30 lines
2.7 KiB
Markdown
30 lines
2.7 KiB
Markdown
---
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category: "Organized Crime"
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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: 2
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- type: investigated
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with: "[[Richard Stavin]]"
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reverse: true
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role: "strike force labor racketeering investigation"
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fn: 2
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created: 2025-08-05
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updated: 2026-09-22
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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.[^2]
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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.[^2]
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According to [[Cheri Seymour]], Giaquinto sat on the board of [[Robert Booth Nichols]]'s holding company, [[Meridian International Logistics]], which was under investigation as a source of funding for narcotics trafficking; FBI wiretaps recorded communications between the two men, and both were described in the intercepts as having a close working relationship with the Justice Department.[^1]
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### Footnotes
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[^1]: Seymour, Cheri. *The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro's Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal.* TrineDay, 2010. Sole source for the Meridian board seat, the narcotics-funding investigation, the Nichols intercepts and the Justice Department relationship.
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[^2]: 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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