Name-Dropping

Trials resurrect an old charge

Does Secretary of Labor Raymond Donovan, who was a New Jersey construction executive before he took office, have ties to organized crime? None that would be possible to prove in court, a special federal prosecutor decided last year. But whether Donovan has had business and personal links with gangsters--he denies any such affiliation--there are gangsters who claim they know him well.

The latest allegations of this sort cropped up in New York courtrooms last week. Two men who had cooperated with the special federal prosecutor were killed in the summer of 1982 just as the prosecutor's investigations were winding up. Last Wednesday the Mafia gunman in one of those murders was convicted in New York City: according to Bronx Assistant District Attorney Martin Fisher, Phil Buono killed Informer Nat Masselli, the son of a mobster, in order "to help and protect the Schiavone Construction Co. and Raymond Donovan."

Buono, 68, could get a sentence of 25 years to life. According to testimony in the trial of his criminal partner, who was convicted last month of manslaughter for the same killing, Masselli had told the pair he would not pledge his silence in the Donovan inquiries. Moments after his refusal, the killers apparently discovered that Masselli, 31, was equipped with a hidden recording device. Buono shot him in the back of the head.

The victim's father, William Masselli, 56, owned an excavating company that over five years did $11 million worth of work for Donovan's firm. Now serving a seven-year sentence for cocaine trafficking and receiving stolen goods, Masselli is said to be considering a bargain with authorities: early release from prison, perhaps, in exchange for talking under oath about his extraordinarily lucrative dealings with Schiavone. If he told all he knew, the senior Masselli once bragged, he could "bury" Donovan.

Two days after Buono was convicted in The Bronx, another trial began in a Brooklyn federal court that could draw a different and even more troublesome connection to Secretary Donovan. Louis Sanzo, 45, and Amadio Petito, 47, both officials of the New York Blasters, Drillrunners and Miners Union local, are charged with perjury. The prosecution alleges that in their testimony last year to the federal grand jury that was investigating Donovan, Defendants Sanzo and Petito lied when they denied having received payoffs from the Schiavone company in the form of salary checks made out to nonexistent "no-show" workers. Whether or not Donovan sanctioned "making illegal payoffs to a union and hiding it on the payroll," said Prosecutor Laura Brevetti in her opening statement, "is the $64,000 question" in the Sanzo-Petito trial. Her key witness: a pseudonymous "Mr. J.H.," who has been a federal informer since 1973 and who, unlike most such federal witnesses, took and passed an FBI lie detector test administered two weeks ago.

Last spring Defendant Sanzo shared a prison tier in Lower Manhattan with Mr. J.H., who had been convicted of firearms violations. Sanzo, fat and owlish, was evidently talkative behind bars. He listened to his erstwhile buddy in court last week as Mr. J.H. quoted him vividly. "Donovan has everything; we got [nothing]," Sanzo is supposed to have complained in the prison recreation room one day. "The guy did the same thing that we did ... He had no-shows . .. You can take the Mafia. . . They do nothing for you ... Donovan is on the throne. Now they got us for perjury. They're going to hang us ... Now, this [jerk] is not helping us at all." Mr. J.H. says that Sanzo also groused that he had got nothing in return for a large political contribution: "That Reagan. We gave $20,000 to his campaign. Donovan was to be Secretary of Labor... and everything was going to be all right." In 1979 Donovan was a Reagan fund raiser; while there is no record of Sanzo's donation, the Federal Election Commission did find $63,000 in "discrepancies" in Donovan's fund-raising ledgers.

The Sanzo-Petito lawyers want Donovan to testify at the trial; he presumably would deny having made any payoffs to the defendants. If Sanzo is convicted, however, he might be inclined to make a deal and provide new evidence against those he feels have left him out in the cold. It was Sanzo's alleged bribetaking at a 1977 lunch with Donovan and other Schiavone officials that triggered the special federal prosecutor's probe in the first place. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.