Bennett pleaded guilty and a federal judge temporarily sealed the court record after Bennett's lawyer expressed concern that Bennett or his family might be harmed. No harm ever came to Bennett.
Thomas Engel, a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted Klein for income-tax evasion at his first trial, said the government alleged that "Klein got 10,000 promotional copies of the Concert for Bangladesh album and he and Bennett sold them and pocketed the proceeds."
FOR THE RECORD - IMPERFECTIONS & RECANTATIONS
Los Angeles Times Sunday June 9, 1985 Home Edition Calendar Page 95 Calendar Desk 3 inches; 77 words Type of Material: Correction
CLOSE CAPTIONED: Fans of guitarist Jesse Ed Davis, including David Ballard of North Hollywood and Daryl Caraco of Canoga Park, leaped to their loose leaf to point out that it was Davis, not Jim Horn, on stage with George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Klaus Voorman at the Concert for Bangladesh, as we mis-captioned a photo in David Johnston's article June 2. Oddly, in the same article the name of former Capitol Records marketing VP Brown Meggs' was transposed, becoming Meggs Brown, a crime for which Johnston David has accepted full responsibility.
Klein's trial ended with a hung jury. A second jury acquitted Klein on five income-tax evasion charges related to the Bangladesh album, but did convict him on another tax charge, filing a false tax return in 1970.
Klein told The Times he never sold promotional recordings or took money from Bennett for such sales, as Bennett testified.
U.S. District Judge Vincent L. Broderick sentenced Klein to two months in prison the false tax return charge. Judge Broderick said in passing sentence in 1977 that he took into consideration his belief that Klein "lied during the trial."
A dispute among the Beatles over whether their manager should be Klein or a New York attorney who is related to Paul McCartney by marriage has been widely cited as one of the key factors that broke up the Beatles.
In a telephone interview, Klein took full credit for arranging the Concert for Bangladesh deal and contracts.
He blamed the IRS for tying up the proceeds on what he characterized as frivolous grounds. And he said the IRS audit of the Apple Corp. was prompted by a 1972 New York magazine article that raised questions about whether $1.14 from every Bangladesh recording was unaccounted for. Klein filed a libel suit against the magazine and writer Peter McCabe, but Klein said he did not pursue it.
Klein added that if he had it to do over again, he would have handled it differently. Instead of having Apple Corp. put up the cash to finance the Concert for Bangladesh, Klein said, he would have had Apple make a donation to the U.S. Committee for UNICEF so the committee, a properly qualified charity, would have been the undisputed sponsor of the event.
That way, Klein said, the IRS would have been less likely to tie up the money in an audit.
Ever since a BBC news crew filmed the plight of starving Ethiopians and caught the media attention of the Western World last fall, singing stars have been donating their time and talents to help the Ethiopians and other victims of drought and civil war in East Africa.
Last week's cyclone in Bangladesh--which hit hardest the poorest of the poor who lived in low-lying lands near the Indian Ocean--already has rekindled memories of the Concert for Bangladesh and suggestions that the album and film be actively marketed again.
(Recently the concert film became available in videocassette, a technology not commercially available in 1971, because of George Harrison's determined efforts to get the necessary contractual releases from the performers and their recording companies.)
Officials of the United Support of Artists for Africa Foundation and other musician-led charities anxious to help the poor both in the Third World and in America say their efforts would be seriously harmed by a repeat of the kind of errors made by the Concert for Bangladesh principals.
So far, USA for Africa has $10.8 million in the bank and expects eventually to raise $45 million. The British Band-Aid rock relief effort has raised about $10 million with its "Do They Know It's Christmas" recordings.
Marty Rogel, who previously ran the world-hunger charities founded by the late singer Harry Chapin and has been a consultant to other relief and development organizations, was hired by USA for Africa as its executive director because of his knowledge of how to organize a legally qualified charity. Attorney Jay Cooper of the Los Angeles law firm of Cooper, Epstein and Hurewitz has donated his services to deal with the complex legal problems.
Before recording the ubiquitous "We Are the World," superstar manager Ken Kragen also took steps to avoid the kinds of contractual problems that complicated the Concert for Bangladesh proceeds. Key among these, say Rogel and others, was getting the singers to sign contracts before, rather than after, they performed.
Significantly complicating the Concert for Bangladesh recording deal was the fact that, at the time, Klein was engaged in negotiating other business deals with Capitol Records, according to Meggs Brown, who was then Capitol's vice president for marketing. Capitol was the distributor of both the Bangladesh album and Beatles albums.
Further, CBS Records demanded 25 cents on each copy of the Bangladesh album from Capitol as a "use royalty" for allowing Bob Dylan's songs to be included. This money didn't go to Dylan, his attorney said at the time, but to CBS Records, which distributed Dylan's recordings.
