Death Threats

Donovan probe has enemies

Frank Silbey. chief investigator for the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, picked up his telephone Said an unidentified male caller: "If you don't lay off the Donovan investigation, you and your wife and your children will end up in a pine box."

With that death threat, the federal investigation into possible ties between Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan and various Mafia-related labor racketeers took on a more sinister tone. Silbey said it was the second such warning he has received in the past month Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah, chairman of the Senate committee, said that he had also received "some minor threats in this matter,'' but did not consider them "significant." However, the warnings to Silbey, Hatch said, "were serious," although there was no way to determine who had made the telephone calls. Declared Hatch: "They're not going to intimidate me."

Another bizarre twist to the unsavory case was the announcement by officers of New Jersey's Schiavone Construction Co., of which Donovan served as an executive vice president in charge of labor relations, that it had hired private detectives to do its own investigation of people who have raised allegations against Donovan. These, presumably, would include FBI informers, the members and staff of the Hatch committee, and perhaps even Special Prosecutor Leon Silverman, who was appointed in December to look into the charges raised against Donovan. Theodore Geiser, a Schiavone attorney, said that the company's gumshoes were also told to find out "who is deliberately leaking information to the media to prejudice an ongoing investigation." Schiavone's concern, he explained, was that "the allegations affect a great many people other than the Secretary, and the company feels an obligation to these people"

The threats and counterprobes have not slowed the investigation by the Special Prosecutor and the FBI. Nonetheless, senior FBI officials fear that some material involving Donovan may still be buried in the bureau's files. The FBI has already been embarrassed by disclosures that it failed to give the Hatch committee, which held Donovan's confirmation hearings, some details of the allegations against the Secretary made by FBI informers.

TIME has also learned that Special Prosecutor Silverman and his staff are looking into a meeting between Donovan and Douglas LaChance, a convicted labor racketeer. It took place in a bar at New York City's Hotel Algonquin on the evening of Jan. 10.1978. LaChance was then head of a newspaper drivers' union that had interfered with the delivery of the New York Trib, a troubled morning tabloid that failed after publishing for a mere three months. Donovan's company had invested $370,000 in the newspaper, according to Leonard Saffir, its founder and publisher. William Casey, now director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was briefly on the Trib's board. Donovan was a stockholder and became a director after Casey left the board.

LaChance's union had held up delivery of 135,000 copies of the Trib and threatened to shut it down with a full-scale strike. A court ordered the deliverers back to work, but according to Saffir it was the meeting between Donovan and LaChance at the Algonquin and the subsequent phone calls the two men exchanged that caused the drivers to resume deliveries. LaChance is now serving a twelve-year prison term for extorting $300,000 from various employers.

Donovan has said that the warning "saddens and angers" him. "I deplore any threat or public intimidation on any public official or, for that matter, on any citizen." Through a spokesman, Donovan said that he had nothing to do with Schiavone's hiring detectives. Although he has done little to help the Reagan Administration gain labor support, the Secretary appears secure in his job, at least until Silverman completes his investigation. Donovan still has his defenders in the Administration, including Helene von Damm, President Reagan's influential personal secretary, who next week is being promoted to White House personnel director. Donovan helped her raise campaign funds for Reagan in New Jersey in 1980; she subsequently urged that he be appointed to the Cabinet. But a White House aide conceded that "the level of embarrassment is growing." Indeed, both Indiana Republican Senator Dan Quayle and Glenn Watts, head of the 650,000-member Communications Workers of America, last week called upon the Secretary to resign.

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