Just over 28 years ago, Taylor Swift was a precocious Montessori preschooler growing up on a Pennsylvania Christmas tree farm, and Eddie Vedder was the Most Important Musician in America, Kurt Cobain having bequeathed to him the (unwanted) title with his suicide that spring.When the Justice Department dropped its investigation in 1995, it had nothing to do with the merits of its case, and everything to do with unalloyed political corruption, meted out in classic bipartisan fashion by a menacing confederation of lobbyists, propagandists, shady characters, and one extremely powerful former Texas senator who is currently promoting a book called The Myth of American Inequality.And as you might expect, the saga begins long before Seattle invented “grunge.” TICKETMASTER’S CONQUEST OF THE CONCERT BUSINESS dates back to 1981, when it came under the control of one Burton Kanter, a famous Chicago tax attorney whose celebrity clients ranged from the band Creedence Clearwater Revival to Chicago’s Pritzker family, which had originally acquired the business with possible intentions of outfitting a New Orleans stadium it controlled with computerized ticketing systems.It is worth noting here that Kanter was swimming in underworld connections—which would become something of a leitmotif in the Ticketmaster tale—and that he had just five years earlier been indicted on charges stemming from his co-ownership of a CIA-connected Bahamas tax shelter called Castle Bank whose clients included the Las Vegas bootlegger-turned-developer Moe Dalitz, Ohio’s famed mobster Morris Kleinman, and various Teamsters pension funds, along with Hugh Hefner and Bob Guccione.(Kanter beat the charges, mostly because of an unbelievable blunder the IRS committed when he countersued the agency, though a tax court judge later ruled him guilty of having orchestrated a complicated kickback scheme.)"