Dismay at GSA

An investigator says a former official undermined a probe

"A man with great integrity and great knowledge." These words were used by Jimmy Carter last month to describe Robert Griffin, who had been fired in July as second in command of the scandal-ridden General Services Administration and given a $50,000-a-year consolation prize as assistant to Anti-Inflation Czar Robert Strauss. Griffin, the President said, had not been tainted by the widespread corruption that investigators have unearthed at the GSA, which spends $5 billion a year to provide federal bureaucrats with office space, supplies and housekeeping services. The cause for Griffin's dismissal was said to be only a personality conflict with his boss, GSA Administrator Jay Solomon.

But TIME last week learned that a memorandum drafted in August by GSA Special Counsel for Investigation Vincent Alto raises questions about Griffin's conduct at the GSA. The memo describes Griffin as trying in 1975 and 1976 to undermine the GSA's efforts to crack down on corruption and as harassing a GSA employee who would not go along.

According to the memo, Griffin tried to persuade Chief Investigator William Clinkscales to conduct "bootleg investigations" of which no official record was made. When Clinkscales refused, Alto's memo said, Griffin ordered that he be transferred to another job and demoted.

The order was supposed to be carried out by GSA Personnel Officer Al Petrillo. He sent Clinkscales a. notice that he was being transferred to Fort Worth. But Petrillo later had second thoughts about the transfer, which he felt violated GSA personnel rules, and canceled it. At the same time, Petrillo submitted his own resignation, but it was rejected by his boss, GSA Director of Administration G.C. Gardner.

In retaliation, Griffin began a campaign of harassment against Petrillo; according to the memo Petrillo was subjected to "duress and coercion wrought by GSA experts from whom the KGB could learn valuable techniques." Over several months, Petrillo was stripped of his authority and warned that "his situation would get worse." In December 1976 he resigned again and filed a grievance with the Civil Service Commission.

In what the memo implies was an attempt to induce Petrillo to drop the case, Griffin next offered him a lower paying job in the GSA's Federal Supply Service. Petrillo took it but refused to cancel his complaint. Thereafter, the harassment of Petrillo increased. "Not a single piece of paper crossed my desk for eight months," he says. Finally, he asked to be transferred to a new job, even though his salary would be cut by $5,000. But when he was told that he would have to pay his own moving expenses, he decided not to take the job. Meanwhile, a civil service administrative judge dismissed Petrillo's grievance, after GSA lawyers filed 150 objections to the charges. Recently, he was named by Solomon to be personnel officer for the National Archives.

Griffin angrily dismissed the allegations in Alto's memo as false. Said he: "I never pressured anybody. There was no effort by me to drive anybody out of any agency at any time." With the Carter Administration pressing for investigators to net some "bigger fish," and Republicans clamoring for an independent probe of the growing fraud and mismanagement scandal, the charges are certain to be thoroughly aired in the next round of Senate hearings on the GSA shenanigans that opens this week. qed

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