37 lines
5.7 KiB
Markdown
37 lines
5.7 KiB
Markdown
---
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category: "Business & Finance"
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tags:
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- Person
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- OrganizedCrime
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- MCA
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summary: "President of MCA's home entertainment division whose calls with the labor negotiator Marty Bacow were wiretapped in a 1987-89 strike force inquiry; he was never prosecuted."
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relations:
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- type: employed_by
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with: "[[Music Corporation of America]]"
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role: "president, Home Entertainment division"
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fn: 1
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- type: director_of
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with: "[[Meridian International Logistics]]"
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role: "board member, per Seymour and Spy; resigned after the FBI investigation became known"
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fn: 3
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created: 2025-08-05
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updated: 2026-10-08
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---
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Eugene F. Giaquinto was the president of the home entertainment division of [[Music Corporation of America|MCA]]. He was a subject of a two-year investigation by the [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]] and the [[Department of Justice|Justice Department]]'s [[Los Angeles]] Organized Crime Strike Force into suspected labor racketeering in the film industry, overseen by the strike force attorney [[Richard Stavin]]. In September 1987 MCA security officers discovered an attempt by agents to tap Giaquinto's office telephone and wrongly blamed it on the prosecutor [[Marvin Rudnick]]. The investigators did tap the telephone of Giaquinto's confidant Marty Bacow, a labor negotiator with ties to the Teamsters president Jackie Presser, and Giaquinto was one of the people Bacow talked to most.[^1]
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A newspaper report said the FBI believed Giaquinto had passed MCA funds annually to [[Edward Sciandra]], underboss of the [[Bufalino Crime Family]], and had a longstanding relationship with [[John Gotti]] of the [[Gambino Crime Family]]. Stavin resigned from the strike force in May 1989 with the case unresolved. Giaquinto was never prosecuted, and as of 1993 the wiretaps of his conversations with Bacow remained sealed; he then ran a video production and duplication firm in the San Fernando Valley.[^1]
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The 1987 continuation wiretap affidavit of the FBI agent [[Thomas Gates]] names Giaquinto and [[Joseph Garofalo]] as persons committing offenses "involving the sale and possession of controlled substances," and lists among the matters the intercepts were to establish "The source of funding for the purchasing of narcotics/controlled substances and the allocation and use of the proceeds from its trafficking."[^2] [[Cheri Seymour]] wrote that Giaquinto sat on the board of [[Robert Booth Nichols]]'s holding company, [[Meridian International Logistics]], and that he resigned and returned his stock certificates when he and Nichols learned of the FBI investigation; a 1992 account of hers puts the shares at 10,000.[^3] John Connolly reported in [[Spy (magazine)|Spy]] in January 1993 that Giaquinto sat on the board of the parent company of Meridian Arms, left MCA and the board when reports of the investigation surfaced, and had proposed to [[Jack Valenti]] that the [[Motion Picture Association of America]] hire Nichols for anti-piracy work in Asia.[^4] Seymour reproduced reports she attributed to [[John Cohen]], an investigator for the [[House Committee on the Judiciary|House Judiciary Committee]], in which Gates is recorded as saying that the wiretaps showed a close working relationship between the MCA board and high-level Justice Department officials, and that Giaquinto told Bacow he would call Attorney General [[Edwin Meese]] and have the FBI investigation of MCA stopped.[^5]
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### Wiretaps
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The affidavit records a July 20, 1987 call in which Giaquinto told Nichols that MCA stock had fallen four points, and a July 23 call in which Giaquinto told Nichols that [[ZZZZ Best]] was a money-laundering operation for heroin money and asked what to do if Nichols's name came up.[^2] An excerpt of Gates's affidavit reproduced in Meridian's Ninth Circuit brief describes agents investigating whether others were using extortionate practices "to ensure that Eugene Giaquinto retains his position as the president of Home Entertainment for MCA/Universal, Inc.," and whether Giaquinto, Garofalo, Bacow and Nichols bought or sold stock by manipulative practices.[^6]
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### Footnotes
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[^1]: Knoedelseder, William. *Stiffed: A True Story of MCA, the Music Business, and the Mafia.* HarperCollins, 1993, pp. xvii, 434-448, 464. Read through the archive.org BookReader search, item stiffedtruestory00knoe.
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[^2]: Affidavit of Special Agent Thomas G. Gates in support of an application to continue interception of wire communications of Martin Bacow, Eugene Giaquinto, Joseph Garofalo, Robert Nichols and others, before Judge J. Spencer Letts, C.D. Cal. (continuation affidavit citing intercepts through September 1, 1987), Danny Casolaro papers, folder "Gates." https://archive.org/details/casolaro-notebooks (file Gates.pdf), paragraphs 5, 69 and 79.
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[^3]: Seymour, Cheri. *The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro's Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal.* TrineDay, 2010, pp. 351 and 356; Seymour, "VORTEX," February 24, 1992. https://archive.org/details/VORTEXDocument . Seymour, *The Last Circle,* p. 356, paraphrases the narcotics-funding wording as describing Meridian International Logistics; the affidavit places it under the controlled-substance offenses of Giaquinto and Garofalo.
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[^4]: Connolly, John. "The Story That Killed Danny Casolaro." *Spy,* January 1993. https://archive.org/details/SpyMagazine
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[^5]: Seymour, Cheri. *The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro's Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal.* TrineDay, 2010, pp. 347-349 ("Report No. 5" and "Report No. 6").
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[^6]: Appellant's Opening Brief, *Meridian International Logistics, Inc. v. Gates,* No. 90-55281 (9th Cir.), certificate dated June 27, 1990 (case removed as CV 89-4383 RG (Kx), C.D. Cal.). https://archive.org/details/MeridianV.Gates
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