Norby Walters, 91, deceased; Music and sports agent who ran afoul of the law

Norby Walters, a booking agent for some of the country’s top disco, R&B, funk and hip-hop artists whose aggressive move in the 1980s to give college athletes secret contracts before they turned pro led to legal troubles, died on December 10 in Burbank, California. He was 91.

His son Gary confirmed the death in a residential care center.

Mr. Walters found his footing in show business through his ownership of restaurants, pizzerias, mambo joints and nightclubs, including the Norby Walters Supper Club on the east side of Manhattan, near the Copacabana, which he opened in 1966.

Two years later, he left the club business after a supper club customer shot and killed two gangsters in front of about fifty people.

“Everyone hit the floor,” Mr. Walters told The New York Times in 2016. “And this guy was very calm about it. He sat at the bar, put the gun down and waited to be taken away.”

Mr Walters closed the club shortly afterwards.

He switched to booking musical acts in nightclubs, lounges and hotels, which proved lucrative. Over the next twenty years, Norby Walters Associates (later named General Talent International) client list included Gloria Gaynor, Dionne Warwick, Patti LaBelle, Parliament-Funkadelic, the Commodores, Luther Vandross, the Four Tops, Run-DMC, Kool & de gang, Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy.

In the early eighties, Mr. Walters a new opportunity in the top echelon of college football players. With a partner, Lloyd Bloom, he founded World Sports & Entertainment. From 1984 to 1987, the two men signed dozens of athletes to secret contracts that included inducements such as cash, loans and cars in exchange for giving their agency exclusive rights to handle their future negotiations with NFL teams, according to the federal indictment from 1988 against them.

Most of the inducements violated National Collegiate Athletic Association rules and would have resulted in the athletes being ineligible to compete if their schools had been aware of them. But Mr. Walters and Mr. Bloom said their lawyers had assured them the contracts were legal even if the players were still on their college teams.

The indictment accused Mr. Walters and Mr. Bloom of conspiring with the athletes to conceal the payments by getting them to agree to postdated contracts that appeared to have been signed after their final collegiate games.

“The crime alleged that he conspired with students to steal their education, which was ridiculous considering the schools had little concern about whether they were getting an education,” Gary Walters said in a telephone interview. He added: “Norby did nothing different in the sporting world than he did in the music world: giving fair compensation to players who had been denied it.”

The government also accused the contracts of threats of violence, some of which involved gangster Michael Franzese, a member of the Colombo crime family. When most of the athletes decided they did not want Mr. Walters and Mr. Bloom to represent them but kept the cars and money anyway, the indictment accused them of threatening to break their legs and threatening their families with physical damage.

Gary Walters said his father denied threatening anyone and also denied Mr Franzese had any involvement in his sports business.

Mr. Walters and Mr. Bloom were convicted in 1989 of mail fraud and racketeering. Mr Walters was sentenced to five years in prison and Mr Bloom to three years, but neither served a day.

An appeals court overturned the racketeering convictions in 1990, ruling that the judge had not instructed the jury that the two men’s actions had been guided by their lawyers’ advice that the signatures were legal.

In 1993, the mail fraud convictions were also overturned.

‘Walters is an annoying and unreliable guy in every respect’ Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote in the 1993 ruling: “but the plaintiff has not proven that his efforts to circumvent NCAA rules amounted to mail fraud.”

Mr. Bloom was shot dead later that year at his home in Malibu, California.

By then, Mr. Walters had withdrawn from his music and sports businesses, which had been damaged by the federal investigation, and turned himself into a host of celebrity parties and poker games.

Norbert Meyer was born on April 20, 1932 in Brooklyn. His father, Yosele Chezchonovitch, a Polish immigrant, served in the Army during World War I (where he changed his name to Joseph Meyer) and later became a diamond courier and owner of a nightclub in Brooklyn and a side business in Coney Island. His mother, Florence (Golub) Meyer, was a homemaker.

“I traveled all over the country with my father’s freak shows,” Mr. Walters told The Daily News of New York in 1987. “It was all a scam. There were no freaks, the alligator boy was a poor guy with a horrible skin condition, the disembodied girl was done with mirrors, the turtle girl was a midget with a costume.

Norby studied business at Brooklyn College from 1950 to 1951 and served in the Army until 1953. He and his brother Walter took over their father’s club that year and named it Norby & Walter’s Bel Air.

When Norby greeted customers on opening night by saying, “Hi, I’m Norby,” some responded by asking, “Oh, are you Norby Walters?” When the brothers stepped outside, they noticed that the neon sign outside the club did not have the necessary ampersand. It read: ‘Norby Walters Bel Air Club.’

“I’ve been Norby Walters ever since,” he told The Atlanta Constitution in 1987. “My brother hated me for it.” His brother, who became known as Walter B. Walters, died in 2004.

Norby Walters carried the name – which he eventually legally changed – through his restaurant, club, music and sports careers, and into his final chapter.

From 1990 to 2017, he hosted an annual Oscar viewing party, which he called Night of 100 Stars, in hotel ballrooms in Beverly Hills. It attracted stars such as Jon Voight, Shirley Jones, Charles Bronson, Eva Marie Saint and Martin Landau. He also hosted a regular poker party at his Southern California apartments, where regulars included Milton Berle, Bryan Cranston, Richard Lewis, Jason Alexander, James Woods, Charles Durning, Mimi Rogers and Alex Trebek.

“It was $2 a hand,” Robert Wuhl, the actor and comedian, said by phone. “So the most anyone lost was $250 and the most anyone won was $300 to $400. It was all about the kibitzing. Buddy Hackett was coming to Kibitz.

The Oscar party wasn’t as popular as Vanity Fair magazine or Elton John, but it was more accessible. In 2016, for $1,000 per seat or $25,000 for a VIP table package, a civilian without show business credentials could be admitted and hang out with celebrities.

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.

Nearly three decades after his legal troubles forced his retirement, Mr. Walters said he understood his place in the Hollywood pantheon.

“As I always say to my wife,” he told The Times in 2016, a few days before his penultimate Oscar party: “I used to be important.”