Estefan Enterprises, Gaitanes Dirty tricks in Emilio and Gloria Estefan's Company causes singer Dalva D to make a report to the FBI Miami Beach Florida

My name is Dalva D. I am a Brazilian singer and through this document I would like to tell you about the negative experience that I had in dealing with the producers from Estefan Enterprises, the company of Gloria Estefan and her husband Emilio.

What has happened to me has affected me so badly, that it has taken me a year to feel sufficiently strong to be able to write my story.

I am letting people know about my experience so as to enable other artists to avoid having the same bad experience and at the same time to ask all those who may have suffered in a similar manner to report the matter to a competent authority. When you have finished reading you will see why.

In May of 2006, through my representative in Miami (Ana Elena), I established contact with the two senior producers of Estefan Enterprises, Ricardo and Alberto Gaitan, because I wanted to work with people who had the confidence of Emilio Estefan, with a view to recording the best CD I could.

I believe as a result of an error when sending the e-mail, on 9th of May of 2006 I received an e-mail sent by GAITAN BROS, which in fact was addressed to Ana Elena, in which it stated that the price for the recording of my CD would be $35,000 per song and that for that price they could make a reasonable recording but not of the best quality. If we calculate on a minimum of ten songs the total for the CD would amount to $350,000.

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E-mail from GAITAN BROS to Ana Elena dile que para comanzar(sic) son 35K en el banco y arrancamos (tell em that to start its 35K in the bank and we will start right now)

Which bank account I wonder?
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The addressee of this e-mail, Ana Elena, had written that of the $35,000, thirty would be for the recording and $5,000, 00 would be her commission. Bearing in mind that as my representative I was already paying her $25 per hour, I e-mailed the Brothers Gaitan complaining about the commission of $5,000 for Ana Elena but without complaining in any way about the price that I would supposedly be paying the recording company.
Nevertheless, I was surprised to receive on 14th May (Sunday) an e-mail from Mr. Alberto Gaitan saying he was sorry for the inconvenience and stating he was very upset not only about the $5,000 of commission for Ana Elena, but also explaining that the normal price charged by Crescent Moon, (the recording studio of Estefan Enterprises), varied between $15,000 and $25,000 per song or a total of $150,000 to $250,000 for a full CD.

Obviously, I was immensely surprised to learn that the price initially given to me was about $200,000 higher than the normal Crescent Moon Studio price for the quality of production promised.
The next day after receiving this e-mail, Monday 15th May, I received another e-mail from Mr. Alberto Gaitan in which he stated that he could not continue speaking with me about business, that he was a Estefan Enterprises producer and that if I wanted to talk about my recording the lawyers would have to be present, and asking me to wait for an answer from Mr Estefan. When Alberto was contacted 3 days later about progess, he replied curtly that he was doing nothing, and would do nothing to arrange a contract or an answer from Mr. Estefan, and that I had to wait for the company to call me.
First there was no problem arranging directly with them to record a CD. Now I had to talk with the lawyers. Why with the companys/his (e-mail not clear) lawyers? Why, now, did I have to wait for the company to contact me?

I do not know what the Gaitanes' contractual arrangements with Estefan Enterprises were, but many of the company's contracts have exclusivity clauses. This might explain why, after reading my e-mail of 13 May, (when they realized that I intended to show my work to Emilio Estefan) they decided to withdraw from negociations.

Alberto's e-mail of 15th May certainly seemed to imply that as an Estefan Enterprises producer he shouldn't have been dealing with me on his own account.
Right now I can not talk with you about bussines (sic) and / or productions. I am a Estefan Enterprises Producer, if you want to do a production, we have to talk with the company and with our lawyers.
If this was the situation, they would have been in breach of their contract with Estefan Enterprises as well as overcharging $200,000 for the CD.
What worries me is that other employees of the company did not want to tell Emilio Estefan what the Gaitanes had intended to do.

The fact is that after many unfruitful attempts to make Mr. Estefan aware of the what had happened with his producers and staff, and after failing to receive any explanation from the company, I came to believe that this attempt to overcharge me would not only have hurt me but also the owners of the company, Gloria and Emilio Estefan. What other reason would there be for such implacable resistance to my attempts to inform Emilio?
For this reason, I tried to inform Emilio about everything that had happened through his family.
I contacted his niece, Lili Estefan (who is a presenter on a Miami TV programme) through her producer. He reviewed the documentation and was sufficiently concerned that he gave me her direct number and told me when to call her. When I called later that day it was clear she had been briefed, and she arranged to meet me that very evening. She received me with open arms, and even introduced me to her friend and to her own children who were with her. I spent a couple of hours going over the whole story with her. At the end she thanked me very much for bringing the matter to her, insisted on walking me back to my car, and made a point of hugging and kissing me goodbye. She promised me she would get right back to me, after going over the matter with her father (Emilio's brother), who she said would pass the information on to Emilio.

A week later, after not hearing from her as she had promised, I called her on her private number, and she reacted to my voice as if she was speaking to someone who she thought was a great threat to her. She told me not to call her again on that number but to call her office. She said she had not passed the information to anyone.

I was pole-axed. It was a complete volte-face which I was at a loss to understand.

When my associate called her office the next day, the phone was answered in the name of Estefan Enterprises. When he was passed through to her, she reacted very coldly, and this time said, without explanation, that her father would not pass on the information, and cut off the conversation.

After this I decided to try to send the information directly to her father.

This I did by e-mailing the documents to his wife (Patricia Estefan) after she very kindly gave me her e-mail address after listening to an outline description of the matter from my associate.

After some time my associate received a phone call in Miami from someone who identified himself as Jose Estefan (Emilio's brother and Lili's father) asking my associate to call Emilio's office number to arrange a meeting with Emilio. My associate told the man that Emilio's secretary never took the calls to this number nor replied to messages left. The man insisted that he should call and the phone would be answered. My associate called right away and miraculously it was answered at the second ring. The secretary took my details as if she had never heard of me (even though we had exchanged several long and acrimonious e-mails in the past) and promised to get back with a meeting date. She never did and when pressed for a date by e-mail, responded that Emilio would never have time for me.
In my surfing of the internet looking for names of producers, I had come across the name of k**e Santander. In researching his background, I found a long newspaper article Los Producers written by Celeste Fraser Delgado http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2001-09-06/news/los-producers/. It appeared she knew a lot of people in Estefan Enterprises and how the company operated, but the tone of her article suggested that she was independent of them, as she had written that she had ignored their advice not to write the article.

I decided to contact her, to see if she could review the situation and help my understanding of what had happened. She replied to my e-mail that she was very interested in reviewing the case, and after doing so, eagerly agreed to meeting me in Miami on my next trip from Brazil that I would make especially to meet up with her. She told my associate she was under contract to write a biography of Emilio Estefan. We arranged a lunch meeting by telephone, which she subsequently had to change because of a prior engagment she had forgotten about, so by e-mail we arranged a Saturday meeting at my hotel at 5pm

Great. I'll come by the Ramada at 5pm on Saturday. Best, CFD.

When by 5:30 she had not appeared, my associate went to my room to see if she had left a voice message. She had.
Oh my God! I can't meet with you. I'm going home. I will go home.

It was the voice of someone who had just seen the Devil.
My associate telephoned her mobile, and she answered in a very confused and flustered tone that she did not know if she could meet with me. My associate pleaded with her not to cancel but to meet and explain what had happened.
We eventually met (with my associate present) in a restaurant far from our hotel at 7pm. It was clear from the way that she was looking at me, and from our conversation, that she had been told something extraordinarily bad about me, which she was trying hard to determine whether it was true or not. After about an hour she excused herself (without eating). The next day I persuaded her to meet me again one-on-one and she invited me to her home. After a long conversation she left me in no doubt that she had been told something very bad about me and my intentions but would not say what it was or who had said it. She told me she could not get involved.

I tried various other avenues to try to get the information that I had accumulated directly to Emilio, always with the same result an eager and sympathetic hearing to start, followed a few days later by an attitude of cold indifference.

What was being said behind my back? What could be so bad that what had happened to me at the hands of the Gaitanes should be ignored?

After all that had happened, I felt obliged to put the facts before the FBI, who treated me with the utmost respect at all times, and whose personnel summoned me to a meeting in July 2007 to review matters in more detail.
The FBI have been the only ones to give me a sensible and respectful response.

Dalva D
Miami Beach, Florida
U.S.A.