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10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Richard Stavin.md
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@ -5,18 +5,27 @@ tags:
- Lawyer
- FBI
- LawEnforcement
summary: "Justice Department organized-crime strike force attorney in Los Angeles who, according to Cheri Seymour, supervised the FBI wiretaps on MCA and quit when the matter was dropped."
summary: "Los Angeles Organized Crime Strike Force prosecutor who took over the record-industry payola case and investigated MCA home video president Eugene Giaquinto, and who resigned in May 1989."
relations:
- type: employed_by
with: "[[Department of Justice]]"
role: "Los Angeles Organized Crime Strike Force"
end: 1989-05
fn: 3
- type: investigated
with: "[[Eugene Giaquinto]]"
fn: 3
- type: investigated
with: "[[Music Corporation of America]]"
fn: 1
created: 2025-08-05
updated: 2026-09-22
---
[[Richard Stavin]] was a member of the Justice Department's [[Los Angeles]] Organized Crime Strike Force. According to [[Cheri Seymour]], he supervised the [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]] wiretaps on [[Music Corporation of America|MCA]]. Along with the prosecutor [[Marvin Rudnick]] and FBI agent [[Thomas Gates]], Stavin believed that MCA had been penetrated by organized crime, based on the wiretaps.[^1]
[[Richard Stavin]] was a prosecutor with the [[Department of Justice|Justice Department]]'s Organized Crime Strike Force in [[Los Angeles]]. He was put in charge of the investigation of payola in the record business, whose target was the promoter Joe Isgro, after [[Marvin Rudnick]] was taken off it, and he ran the two-year strike force and [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]] investigation of suspected labor racketeering involving [[Eugene Giaquinto]], president of [[Music Corporation of America|MCA]]'s home video division; agents attempted to tap Giaquinto's MCA office telephone in September 1987. After a dressing-down by [[Michael DeFeo]] and [[David Margolis]] of the strike force in Washington in December 1988, and the assignment of the department's senior litigation counsel, William Lynch, to take over the payola case, Stavin resigned in May 1989, leaving both cases unresolved. "I was convinced I was about to become the next Marvin Rudnick," he said. Rudnick was removed from the department that July.[^3]
Stavin quit his job after the [[Department of Justice|DOJ]] sealed the wiretaps and brought no case against MCA or its executives; the investigation did produce the tax-evasion conviction of the MCA middleman [[Sal Pisello|Salvatore Pisello]], affirmed by the Ninth Circuit in 1989.[^2] The [[Los Angeles Organized Crime Strike Force]] was disbanded following these events.[^1]
According to [[Cheri Seymour]], Stavin, Rudnick and the FBI agent [[Thomas Gates]] believed on the basis of wiretaps that MCA had been penetrated by organized crime, the wiretaps were sealed, and the [[Los Angeles Organized Crime Strike Force]] was disbanded.[^1] The investigation produced the tax-evasion conviction of the MCA middleman [[Sal Pisello|Salvatore Pisello]], affirmed by the Ninth Circuit in 1989.[^2]
### Footnotes
[^1]: Seymour, Cheri. *The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro’s Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal*. First Edition. TrineDay, 2010.
[^1]: Seymour, Cheri. *The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro's Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal.* TrineDay, 2010.
[^2]: *United States v. Pisello,* 877 F.2d 762 (9th Cir. 1989). https://openjurist.org/877/f2d/762
[^3]: Knoedelseder, William. *Stiffed: A True Story of MCA, the Music Business, and the Mafia.* HarperCollins, 1993, pp. xix, 435-448, 461-462. Read through the archive.org BookReader search, item stiffedtruestory00knoe.