G.F.Bunting Hires Distinguished Journalist Ralph Frammolino

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Ralph Frammolino, a former longtime Los Angeles Times investigative reporter and recent California Book Award winner, has been named Senior Executive at G.F.Bunting, a strategic communications firm.

Frammolino will work out of Los Angeles, where he will oversee client services and business development.

"We are thrilled to have another world-class journalist join our firm," said President Glenn F. Bunting.  "Ralph has a well-deserved reputation as a gifted writer, a diligent reporter and a passionate journalist. Our clients will benefit from his many talents."

Frammolino, 56, a graduate of Michigan State University, worked for the Dallas Times-Herald before joining The Times in 1983, where he distinguished himself during 25 years as an enterprising reporter.

Throughout his Times career, Frammolino demonstrated a remarkable versatility by working for nearly every major section of the newspaper. He covered the entertainment industry for the Business section, California state government for the Sacramento Bureau and higher education for the Specialists desk. He filed stories for the National Desk from Ground Zero after 9/11 and reported out of the Beijing Bureau. He wrote a front-page story as part of the Times' Pulitzer-prize winning coverage of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake.

Frammolino is best known for his investigative reporting, which probed some of Southern California's most powerful institutions.

His stories uncovered a vast back-door admissions system at UCLA favoring the wealthy, famous and politically connected. Another exclusive revealed a cornea mill running out of the Los Angeles Count medical examiner's office, prompting a new state law restricting eye tissue donations. His expose about inflated billings under a Los Angeles City contract led to federal fraud convictions of two Fleishman-Hillard public relations executives.

His final work for The Times was an investigative series exposing how the J. Paul Getty Museum and other leading American museums acquired dozens of masterpieces from the black market in looted Greek and Roman antiquities. Those revelations helped pressure the Getty, New York's Metropolitan Museum and other museums to return more than 100 artifacts worth nearly $1 billion to the governments of Italy and Greece. The Getty series was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.

Frammolino and a Times colleague co-authored "Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World's Richest Museum," a non-fiction narrative of the Getty scandal published last year by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The book was critically acclaimed and earned a California Book Award Gold Medal from The Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. The Association for Research into Crimes against Art in Rome honored it with a 2012 Excellence in Art Crime Scholarship Award. "Chasing Aphrodite" has also been published in Chinese.

After taking a voluntary buyout from The Times in 2008, Frammolino taught at the Indian Institute of Journalism & New Media in Bangalore before working as a media development consultant for international aid organizations such as USAID and The World Bank Institute. He specialized in projects aimed at fighting corruption and bolstering government transparency in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and other developing countries through the improvement of local investigative journalism.

The hiring of Frammolino brings him back home and reunites him with Bunting, whom he worked with and for at The Times for more than two decades.

"I have the highest respect for Glenn," Frammolino said. "I'm looking forward to working for a communications firm that is all about advocacy with integrity."

ABOUT G.F.BUNTING LLC

G.F.Bunting LLC is a San Francisco-based communications firm consisting of former journalists who provide clients with a wide range of services from strategic media consulting to litigation support. Clients include Fortune 500 companies, high profile CEOs, technology start-ups, real estate developers and entertainment and sports celebrities.

SOURCE G.F.Bunting