The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/John St. John.md

category	tags	summary	updated
Law Enforcement & Legal	Person	During the process of opening a grand jury investigation into the mob's involvement in the motion picture industry, St.	2026-10-15

John St. John was a Detective with the Los Angeles Police Department's Organized Crime Intelligence Division (OCID). He was implicated in the Federal Bureau of Investigation wiretap investigation into alleged organized crime penetration of Music Corporation of America.¹

Martin Bacow boasted to Eugene Giaquinto that St. John's status within OCID allowed him to obtain intelligence reports on organized crime figures across the nation, which Bacow could then pass along to Giaquinto. St. John was allegedly Bacow's direct contact at LAPD-OCID.¹

During the process of opening a grand jury investigation into the mob's involvement in the motion picture industry, St. John called Bacow and told him he would listen, not give up too much, and try to find out what the investigators were looking at to inform Bacow. Bacow then called Giaquinto, who responded that he would call Edwin Meese and get the investigation shut down.¹ The Los Angeles wiretap affidavit lists as a separate investigation whether St. John, assigned to the Organized Crime Intelligence Division, was obstructing the administration of justice by revealing information about investigations to Bacow.² In an intercepted call of July 13, 1987, Bacow said that the "guy downtown" had told him that a permit application had to go through a small-town office or the sheriff's office. The affiant bracketed "guy downtown" as St. John, and the call concerned a gun permit that Giaquinto said he was seeking.³ In a separate intercept Bacow said that their friend St. John was in charge of the whole country, which the affiant read as a reference to St. John's position gathering La Cosa Nostra intelligence for the Los Angeles Police Department nationwide.⁴

Despite the wiretap information and related investigation reportedly gathering enough evidence to justify seeking an indictment against St. John, Giaquinto, and Bacow for obstruction of justice, no indictment was ever issued. The prosecution reportedly did not go forward because no one at the Department of Justice in Washington D.C. wanted all the wiretap affidavits in the case to be released.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. First Edition. TrineDay, 2010. ↩︎

2. Gates affidavit, the section listing the investigations in Los Angeles, following paragraph 155. https://archive.org/details/casolaro-notebooks (file Gates.pdf). ↩︎

3. Gates affidavit, paragraph 41 (July 13, 1987 calls). Same source as note 2. ↩︎

4. Gates affidavit, paragraphs 23 through 25 and the paragraph following the Wasserman and Villano discussion. Same source as note 2. ↩︎