Norby Walters

Norby Walters, a booking agent for some of the country’s top disco, R&B, funk and hip-hop artists whose aggressive leap in the 1980s into signing college athletes to secret contracts before they turned pro led to legal problems, died on Dec. 10 2024 in Burbank, Calif. Norbert Meyer came of age in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. His father, a Polish immigrant, served and boxed in the Army through World War I and then opened a bar and nightclub in the neighborhood. When Mr. Walters and his brother, Walter Meyer, took it over, they rechristened the place Norby & Walter’s Bel Air. As Mr. Walters tells the story, the sign lacked the ampersand. Norby Walters was born. In the 1950s and ’60s, Mr. Walters opened a series of mambo joints and pizzerias and a Chinese restaurant named House of Wong in Howard Beach, Queens. He soon took over a small, struggling nightclub in the shadows of Manhattan’s Copacabana on East 60th Street, calling it Norby Walters’s Supper Club. Mr. Walters says the club was forced to shut down after two mobsters began harassing an African-American patron, who returned and shot both mobsters dead. He went into the music business as a booking agent. At first, he built his roster with regional lounge acts, until a singer from New Jersey, Gloria Gaynor, soon to reach the stratosphere with “I Will Survive,” scored her first hit record with “Never Can Say Goodbye.” Mr. Walters, more a jazz and standards man than a disco man, followed the money nonetheless. He became a “chart chaser,” hustling disco-era track dates. With two young partners, Jerry Ade and Sal Michaels, he formed Norby Walters Associates, later General Talent International. The booking agency had Teena Marie, Frankie Beverly, the Bar-Kays, Peaches and Herb, the Commodores, the Four Tops, Luther Vandross, Patti LaBelle, George Clinton, Rick James, Kool and the Gang and the Gap Band. Mr. Walters had his sights set on a different kind of black entertainers: athletes. With trademark flamboyance, Mr. Walters and a young partner named Lloyd Bloom barnstormed the world of big-time college sports, flashing cash at dozens of star football players under their World Sports & Entertainment banner. When players reported being threatened over their betrayals and an associate of a rival agent was found beaten in her Chicago office, the F.B.I. initiated a criminal investigation that came to paint Mr. Walters and Mr. Bloom as mob-connected arrivistes despoiling the college game. In 1988, both were charged with racketeering and fraud (unrelated to the beating of the agent). While the convictions were later overturned on appeal — cleared of racketeering, Mr. Walters and Mr. Bloom entered conditional guilty pleas to mail fraud, also later overturned — Mr. Walters sold his share of the booking agency to Mr. Ade and came to Los Angeles for early retirement. As it happened, Mr. Bloom was already in Los Angeles, trying his hand at movie industry dealmaking. In the summer of 1993, he was shot to death in his rented Malibu home. In addition to his son Gary, Mr. Walters is survived by two other sons, Steven and Richard. His wife, Irene (Solowitz) Walters, died in 2022.