the-table cash. The practice came to be known as payola, connecting the word pay to Victrola, the original brand name for RCA Victor’s record player.

Payola ranged from flatout bribery – a promoter slipping a couple of hundred dollars to a deejay for playing a designated cut in heavy rotation over a specified time period – to more complex and legally nebulous arrangements involving fake songwriting credits, unearned royalty splits and hidden ownership interests in disc stamping plants, music distribution, publishing, talent management and record labels.

By the spring of 1960, Freed and his younger Philadelphia counterpart, Dick Clark, had been called to testify before the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on legislative oversight. The appearances went badly for Freed, and much better for Clark.

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When he died at 82 in Malibu this month, Richard Wagstaff Clark was a multi-millionaire dozens of times over and a universally acclaimed cultural icon. Freed, after finally pleading guilty in 1963 to two of 99 counts of commercial bribery, was sentenced to pay a $300 fine and a six-month suspended sentence, after which he was put up on charges of federal income tax evasion. He thereafter descended into a spiral of itinerant radio gigs, alcohol addiction and isolation. He died in 1965, aged 43, of cirrhosis of the liver, without a pot to piss in. – Read more here

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