Frontiere Gets Year for Hiding Ticket Profits

Dominic Frontiere, the songwriter husband of Los Angeles Rams owner Georgia Frontiere, was sentenced Monday to one year and a day in federal prison for willfully filing a false income tax return and lying to IRS investigators to cover up his role in scalping Rams tickets to the 1980 Super Bowl game.

U.S. District Judge William D. Keller also imposed a fine of $15,000--the maximum--after repeatedly asking Frontiere to explain his conduct and getting what he regarded as untruthful answers.

Frontiere, who appeared crestfallen after the judge’s decision, was ordered to surrender Jan. 5. Keller could have sentenced the 55-year-old Emmy award-winning composer to up to eight years in prison or placed him on probation without ordering any prison time.

Frontiere had pleaded guilty to the charges in October.

In his unsuccessful bid for probation, Frontiere portrayed himself Monday as a naive musician who, while engaged to the Rams owner in late 1979, saw an opportunity to make easy money scalping tickets, but got involved with a bad crowd, some of whom extorted profits from him.

Frontiere said under oath that he did not report his income to the Internal Revenue Service because he was scared. He said he feared for his relationship with his wife. And he said he feared those who had extorted money from him by threatening to tell news reporters of his activities.

‘Stigma of Selling Tickets’

“They were going to tell the press,” he told Keller. “That’s what the extortion was all about. The stigma of selling tickets is terrible when your wife owns a football team.”

Frontiere said the extortionists left him with little money. And he said he had been told by the Rams accountant that he and his wife had a large one-time tax loss for 1980. He said he knew this would wipe out any taxes he might otherwise owe.

But Keller concluded: “I don’t think he’s telling me the truth.”

The judge said he had difficulty, for instance, believing Frontiere’s statement that he never counted the proceeds from the ticket sales.

Frontiere claimed that he gave an intermediary, Raymond Cohen, between 1,500 and 2,200 tickets to sell, and that Cohen sold most of them and gave him a bag of cash.

“I didn’t even count the money,” Frontiere told the judge. “I knew it was approximately $90,000, because, when (Cohen later) extorted me, he took three payments of $25,000, $25,000 and $38,000.”

Expressed Skepticism

Keller also expressed skepticism about whether any money was extorted from Frontiere, and asked why the composer placed the ticket receipts in a newly opened safe deposit box, rather than in a checking account.

“I didn’t think of that sir,” Frontiere said. “I mean, your honor, at the time, I didn’t think what I was doing was illegal. It wasn’t a question of hiding.”

Scalping tickets is lawful in California as long as it is not done at a game site. However, it is a crime to fail to report income from scalping.

During the hearing, a federal prosecutor, Richard J. Leon, asserted for the first time that Frontiere had obtained the tickets from his wife-to-be.

“There is only one possible source,” Leon said.

Frontiere acknowledged that this was so. But he said he did not count the tickets either.

‘It’s the Truth’

“I know you’re looking at me like I’m crazy, but it’s the truth, your honor,” he said.

Georgia Frontiere, who has not been charged in the case, inherited the Rams when her husband, Carroll Rosenbloom, drowned in 1979. She married Frontiere in 1980. The tax return they filed for that year was joint.

She has not been present at any of her husband’s court appearances, and has not commented on the case. However, her attorney, Joseph W. Cotchett, has said: “She had little or no knowledge of what happened with those tickets.”

Leon, an attorney with the Justice Department, said he believes that Frontiere initially gave about 5,500 tickets to Cohen, but got about 2,500 of them back after Georgia Frontiere was threatened with a lawsuit by irate season ticket holders who had not gotten an opportunity to buy any of the Rams’ 27,000 tickets to the game, which was played at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.

No Evidence of Fear

Leon said he believes that Dominic Frontiere made about $500,000 from the ticket scalping and was not an extortion victim. He noted that there was no evidence Dominic Frontiere was frightened in that he had not sought advice from anyone--not from his lawyer, accountant nor wife.

“Your honor, how could I tell her?” Frontiere said.

Frontiere said that he realized that he had gotten involved with “really terrible people.” But he said he expected that they would eventually get into trouble for something else and fall out of his life. Meanwhile, he said, he had not wanted to “hurt my marriage by telling her (Georgia) I’d taken advantage of her generosity”--scalping tickets she had given him.

The income tax return that he and his wife signed claimed a deduction of $116,335 for complimentary tickets to the game. In pleading guilty, Frontiere acknowledged that figure was substantially inflated.

When Scalping Began

However, prosecutors have contended it was complete fiction because Georgia Frontiere, as sole owner of the National Football League team, had decreed that no complimentary tickets were to be given out to that game.

Frontiere claimed that the scalping began after he was approached by a friend, Daniel Whitman, a restaurateur who owned Cyrano’s on the Sunset Strip, who told him if he could get some tickets, he knew someone who could sell them. That someone was Cohen, a convicted thief turned government informant.

Cohen invoked the name of Jack M. Catain Jr., a San Fernando Valley businessman who is reputedly a major organized-crime figure, to scare him, Frontiere said.

In pleading guilty, Frontiere admitted that he lied to IRS agents in 1983, when he denied knowing Cohen.

Whitman, Cohen and Catain have each denied participating in an extortion plot, Leon said.