Five defendants were tried in Federal Court in Los Angeles in November 1980. The accused were members of the Los Angeles La Cosa Nostra. They were charged with killing mobster turned informant "Frank the Bomp" Bompensiero and defrauding pornographers who ran a firm called Forex. Bompensiero was assassinated in a phone booth in Pacific Beach, California. Bompensiero, a Wisconsin native, had been involved in drug crimes and was also a hit man for the mob. The company the L.A. Mafia chose to extort happened to be a front for an FBI sting operation.