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| Law Enforcement & Legal |
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Federal prosecutor on the Justice Department's organized-crime investigation of MCA in the 1980s, who according to Cheri Seymour lost his job for refusing to drop it. |
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2026-05-14 | 2026-09-22 |
Marvin Rudnick was a federal prosecutor who, according to Cheri Seymour, supervised the Federal Bureau of Investigation wiretap investigation of Music Corporation of America. He, along with FBI agent Thomas Gates and Richard Stavin of the Organized Crime Strike Force, believed that MCA had been penetrated by organized crime, based on the wiretaps.1
Rudnick subsequently lost his job when he refused to drop the investigation into MCA. In her account the wiretaps were later sealed by the Department of Justice, and no case against MCA or its executives followed; the investigation did produce the tax-evasion conviction of the MCA middleman Sal Pisello, affirmed by the Ninth Circuit in 1989.2 The Los Angeles Organized Crime Strike Force was disbanded, and Rudnick's efforts to expose the alleged organized crime penetration of MCA were thwarted.1
After losing his job, Rudnick eventually had part of his story told in the 1993 book, Stiffed: A True Story of MCA, The Music Business, and the Mafia by William Knoedelseder.1
Footnotes
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Seymour, Cheri. The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro’s Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal. First Edition. TrineDay, 2010. ↩︎
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United States v. Pisello, 877 F.2d 762 (9th Cir. 1989). https://openjurist.org/877/f2d/762 ↩︎