<v Speaker 1>It's a Thursday night in March of 1989, 16th Avenue South, a.k.a.

<v Speaker 2>Music Row.

<v Speaker 1>If you've never been, just picture a quiet street of

<v Speaker 1>little converted houses, and inside each of those homes is

<v Speaker 1>the entire country music business. Publishers, studios, the people who

<v Speaker 1>decide which songs you're going to be hearing on the

<v Speaker 1>radio next summer. And on that street, a young man

<v Speaker 1>steps out of a recording studio into the night.

<v Speaker 2>He's 23 years old. He's not a singer. He's not

<v Speaker 2>a star.

<v Speaker 1>His job is to keep the country charts, to count

<v Speaker 1>the numbers and tell the truth about which records are

<v Speaker 1>really selling.

<v Speaker 2>And that's the whole reason that he's about to die.

<v Speaker 2>I'll take care of Kevin Hughes. And if I can't

<v Speaker 2>take care of him, I'll take care of him.

<v Speaker 1>At 1025, that young man lay dead in the street

<v Speaker 1>on Music Row, and it would take 13 years and

<v Speaker 1>the backyard of a drug dealer in Georgia before anyone

<v Speaker 1>could prove why. ¶ ¶.

<v Speaker 2>From Hey Dad Productions, this is Nash Villains.

<v Speaker 1>I'm Jerry Broadway, and we're about to dive into a

<v Speaker 1>murder that this town spent 13 years doing everything they

<v Speaker 1>could to not look at. It was the real murder

<v Speaker 1>on Music Row.

<v Speaker 3>Music Row.

<v Speaker 4>Portions of this program were recreated using the actual words

<v Speaker 4>of the actual people who spoke them, based on local

<v Speaker 4>press reports, court documents, and 911 transcripts.

<v Speaker 2>Kevin Hughes wasn't a Nashville native.

<v Speaker 1>He grew up in Carmi, Illinois, which is a small

<v Speaker 1>town where starting in grade school, Kevin did something a

<v Speaker 1>little unusual.

<v Speaker 2>He would buy the.

<v Speaker 1>Music trade magazines and study the charts. He was fascinated

<v Speaker 1>with the charts. And then he began to make up

<v Speaker 1>his own. His mom said she would find them all

<v Speaker 1>over the house, these hand-drawn rankings numbering one to a hundred.

<v Speaker 1>Just a little boy keeping score of the whole country

<v Speaker 1>music industry from a kitchen table in Southern Illinois. Kevin

<v Speaker 1>loved the numbers. And he believed those numbers meant something.

<v Speaker 1>And so Kevin came to Nashville and studied business at

<v Speaker 1>Belmont University. And then he landed the job of his

<v Speaker 1>dreams at a magazine called Cashbox. Now, if you're under

<v Speaker 1>a certain age, you've never heard of Cashbox. But in

<v Speaker 1>the 1980s, it was one of the trade magazines that

<v Speaker 1>published the charts. And in the world of country music,

<v Speaker 1>the chart means everything. A number one song could set

<v Speaker 1>an artist up for a long, prosperous career. And the

<v Speaker 1>new guy in town who was responsible for compiling those

<v Speaker 1>charts was none other than Kevin Hughes.

<v Speaker 2>Here's what Kevin walked into.

<v Speaker 1>There was a scheme running behind the scenes at Cashbox

<v Speaker 1>and it had a name as old as the record

<v Speaker 1>business itself.

<v Speaker 2>Payola. Pay to play. Only in this situation, it was

<v Speaker 2>pay to chart.

<v Speaker 1>There was a record promoter in town named Chuck Dixon,

<v Speaker 1>and he worked with a partner named Tony D'Antonio.

<v Speaker 2>But around town, everybody just called him Tony D. Tony D.

<v Speaker 1>Was a former Vegas casino dealer who'd had the chart

<v Speaker 1>job before Kevin Hughes. And according to what came out

<v Speaker 1>at trial, Chuck Dixon and Tony D.

<v Speaker 2>Were taking money to move records up the country charts.

<v Speaker 1>And witnesses would later testify that the cost of moving

<v Speaker 1>up the chart was up to $ 2, 000 per single.

<v Speaker 2>And the formula was pretty simple. You pay, your song

<v Speaker 2>climbs the chart.

<v Speaker 1>Whether or not a single soul had ever requested it

<v Speaker 1>at a radio station or bought it at a record store. Now,

<v Speaker 1>as most crimes do, this one had collateral damage. His

<v Speaker 1>name was Sammy Sadler. Sammy said, was a rising young

<v Speaker 1>artist out of Texas who was signed to.

<v Speaker 2>A little label called Evergreen Records.

<v Speaker 1>He also had a side job as a record promoter,

<v Speaker 1>and he happened to be friends with Kevin Hughes. Now

<v Speaker 1>remember who Kevin was, that innocent little boy who made

<v Speaker 1>his own charts because he knew in his heart that

<v Speaker 1>those numbers meant something.

<v Speaker 2>Or at least they were supposed to.

<v Speaker 1>So when the honest kid takes over the charts, and

<v Speaker 1>starts noticing that songs are climbing the chart that no

<v Speaker 1>one's actually playing, much less buying, he starts asking questions.

<v Speaker 1>He starts saying out loud that he wants to clean

<v Speaker 1>this thing up. And in the first week of March 1989,

<v Speaker 1>at the Country Radio Seminar over at the Opryland Hotel,

<v Speaker 1>Kevin Hughes confronted Chuck Dixon directly about the money. And

<v Speaker 1>as you might imagine, Dixon did not take it well.

<v Speaker 1>He tells the people around him that he's going to

<v Speaker 1>handle Kevin, And if he can't handle him, well, you

<v Speaker 1>already heard the rest. March 9th, 1989. It's Thursday night.

<v Speaker 1>Kevin Hughes and Sammy Sadler are at the Evergreen Records

<v Speaker 1>Studio on 16th Avenue, right in the heart of Music Row.

<v Speaker 1>It's a little after 10 at night, just another ordinary Thursday,

<v Speaker 1>and the business of the day... is winding down. Up

<v Speaker 1>the street, a young couple is driving through the row

<v Speaker 1>in a little red Volkswagen. Bobby Lyons is giving his

<v Speaker 1>friend Allison a ride to the movies. They're on their

<v Speaker 1>way to see Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. They'll never

<v Speaker 1>make that movie. In fact, they're about to have an

<v Speaker 1>adventure of their own that they didn't plan for or want.

<v Speaker 1>We saw this guy in a ski mask holding a gun,

<v Speaker 1>and he ran funny.

<v Speaker 2>Like, Like he had a board down his back or something.

<v Speaker 1>Now that odd stiff run is going to matter more

<v Speaker 1>than anyone could possibly know at this time. Kevin and

<v Speaker 1>Sammy step out of the studio into the dark. The

<v Speaker 1>masked man is waiting. He shoots Sammy Sadler first and

<v Speaker 1>nearly kills him. Sammy goes down immediately. And then the

<v Speaker 1>gunman turns his attention to Kevin Hughes. Now, this is

<v Speaker 1>the detail that told police everything they needed to know

<v Speaker 1>about what kind of crime this actually was.

<v Speaker 2>Kevin runs.

<v Speaker 1>He zigzags up the street toward that little red Volkswagen.

<v Speaker 1>He's trying to get to the light, trying to get

<v Speaker 1>to people, just trying to get to help. And the

<v Speaker 1>man in the mask chases him down and executes him.

<v Speaker 1>A robber doesn't do that. A robber takes a wallet

<v Speaker 1>and runs. This man was on a mission, and his

<v Speaker 1>mission was to make sure that Kevin Hughes never spoke again.

<v Speaker 1>Sammy Sadler survives, barely, but Kevin Hughes, the kid who

<v Speaker 1>made his own charts, the kid who thought the numbers

<v Speaker 1>should tell the truth, well, he's dead in the street

<v Speaker 1>at 23 years old.

<v Speaker 2>And here's the cruelty on top of the cruelty.

<v Speaker 1>Because Sammy was there and survived, whispers start all around

<v Speaker 1>town that maybe he was involved. at the top of

<v Speaker 1>their suspect list. Now, there was never a shred of

<v Speaker 1>evidence for that. He'd lost a close friend and nearly

<v Speaker 1>lost his own life. But that suspicion alone was enough

<v Speaker 1>to damage his music.

<v Speaker 2>Career for years.

<v Speaker 1>The shooter didn't just take one life that night. He

<v Speaker 1>damaged another permanently. And so the case lands on the

<v Speaker 1>desk of a Metro Nashville detective named Bill Pridemore. He

<v Speaker 1>and his colleagues couldn't see the shape of it almost immediately.

<v Speaker 1>I mean, everyone on Music Row can. This wasn't a robbery.

<v Speaker 1>This was about the charts. This was about the money.

<v Speaker 1>They just couldn't prove it. And they wouldn't prove it

<v Speaker 1>for a very, very long time.

<v Speaker 3>13 years.

<v Speaker 1>That's how long this case goes cold. For 13 years,

<v Speaker 1>a killer walks free while the music industry just hums along.

<v Speaker 1>And the reason it stays cold is almost more disturbing

<v Speaker 1>than the murder itself.

<v Speaker 2>Because it isn't that nobody knew.

<v Speaker 1>Plenty of people on Music Row had a pretty good

<v Speaker 1>idea what happened and more importantly why. It's that the

<v Speaker 1>answer pointed straight at the corruption underneath the business. And

<v Speaker 1>that was a mirror that nobody in Nashville wanted to

<v Speaker 1>look into. Nobody wanted to touch this because the reason

<v Speaker 1>Kevin Hughes died was payola.

<v Speaker 2>And payola implicated abortion. a lot of people.

<v Speaker 1>Detective Pridemore and his partner, Pat Pestiglione, they have a motive,

<v Speaker 1>but they have no evidence. They have a description. It's

<v Speaker 1>a masked man with a funny run, but they have

<v Speaker 1>no name and nothing else to go on. And so

<v Speaker 1>the case goes cold. And then, the way these things

<v Speaker 1>so often happen, a break came from somewhere nobody was looking.

<v Speaker 1>Not Music Row at all. Not even Nashville in general.

<v Speaker 1>The break came from Georgia. You see, there's a drug

<v Speaker 1>dealer down in Georgia named Steve Daniel. He has a

<v Speaker 1>big operation. He's moving thousands of pounds of marijuana around

<v Speaker 1>the country along with other drugs. And his contact in

<v Speaker 1>Nashville is none other than Tony D'Antonio.

<v Speaker 2>Tony D.

<v Speaker 1>the former chart man, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, is

<v Speaker 1>all over Steve Daniels' operation. And they have his phone tapped.

<v Speaker 1>And on one of those recorded calls, Tony D'Antonio does

<v Speaker 1>something remarkable. Unprompted, he brings up the Kevin Hughes murder

<v Speaker 1>that at this time was four years in the past,

<v Speaker 1>and he hands himself.

<v Speaker 2>An alibi for it. Nobody asked. Nobody was talking about it.

<v Speaker 1>And yet there he is on tape telling Daniel exactly

<v Speaker 1>what to say.

<v Speaker 5>Anybody asks where I was on March 9th, I was

<v Speaker 5>down in Flintstone with you. And I was there till

<v Speaker 5>after the 11 o'clock news.

<v Speaker 1>Now that's not the behavior of an innocent man. An

<v Speaker 1>innocent man doesn't have a rehearsed alibi ready for a

<v Speaker 1>specific night four years gone by.

<v Speaker 2>A guilty one does.

<v Speaker 1>But a recorded voice covering his tracks isn't a conviction.

<v Speaker 2>Not yet. Here's what pulls it all together.

<v Speaker 1>That drug dealer, Steve Daniel, well, back in 1989, he

<v Speaker 1>had sold Tony D a gun, a.

<v Speaker 2>38 caliber revolver, the same kind of weapon that killed

<v Speaker 2>Kevin Hughes.

<v Speaker 1>And Tony D had test fired that gun in the

<v Speaker 1>backyard at Steve.

<v Speaker 2>Daniel's house in Georgia.

<v Speaker 1>And then, in 1993, Daniel sees the Hughes case on Crimestoppers,

<v Speaker 1>and he immediately recognizes the description.

<v Speaker 2>Of the shooter.

<v Speaker 1>That stiff, awkward, strange run that the witness saw on

<v Speaker 1>Music Row?

<v Speaker 2>Daniel knew that run.

<v Speaker 1>He'd actually tell police later on that Tony D runs

<v Speaker 1>like a duck. But the wheels of justice grind slower.

<v Speaker 1>And police can't fully get to Steve Daniels until 2002.

<v Speaker 1>And when they finally do, investigators go down to that

<v Speaker 1>Georgia property and they start digging. And out of the

<v Speaker 1>dirt where Tony D once test fired a pistol, they

<v Speaker 1>recover 13 spent projectiles. And one of them, just one,

<v Speaker 1>matches the bullets pulled from Kevin Hughes.

<v Speaker 2>13 years.

<v Speaker 1>And the entire case turns on a bullet buried in

<v Speaker 1>a backyard three states away. And the man who ordered it,

<v Speaker 1>Chuck Dixon, the promoter who said he'd handle Kevin Hughes,

<v Speaker 1>he never sees a courtroom. Dixon dies in 2001 of

<v Speaker 1>natural causes, roughly a month before the Nashville police plan

<v Speaker 1>to arrest him on payola charges. He took his part

<v Speaker 1>of this crime to the grave. But Tony D is

<v Speaker 1>still very much alive. In fact, he's gone back to

<v Speaker 1>doing what he did before Nashville. He's in Vegas, dealing cards.

<v Speaker 1>In July of 2002, a grand jury in Nashville indicts

<v Speaker 1>Richard Frank D'Antonio for the first-degree murder of Kevin Hughes

<v Speaker 1>and for the shooting of Sammy Sadler. Nashville detectives fly

<v Speaker 1>out to Las Vegas, Vegas police make the arrest, and

<v Speaker 1>Tony D is extradited back to Tennessee to stand trial

<v Speaker 1>for something he had gotten away with for 13 years.

<v Speaker 1>In September 2003, Tony D stands trial. And that trial

<v Speaker 1>does something that Nashville had avoided for over a decade.

<v Speaker 2>It pulls the curtain all the way back on Music Row.

<v Speaker 1>Witness after witness testifies to the whole machine, the bribes,

<v Speaker 1>the pay-to-chart scheme, the money that decided which songs America

<v Speaker 1>thought it wanted.

<v Speaker 2>And at the center of it, the motive, well, stated.

<v Speaker 1>Plainly, I mean, the word around town was that Kevin

<v Speaker 1>was about to go to the press and he was

<v Speaker 1>going to name names.

<v Speaker 2>And that was it.

<v Speaker 1>That was Kevin Hughes' death sentence.

<v Speaker 2>Not a robbery, not a grudge.

<v Speaker 1>A 23-year-old kid was murdered in the street because he

<v Speaker 1>wanted the charts to tell the truth. But the truth

<v Speaker 1>was going to cost too many people too much money.

<v Speaker 2>On September 25, 2003.

<v Speaker 1>14 years after that night on 16th Avenue, the jury

<v Speaker 1>convicts Richard Tony D. D'Antonio of first-degree murder and of

<v Speaker 1>assault with intent.

<v Speaker 2>In the shooting of Sammy Sadler. He's sentenced to life

<v Speaker 2>in prison at 56 years old. Tony D.

<v Speaker 1>Dies behind bars in September of 2014 of natural causes

<v Speaker 1>at a Nashville prison facility. If anyone else was involved

<v Speaker 1>in the crime, he'd never said a word. And what

<v Speaker 1>about the people he left in his wake? Well, Sammy

<v Speaker 1>Sadler carried his injuries deep into the 90s, and he

<v Speaker 1>intentionally stayed off the radar because of the suspicion that

<v Speaker 1>followed him everywhere. He had multiple surgeries during the 90s,

<v Speaker 1>and he suffered PTSD for years over the shooting and

<v Speaker 1>the fallout that followed.

<v Speaker 2>In 2004, Sammy decided.

<v Speaker 1>To resurrect his music career and released an album. The

<v Speaker 1>title track from that album went top 10 on the

<v Speaker 1>Texas charts and spent seven weeks at number one on

<v Speaker 1>the European charts. He followed that with another album in 2009,

<v Speaker 1>and in 2021, he released an album titled 1989, which

<v Speaker 1>was a tribute to the era in which his career

<v Speaker 1>was halted because he walked out of the wrong door

<v Speaker 1>on the wrong street on the wrong night. Kevin's mother, Barbara,

<v Speaker 1>the one who used to find those hand-drawn charts all

<v Speaker 1>around the house, Well, she lived long enough to see

<v Speaker 1>her son's killer be convicted and passed away in 2020.

<v Speaker 2>And there's one.

<v Speaker 1>More odd note to this story, and it's true, but

<v Speaker 1>it may not be what you think. Ten years after

<v Speaker 1>Kevin Hughes was murdered, a song came out called Murder

<v Speaker 1>on Music Row. Larry Cordle wrote it. George Strait and

<v Speaker 1>Alan Jackson made it famous. But that song isn't.

<v Speaker 2>About Kevin Hughes. It's a lament song.

<v Speaker 1>It mourns traditional country music being killed off by the

<v Speaker 1>chase for pop crossover and the almighty dollar.

<v Speaker 2>It's a metaphor. And yet, there it was.

<v Speaker 1>A song by two Nashville giants playing on every country

<v Speaker 1>radio station in America describing a killing on Music Row

<v Speaker 1>over money. While a real murder with a real body

<v Speaker 1>went unspoken for for 13 years. Sometimes this town writes

<v Speaker 1>its own confessions and doesn't even know it. Nashville sells

<v Speaker 1>a dream and the dream's pretty simple. If the song

<v Speaker 1>is good enough, this town would carry you all the

<v Speaker 1>way to the promised land. Kevin Hughes believed in that dream.

<v Speaker 1>He just wanted the charts to be an accurate reflection

<v Speaker 1>of the actual popularity of the songs. And that belief

<v Speaker 1>is what got him killed. And it took 13 years,

<v Speaker 1>a wiretap, and a bullet dug out of a backyard

<v Speaker 1>in Georgia to say so out loud. And the music

<v Speaker 1>kept playing the whole time.

<v Speaker 2>Because it always does.

<v Speaker 1>That's the thing about Nashville. The song never stops, even

<v Speaker 1>when it should. I'm Jerry Broadway. Thanks for listening. I'll

<v Speaker 1>see you next time on Nashvillains.