Darkening Cloud over Donovan

A witness is murdered, and Mob links surface

The body of a slain witness found stuffed into a car trunk. More previously suppressed FBI reports uncovered. Senatorial demands for his resignation. All in all, it was another rough week for Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan, who was vacationing, but probably not relaxing, in Europe.

Federal Investigators are not yet certain why Fred Furino, 52, an important witness in Special Prosecutor Leon Silverman's probe into Donovan's alleged ties to the Mafia, was murdered. His decaying body, with at least one bullet wound in the head, was found in a car abandoned in New York City. A career gangster, Furino had been intensively questioned by Silverman's investigators and called before a federal grand jury hearing Silverman's witnesses. The investigators suspect that other mobsters feared that Furino had been cooperating with federal officials. Furino may not have been, but the Mob takes no chances.

Furino was potentially a key witness because FBI informants had claimed that he sometimes collected payoffs from Donovan in the 1960s, when Donovan was a vice president in charge of labor relations for New Jersey's Schiavone Construction Co. FBI agents quizzed Furino in January 1981, when Donovan's confirmation hearings were under way in the Senate, but he denied ever having met Donovan and offered to take a he detector test.

When Silverman began his inquiry a year later, he took Furino up on the polygraph offer. Furino still denied knowing Donovan. But officials say Furino flunked the test--and not just once. "Freddie took a dive six times," claims one investigator. Whether Furino also denied any acquaintance with Donovan in his grand jury testimony has not been revealed. But he disappeared from his New Jersey trucking company office shortly afterward, on June 3.

At Silverman's request, the FBI opened an inquiry into whether the killing of Furino amounted to an obstruction of justice. Furino's violent end made the earlier anonymous death threats received by Frank Silbey, chief investigator for the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, all the more ominous. Silbey had been warned to "lay off the Donovan investigation" or he would "end up in a pine box."

No investigator, of course, contends that Donovan has had anything to do with violence. But the murder of Furino does suggest that certain racketeers consider the Donovan probe a most serious matter. TIME has learned that some of the mobsters involved in the Donovan investigation are also named in a 1980 FBI report on the "Provenzano crime group." The 60-page document was used by the FBI to place a court-sanctioned wiretap on telephones available to Anthony ("Tony Pro") Provenzano, a New Jersey Teamster boss and Mafia captain, in California's Lompoc federal prison.

The report names Furino, Salvatore ("Sally Bugs") Briguglio and Ralph Picardo as members of Provenzano's group. It contends that Provenzano and Briguglio helped murder former Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa in 1975. Picardo is now a federal witness who contends that he had collected payoffs from Donovan in the 1960s to arrange labor peace and had turned the cash over to Briguglio. Other FBI informants claim that Furino sometimes picked up such payments from Donovan. Briguglio was the victim of a gangland slaying in New York City in 1978 because, according to an informant, "Provenzano said that he had found out that Briguglio had talked to the federal people" and was "going to have to go."

The 1980 FBI document also discloses that the bureau at that time portrayed its informants within the Provenzano gang as highly reliable. But when the same informants made allegations about Donovan last year, the FBI suddenly considered them so shaky that it did not immediately forward all of its information to the Senate committee holding the confirmation hearings. The FBI did warn Fred Fielding, a Reagan transition aide handling background checks on Cabinet nominees. In a written report following up telephone calls to Fielding, the FBI told him that it had corroborated information that Donovan had "close personal and business ties with known La Cosa Nostra figures." Neither Fielding, who is now the White House Counsel, nor anyone on the transition team nor the FBI gave this report to the Senate committee at that time.

TIME has learned that just before Donovan's confirmation hearings began, the FBI received information indicating that a Donovan associate in New Jersey was also involved in the alleged Mafia connection with the Schiavone firm. The man's voice was often heard on wiretaps made by the FBI on an admitted Mafia member, William Masselli. The Donovan associate was named on an internal FBI memo recounting information that the bureau claims to have orally summarized to Fielding. Yet when this information was later given to the Senate committee, the identity of the businessman was deleted.

Still another FBI report, which noted that one of its informants claimed to have seen Donovan dining in a restaurant with Phillip ("Brother") Moscato, an alleged Provenzano associate, failed to reach the Senate committee. Donovan had testified that he had never heard of Moscato, even though Moscato told reporters that a wrecking firm he headed had done demolition work for Schiavone Construction.

As things kept looking worse for Donovan, all 46 Democratic Senators issued a demand that he "step aside" and leave his office at least until the investigation ends. Even Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, chairman of the labor committee, said that Donovan should consider resigning. As Hatch told reporters: "There comes a time when you say, 'Can the Secretary do his job?'"

At the White House, top aides predicted that the President would not take any action until Silverman issued his report, which is expected within a week or two. "He has no support on the inside," one aide said about Donovan. "But nobody wants to pull the trigger." The White House has troubles of its own. Plans are under way on Capitol Hill to investigate whether the FBI and the White House tried to mislead the Senate about Donovan's fitness for office.

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