In the summer of 1896, six men sat down for lunch at the Holland House hotel in Manhattan and carved up American theater. They signed their agreement in triplicate, in front of a witness, and called it what it was: a syndicate.

That lunch is the opening scene of Power and Greed: Monopolies, Mergers, and Cartels on the American Stage, out October 15 from Bloomsbury's Methuen Drama imprint. Its author, Spencer Weber Waller, teaches antitrust law at Loyola University Chicago and spent eight years practicing, including as a federal organized crime prosecutor. He stumbled onto the subject during the pandemic, when his wife — who works on the business side of theater — asked if he'd ever heard of the Theatrical Syndicate.

"Syndicate really means cartel," Waller told me on the Decibel & Docket podcast. What he found in the archives was a century-long pattern: whoever controls booking and venues controls the business, and the law almost always shows up late. The book lands just months after a Manhattan jury found Live Nation liable for monopolization — and while a federal judge is still deciding what to do about it.

The Syndicate joined three partnerships: Klaw & Erlanger, Hayman & Frohman, and Nixon & Zimmerman. Together they were producers, bookers and theater operators. They pooled profits and centralized booking for every house they owned, leased or represented.

The front man was Abraham Lincoln Erlanger, a former opera-glass vendor from Buffalo who, per Waller, kept a house full of Napoleon busts. His partner Marc Klaw was a lawyer. Charles Frohman was the tastemaker who imported Peter Pan and later died on the doomed Lusitania luxury ocean liner, famously torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat on May 7, 1915.

The Syndicate started with 33 theaters. At its peak it owned, leased or booked nearly 2,000 across North America — including the one-nighters and split weeks that connected big-city engagements into a profitable route. You couldn't route a national tour without them. And the Syndicate dealt all-or-nothing: book one of its houses and you booked none of anyone else's.

"They controlled all the bottlenecks, all the gateways, all the essential facilities," Waller said. "They're happy to rent you a theater. It just was all or nothing."

It wasn't pure villainy, and Waller is careful to say so. Before the Syndicate, managers cut deals on park benches in Union Square and on cocktail napkins. Tours collapsed and casts got stranded. One producer testified that Erlanger booked him a 27-week national tour in seven minutes. "They did a service," Waller said, "but they exacted a very heavy cost for it."

The cost: booking fees of 5% to 10%, sometimes demands for a slice of the gross or a hidden stake in the show. Holdouts got blacklisted or handed deliberately ruinous routes — Philadelphia to East Liverpool, Ohio, to Dowagiac, Michigan, to Charlotte. When David Belasco crossed them, the Syndicate mounted a knockoff of his hit shows and sent it into his tour cities ahead of him.

The challenge came from Syracuse. Lee, Sam and J.J. Shubert were sons of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who started out shining shoes and selling programs outside the Wieting Opera House. They began as a small Syndicate client with a handful of upstate houses. When Erlanger demanded they stop acquiring theaters, they refused, and he cut them off.

The blacklist backfired. With backing from Jewish businessmen in Syracuse and Cincinnati, the Shuberts built, bought and leased their own circuit, and sold it with an "open door" pitch: anyone could book with them, Syndicate client or not. By 1910 the two sides controlled roughly the same number of theaters. Sam, the family's boy genius, relished the fight. But he died in 1905 at 30, after his train to a Pittsburgh court date against the Syndicate slammed into a munitions freight.

The rivals fought and colluded in turns. In 1907 they joined forces to invade vaudeville, which was carved up between B.F. Keith and E.F. Albee's eastern circuit and Martin Beck's Orpheum in the West. Their joint venture, Advanced Vaudeville, overpaid for European headliners and hemorrhaged money. Within a year they sold out for $250,000 and a promise to stay out of vaudeville for a decade.

"All the stuff we're talking about is stuff that if it happened today, you'd go to jail," Waller said. "It's straight up criminal cartel type things." In 1913 the two camps openly agreed to raise top New York ticket prices from $2.50 to $3.00, and J.J. Shubert told reporters the point was to stop the expensive fighting.

Once the Shuberts won, the open door quietly closed. By the late 1920s they owned or operated more than 100 theaters, booked hundreds more, and ran their own ticket brokerages. They were long suspected of skimming off hot tickets for resale, a practice the trade called "ice," though no Shubert was ever charged. The brothers themselves hated each other so much that J.J. moved into a penthouse across 44th Street, and they communicated by messenger. Waller's broader point: the challenger that breaks a monopoly tends to become the next one.

How did all this happen in the open, two decades after the Sherman Act? The courts let it. The federal antitrust law reaches only interstate trade and commerce, and for half a century the theater industry argued it was neither.

In 1907 a New York grand jury indicted the Syndicate for criminal conspiracy, with the Shuberts and Belasco among the witnesses. Judge Otto Rosalsky tossed it, ruling that plays were not commodities and running theaters was not trade. In 1922 the Supreme Court's Federal Baseball decision held that ballgames were local exhibitions, not interstate commerce. The next year the Court suggested touring vaudeville might be different — then let a lower court's ruling for the vaudeville circuits stand.

"I think the court screwed up," Waller said. The ambiguity turned antitrust into a cost of doing business. Suits got settled cheap, with no admission of guilt, and the Syndicate and the Shuberts sued each other under the same laws when it suited them. The Federal Trade Commission spent years investigating vaudeville's company union and blacklists in the 1920s, then concluded it had no jurisdiction.

Meanwhile the monopolists had real competition only from technology. Movies, radio and the Depression did more damage than any regulator. Vaudeville died. The road collapsed from 392 touring companies in 1900 to 78 by 1928. The Syndicate faded with Erlanger's death in 1930, and the Shuberts limped through receivership as the last national theater company standing.

The government finally moved after it broke up the Hollywood studios in the 1948 Paramount case. To find out what happens, you’ll have to read Power and Greed: Monopolies, Mergers, and Cartels on the American Stage. Wallers argues in the book that antitrust is still a pressing issue in entertainment, drawing upon his own history with the concert business going back to 1994. As a junior law professor, he went on CNN's Inside Business to talk about Pearl Jam's fight with Ticketmaster. Afterward, he writes, Ticketmaster's Fred Rosen — an alum of his law school — called the dean demanding Waller be fired.

The 2010 Ticketmaster–Live Nation merger, approved under the Obama administration with conditions, is where Waller sees the modern echo of the Syndicate. Venue control, booking and ticketing sit under one roof, and exclusivity is the enforcement mechanism. The DOJ went back to court in 2019 over violations of that decree. "They didn't keep their promise," Waller said. "That's part of why they got sued this time."

This time ran differently than anyone expected. The Trump Justice Department, which inherited the 2024 case, settled in the first week of trial on terms Waller calls lenient — a few exclusive venue contracts unwound, no breakup. More than 30 states refused to sign on and kept trying the case, with antitrust litigator Jeffrey Kessler, Waller's former co-author, leading on short notice. On April 15, a jury found Live Nation liable for monopolization.

Waller doesn't hide his discomfort with how the federal settlement came together, citing reported White House meetings with Live Nation leadership that trial lawyers weren't told about. "I don't like the idea," he said, if the reporting holds up. [Add Live Nation response / appeal status.]

Judge Arun Subramanian still has to decide whether the federal settlement serves the public interest and what remedy fits the verdict. Waller's answer is structural. "The least possible way to do that is make them promise again for the third time or more that they won't abuse their power," he said. "The way to best achieve that is to break them up." His book ends on the same note: thirty years of monopoly is enough.

Asked whether Live Nation is bigger than the Syndicate and the Shuberts combined, Waller split the answer. Consumers today have more ways to spend a night out than theatergoers did in 1905. But inside the market for big arena and amphitheater shows, he thinks Live Nation's power is, if anything, greater. Any appeal would run through the Second Circuit, and possibly the Supreme Court. "That's the Super Bowl of antitrust," he said.

Waller's book isn't a morality play. His entertainment barons are businessmen solving real problems — stranded casts, chaotic routing, boom-and-bust economics — who discovered that controlling the chokepoint paid better than competing. The law caught the Shuberts only after movies and the Depression had already shrunk them. Waller's argument is that the concert business shouldn't have to wait that long.

Power and Greed: Monopolies, Mergers, and Cartels on the American Stage by Spencer Weber Waller (Methuen Drama/Bloomsbury) publishes October 15 and is available for preorder at powerandgreed.com. Hear the full conversation on the Decibel & Docket podcast.