Retailers Comb Inventories for Phony Cassettes

Local record and tape retailers combed their inventories Friday, searching for suspected counterfeit audio cassettes in the wake of a disclosure that a large-scale counterfeiting operation has distributed suspected counterfeit MCA and Motown recordings to major record chains around the country.

The Times reported Friday that Los Angeles-based MCA Inc. turned over evidence of the counterfeiting operation to the FBI, which is looking into the matter.

The evidence includes suspected counterfeit cassettes by such MCA and Motown artists as Neil Diamond, Elton John, the Who, Tom Petty, Olivia Newton-John, Jimmy Buffett, Steely Dan, Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross.

Suspected counterfeit cassettes were purchased last week by an MCA internal auditor and a Times reporter at record stores in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and at Tower Records and Licorice Pizza outlets in Los Angeles.

“We found some things that were questionable and we pulled them off floor,” said Brett Mitchell, manager of the Tower Records outlet in Sherman Oaks, where suspected counterfeits were purchased last week. “Some of the stuff looks pretty funky and we’re a little shook up to find that we were selling it.”

Several Dozen Found

Tower Records owner Russ Solomon said he was “embarrassed as hell” to find small quantities of questionable cassettes in some of his stores.

According to Solomon, his employees had pulled several dozen questionable tapes from the budget bins at three locations, but they found nothing at the chain’s flagship Sunset Boulevard store, where MCA executives bought suspected counterfeits last week. “The amount that got in apparently was not very much.”

Lee Cohen, senior vice president of the Licorice Pizza chain, said: “We’ve sent our buyers out to stores this morning to investigate. We’re pulling anything that even vaguely resembles” counterfeits.

“We also notified MCA and told them that we’ll fully cooperate in their investigation to help find where this product came from,” Cohen said.

Meanwhile, MCA, whose record unit distributes both MCA and Motown products, called on the Recording Industry Assn. of America to “vigorously explore” the counterfeiting problem that is “costing our industry untold revenues.”

The RIAA, a trade group representing the major recording companies, has a longstanding anti-counterfeiting division to investigate such problems, but an official said earlier that it usually does not look into counterfeiting cases that affect only one company.