---
category: Law Enforcement & Legal
created: 2025-08-05
relations:
- end: 1989-05
  fn: 3
  role: Los Angeles Organized Crime Strike Force
  type: employed_by
  with: '[[Department of Justice]]'
- fn: 3
  type: investigated
  with: '[[Eugene Giaquinto]]'
- fn: 1
  type: investigated
  with: '[[Music Corporation of America]]'
summary: Los Angeles Organized Crime Strike Force prosecutor who took over the record-industry
  payola case and investigated MCA home video president Eugene Giaquinto, and who
  resigned in May 1989.
tags:
- Person
- Lawyer
- FBI
- LawEnforcement
updated: 2026-09-22
---

[Richard Stavin](/people/richard-stavin/) was a prosecutor with the [Justice Department](/organizations/department-of-justice/)'s Organized Crime Strike Force in [Los Angeles](/places/los-angeles/). He was put in charge of the investigation of payola in the record business, whose target was the promoter Joe Isgro, after [Marvin Rudnick](/people/marvin-rudnick/) was taken off it, and he ran the two-year strike force and [FBI](/organizations/federal-bureau-of-investigation/) investigation of suspected labor racketeering involving [Eugene Giaquinto](/people/eugene-giaquinto/), president of [MCA](/organizations/music-corporation-of-america/)'s home video division; agents attempted to tap Giaquinto's MCA office telephone in September 1987. After a dressing-down by [Michael DeFeo](/people/michael-defeo/) and [David Margolis](/people/david-margolis/) of the strike force in Washington in December 1988, and the assignment of the department's senior litigation counsel, William Lynch, to take over the payola case, Stavin resigned in May 1989, leaving both cases unresolved. "I was convinced I was about to become the next Marvin Rudnick," he said. Rudnick was removed from the department that July.[^3]

According to [Cheri Seymour](/people/cheri-seymour/), Stavin, Rudnick and the FBI agent [Thomas Gates](/people/thomas-gates/) believed on the basis of wiretaps that MCA had been penetrated by organized crime, the wiretaps were sealed, and the Los Angeles Organized Crime Strike Force was disbanded.[^1] The investigation produced the tax-evasion conviction of the MCA middleman [Salvatore Pisello](/people/sal-pisello/), affirmed by the Ninth Circuit in 1989.[^2]

[^1]: Seymour, Cheri. *The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro's Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal.* TrineDay, 2010.
[^2]: *United States v. Pisello,* 877 F.2d 762 (9th Cir. 1989). https://openjurist.org/877/f2d/762
[^3]: Knoedelseder, William. *Stiffed: A True Story of MCA, the Music Business, and the Mafia.* HarperCollins, 1993, pp. xix, 435-448, 461-462. Read through the archive.org BookReader search, item stiffedtruestory00knoe.