Ticket-Scalping Case : Husband of Rams Owner Accused of Tax Evasion

Dominic Frontiere, songwriter-husband of Los Angeles Rams owner Georgia Frontiere, was indicted by a federal grand jury Thursday on charges that he failed to pay income taxes on profits he made from scalping Super Bowl tickets six years ago.

The indictment accused the Emmy-award winning composer of under-reporting his 1980 income by hundreds of thousands of dollars, and of trying to obstruct an Internal Revenue Service investigation by lying and trying to persuade an associate to lie to investigators.

Frontiere’s wife was not named in the indictment, although the income tax return they filed for 1980--their first year as a married couple--was joint.

Dominic Frontiere, who won his Emmy for best music direction on the 1970 NBC special “Swing Out, Sweet Land” and a Golden Globe for best original score for the 1980 motion picture “The Stunt Man,” could not be reached for comment Thursday. However, he has in the past denied any knowledge of a ticket-scalping scheme. His arraignment was tentatively scheduled for June 30.

The Frontieres’ 1980 return showed an income of $397,780, the indictment said, but it omitted substantial additional income from the scalping of tickets the Rams had purchased from the National Football League for the 1980 Super Bowl.

That was year the Rams lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers in the championship game at the Rose Bowl. As one of the contending teams, the Rams had access to 27,000 tickets to the game. The Rams have said that 19,500 went to season ticket holders.

The indictment did not give the exact number of tickets that Frontiere, 55, allegedly scalped, but it indicated there were thousands of them, sold to ticket brokers and others in the Los Angeles area at prices above face value.

Scalping tickets is not illegal in California, as long as it is not done at the game site. However, profits from scalping must be reported as income.

The indictment did not say how Frontiere got possession of the tickets. He holds no position in the Rams’ organization. However, he attends meetings of team executives.

According to the indictment, Frontiere falsely claimed on the income tax return that the Rams had given away the tickets he is accused of scalping. On the basis of that claim, the indictment said, he falsely deducted $116,335--the amount the Rams paid the NFL for the tickets in question--as a deductible publicity expense on the Frontieres’ joint income tax return.

When questioned by IRS agents in 1983, Frontiere lied, the indictment charged. It said he told agents he had received only 200 tickets for the Super Bowl game when he had actually gotten thousands; and that he had told of giving most of the tickets to friends when he had actually “sold and caused to be sold” most of the thousands of tickets he had received.

Frontiere also lied when he told agents he did not know a man named Raymond Cohen, the indictment alleged.

Charges in Indictment

The indictment said Frontiere had provided thousands of the tickets to Cohen “to sell at prices far above their face value, and had thereafter received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Raymond Cohen, as his, Dominic Frontiere’s, share of the profits for the sale of those tickets.”

The indictment also charged that Frontiere, at a meeting on Easter Sunday, 1983, urged Cohen to lie to IRS investigators.

Cohen was a middle-aged thief and counterfeiter who became a government informant in late 1981 after his Las Vegas arrest on a counterfeiting charge.

Facing the prospect of returning to prison for the third time, Cohen began talking to members of the federal Organized Crime Strike Force. First, he implicated in the counterfeiting scheme Jack M. Catain Jr., a Tarzana businessman who was identified as a member of the Mafia in a 1969 Senate investigation headed by then-Sen. John L. McClellan (D-Ark.).

Catain was soon indicted on a charge that he conspired to receive and sell thousands of phony $50 and $100 bills to an undercover agent of the U.S. Secret Service.

Not Yet Tried

Catain, who suffered a heart attack, still has not gone to trial on counterfeiting charges.

But Cohen also provided Strike Force investigators with information about Frontiere.

He told authorities that he obtained several thousand tickets for the 1980 Super Bowl from Frontiere.

And he said he scalped the tickets and returned money to Frontiere.

Federal investigators presumably believed that Catain figured somehow in the Frontiere case in that they subpoenaed him to testify under immunity before the federal grand jury investigating Frontiere in late 1984. But prosecutors have not said how he might have figured in the case.

Cohen, meanwhile, became the target of a murder-for-hire plot.

He said he had been introduced to Dominic Frontiere by H. Daniel Whitman, part owner of Cyrano’s, a Sunset Strip restaurant.

Federal prosecutors charged that Whitman tried to arrange Cohen’s death in a November, 1983, plot that was foiled when the hired would-be killer turned out to be an informant.

That informant testified at Whitman’s trial that he believed Whitman commissioned the murder on orders from Catain. A Secret Service agent also testified that Whitman said after his arrest that Catain “was aware that Raymond Cohen was to be killed.” Whitman denied implicating Catain.

Sentenced to Prison

Whitman was convicted of conspiring to violate Cohen’s civil rights by having him killed and was sentenced to eight years in prison. However, his conviction was overturned by a federal appeals court and he is awaiting a new trial. Catain was not charged, and Frontiere was not linked to the murder-for-hire plot.

The federal investigation into concealment of scalping profits gathered steam when Cohen became an informant. But it was born in allegations that surfaced in 1981 as side issues during pretrial testimony in the Raiders’ antitrust suit against the National Football League. The NFL was trying to block the Raiders’ move from Oakland to Los Angeles.

Raider managing partner Al Davis testified in a deposition that he believed NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle knew that people connected with NFL teams were scalping Super Bowl tickets, but did nothing about it. Rozelle denied the charge.

Rozelle was later called to testify before the Los Angeles federal grand jury that indicted Frontiere.

Davis also testified in the Raider case that Georgia Frontiere’s late husband, Carroll Rosenbloom, once invited him to take part in scalping Super Bowl tickets.

Tells of Profit

Davis said he declined to participate, but that Rosenbloom later told him that the ticket-selling plan was carried out and that Rosenbloom had made a handsome profit.

Rosenbloom drowned off the coast of Florida in April, 1979.

He was succeeded as owner of the Rams by his wife, Georgia, a former Las Vegas showgirl who married Dominic Frontiere in July, 1980.

A Rams staff shake-up ensued and one of those who left was Harold Guiver, a vice president who negotiated player contracts, and who was also a broker, investing money for football players and coaches and dabbling in the ticket business on the side.

Guiver said in his Raiders case deposition that Georgia Frontiere had made money scalping tickets to the 1980 Super Bowl. She denied it.

But at some point after he left the Rams, Guiver also testified, he was visited by Catain and another man, identified only by the last name of Cohen. Guiver said the two men told him they had been sent by someone in the Rams organization--they didn’t say who--to tell him to keep his mouth shut--to make no public statements detrimental to the Rams. Guiver testified that the two men threatened his life, but, in an interview later, he backed off that claim, saying that Catain “never made things awkward for me . . . never leaned on me.”

The judge presiding over trial of the lawsuit blocked Raider efforts to develop the ticket-scalping theme during the Raiders’ antitrust suit. The Raiders contended that the NFL and the Rams wanted to keep them in Oakland in part to protect a lucrative ticket-scalping operation in Los Angeles. They claimed that the Rams made more than $2 million selling Super Bowl tickets for several years through a network of travel agencies. But the judge ruled that the value of such evidence to the Raiders would be outweighed by the danger of unfairly prejudicing jurors against the NFL.

Nationwide Black Market

Reporters from The Times subsequently investigated the allegations of widespread scalping and found that there was indeed a nationwide black market in Super Bowl tickets, all of which were distributed to NFL teams and to the league office to dispense as they saw fit.

The Times reported that there was feverish competition for the tickets among travel agents who arranged Super Bowl tours.

To get an edge, ticket brokers would begin as early as summer training camp with recruitment of “ticket captain” players to act as middlemen in providing them with tickets that ultimately sold for more than 10 times face value.

Times staff writers John Kendall and Rich Roberts contributed to this story.