Find Dominic? Yeah, That’s the Ticket

You go to a Super Bowl, you’re going to get the call. Someone needs tickets, and thinks you have connections. They will pay anything for a Super Bowl ticket. They just have to go.

People even get desperate. In Nashville this week, a radio station announced it had put Super Bowl tickets on the belt of one of the city’s police officers and the first person to ask for them, would get them, free.

The contest had to be scrubbed in its first hour because motorists were speeding after police cruisers, trying to pull them over along the freeway. Downtown officers were mobbed, and many had no idea why they were being harassed.

“I’ve even heard reports that citizens were patting down officers,” Metro police spokesman Don Aaron told reporters.

There are simply no tickets available, unless you know just the right person.

So where’s Dominic Frontiere when you really need him?

There’s Joe from New York in the lobby of the Hyatt, offering a pair of $325 tickets for $900 each, and some guy who says he has no name from some no-name city in Pennsylvania, who has a couple of real bargains he can get his hands on. But no Dominic, the old pro.

There’s no indication in a check of the records whether he penned the theme to “Outer Limits” while still married to Georgia Frontiere, but surely you remember Dominic, the Emmy award-winning composer and accordion player who also used to be Georgia’s personal pianist.

Although he probably doesn’t have much pull with Georgia these days, what with being husband No. 7 and she already’s moved on to a prospective No. 8 in Earle Weatherwax, Dominic has experience with Ram Super Bowl tickets.

This is the 20th anniversary of the Rams’ last appearance in the Super Bowl, when the Justice Department concluded later that Dominic had made about $500,000 scalping Super Bowl tickets that had been stashed in his wife’s boudoir.

Some people, like Roxanne Pulitzer, are known for other happenings in the bedroom. Others, like Georgia Frontiere, stuff the mattress with Super Bowl ducats. We’re not here to judge.

We’d ask Georgia, but she’s not commenting these days unless the reporter agrees to sign off on writing a puff piece. And the nice lady in the housekeeping department at the Crowne Plaza Ravinia where the Rams are staying here said it would be inappropriate--well, she said very inappropriate--to look under the bed in Georgia’s suite to see if there were any tickets still available.

There’s still hope, though, which brings us back to Dominic Frontiere, and you have to wonder if he stops in his tracks every time he walks through an electronics store and hears his last name coming over all those TVs.

John Shaw, president of the Rams, said Thursday that the team takes no special precautions beyond that of any other organization in the NFL to prevent the scalping of tickets.

“We give tickets to the same people who have historically gotten the tickets,” Shaw said, “and what they do with them they can do with them.”

A check of history shows that the Justice Department said Georgia gave Dominic about 5,500 Super Bowl tickets, although he had to return about 2,500 after season-ticket holders threatened to sue Georgia. The Justice Department said 3,216 tickets eventually were unaccounted for on the Rams’ books.

So if the Rams are holding to their historical pattern, Dominic has more than 3,000 of those things to disburse, and after serving time in the slammer for charging too much the last time and not telling the IRS, you could probably get a good deal--maybe even pay face value for the tickets.

He wasn’t even married to Georgia during the last Super Bowl, but was close enough to get her to tap into her bedroom stash of tickets. Carroll Rosenbloom, No. 6, died in April 1979, and Georgia married Dominic in July 1980.

The Feds would contend later that Dominic was the mastermind behind the ticket-scalping scheme. After pleading guilty to filing a false income tax return signed by both him and his wife and lying to IRS investigators to cover up the scam, he was subpoenaed by a federal grand jury. But he refused to answer questions about whether Georgia was involved in the scandal, invoking the privilege of not having to testify against a spouse.

He served nine months of a sentence of one year and a day, and a short time later the romance was gone. Georgia filed for divorce in 1987 and got it in 1988.

On this 20th anniversary of Ram ticket scalping, it does not appear as if Georgia will be celebrating any time soon with her surname companion.

“Dominic moved to Santa Fe about 10 years ago,” said Shaw, and he would know, because, as he said, at the very least, historically the same people get Super Bowl tickets.

The Better Business Bureau of Santa Fe, however, had no record of Dominic Frontiere, a ticket broker business or someone claiming to be one of Georgia’s former husbands.

The phone number that he had as of August 1998, in Tesuque, N.M., has been given to someone else, and for some odd reason, his current number is unlisted. How will he know that we’re trying to get in touch with him, and need tickets desperately? You can’t get top dollar if you can’t be reached.

Dominic, please call. Collect.