The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Angelo Commito.md

category	tags	summary	updated	relations
Organized Crime	Person OrganizedCrime	Individual under FBI investigation for extortion, insider trading at MCA/Universal, narcotics trafficking, and ties to organized crime.	2026-10-15	type with start role fn partner_of Martin Bacow 1987-03 named co-subject of the same wiretap applications; calls recorded March and August 1987; the affidavit alleges a kickback on labor benefit plans 2

Angelo Commito was an individual who was under investigation in 1987 for various suspected offenses, including extortion, insider trading (MCA/Universal), the purchase and sale of narcotics/controlled substances, and the allocation and use of the proceeds of its trafficking. His name appeared in Federal Bureau of Investigation wiretap affidavits related to the investigation of Music Corporation of America and its alleged ties to organized crime.¹

Wiretaps and the benefit-plan allegation

Commito was then the president of Labor Health and Benefit Plans, Inc., a company that administers employee benefit plans for unions and private companies.² On March 12, 1987, Commito told a Chicago-area contact that he had spoken with Martin Bacow, who was making a movie that Eugene Giaquinto was going to distribute.² The affidavit alleges that agents were investigating whether Commito offered Bacow a kickback to guarantee the selection of benefit plans that Commito represented.²

The Ninth Circuit's opinion in the Tham appeal recounts that Chief Judge Peckham, sitting as a magistrate, initially authorized the April 22, 1987 wiretap application against Commito, and that the April affidavits named Commito, Bacow, real estate developer William Richard Baldwin and others.³ In the appeal of Michael Rudy Tham, a Teamsters official in San Francisco, Tham argued that the affidavit omitted a March 12, 1987 call in which Commito told Bacow that he did not want to talk to Tham or involve him in further discussions about an eye-care insurance kickback scheme. The court held that the omission was at worst negligent and that Tham had offered no proof it was intentional or reckless.³ The Ninth Circuit later reversed Judge Patel's suppression of the April wiretap, which Judge Patel had ordered in Commito's trial.⁴ On December 15, 1987 the Los Angeles Times reported Commito's indictment on labor racketeering charges, described as another organized crime figure and Bacow associate.⁵

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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. First Edition. TrineDay, 2010. ↩︎

2. Gates affidavit, paragraphs 5(c), 58 and 59 (continuation affidavit, Judge J. Spencer Letts, C.D. Cal., intercepts through September 1, 1987). https://archive.org/details/casolaro-notebooks (file Gates.pdf). ↩︎

3. United States v. Tham, 948 F.2d 1107 (9th Cir. Nov. 5, 1991). https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/571500/united-states-v-michael-rudy-tham/ ↩︎

4. United States v. Commito, 918 F.2d 95 (9th Cir. 1990), as stated in the note to United States v. Tham, 948 F.2d 1107. https://static.case.law/f2d/918/cases/0095-01.json ↩︎

5. William Knoedelseder, Stiffed: A True Story of MCA, the Music Business, and the Mafia (HarperCollins, 1993), p. 436. ↩︎