Eugene Giaquinto

Eugene F. Giaquinto was the president of the home entertainment division of MCA. He was a subject of a two-year investigation by the FBI and the 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

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

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.²