Ex-Restaurateur Gets 8 Years in Murder Plot

A former restaurateur was sentenced to eight years in prison Tuesday for trying to arrange the murder of the key witness in a Super Bowl ticket-scalping investigation that led to the indictment of the husband of Rams owner Georgia Frontiere.

H. Daniel Whitman, 55, was convicted a second time July 18 of conspiracy, witness-tampering and retaliation against a federal witness. The jury agreed with prosecutors that Whitman hired people to kill the government’s chief witness against Dominic Frontiere, Whitman’s friend.

U.S. District Judge Francis C. Whelan gave Whitman the same sentence that he did when Whitman was first convicted in 1984. Whelan also fined Whitman $10,000 and placed him on probation for five years after his release from prison.

Although he allowed Whitman to remain free on bail after his first conviction, Whelan this time told him to surrender Aug. 20 because he thought that Whitman’s promised appeal “is taken for purposes of delay.”

The first conviction was reversed by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which cited errors Whelan committed at the first trial.

James A. Twitty, Whitman’s lawyer, predicted a second reversal because of restrictions placed by the judge on Twitty’s cross-examination of government witnesses.

Twitty said outside court that he suspected that Whelan ordered Whitman jailed because “he’s probably a little mad we got him reversed the last time.”

Relying on testimony of Raymond Cohen, the target of the failed murder-for-hire plot, a federal grand jury indicted Frontiere in June for filing a false tax return, lying to investigators and obstructing a federal investigation.

Frontiere’s Indictment

The indictment said Frontiere did not report hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits he made from selling thousands of Rams tickets to the 1980 Super Bowl through Cohen, a convicted counterfeiter now a federal witness.

Lawyers for Frontiere, 55, were scheduled to ask another federal judge later Tuesday to dismiss the charges. He is scheduled for trial Oct. 7.

Arguing for a lesser sentence, Twitty told Whelan that Whitman testified last year and again in May before the federal grand jury that indicted Frontiere.

Twitty said Whitman, who refused to testify before his first trial, was truthful, although he said the testimony revealed that Whitman “didn’t know as much about that case as (prosecutors) thought he did.”

James D. Henderson, an attorney for the federal Organized Crime Strike Force, asked Whelan to again impose an eight-year sentence, saying, “Mr. Whitman tried to have someone killed.”