---
category: Organized Crime
created: 2025-08-05
relations:
- fn: 1
  role: president, Home Entertainment division
  type: employed_by
  with: '[[Music Corporation of America]]'
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.
tags:
- Person
- OrganizedCrime
- MCA
updated: 2026-09-23
---

Eugene F. Giaquinto was the president of the home entertainment division of [MCA](/organizations/music-corporation-of-america/). He was a subject of a two-year investigation by the [FBI](/organizations/federal-bureau-of-investigation/) and the [Justice Department](/organizations/department-of-justice/)'s [Los Angeles](/places/los-angeles/) Organized Crime Strike Force into suspected labor racketeering in the film industry, overseen by the strike force attorney [Richard Stavin](/people/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](/people/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](/people/edward-sciandra/), underboss of the [Bufalino Crime Family](/organizations/bufalino-crime-family/), and had a longstanding relationship with [John Gotti](/people/john-gotti/) of the [Gambino Crime Family](/organizations/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](/people/cheri-seymour/), Giaquinto sat on the board of [Robert Booth Nichols](/people/robert-booth-nichols/)'s holding company, [Meridian International Logistics](/organizations/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]

[^1]: 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.
[^2]: 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.