Finger Pointing

Bungling the Donovan probe

The bugs and wiretaps placed by the FBI in a windowless Bronx warehouse recorded a sordid tale of dealings between New Jersey's Schiavone Construction Co. and a subcontracting firm run by William Masselli, a soldier in the Genovese Mafia clan. But the FBI did not bring up these taps during the confirmation hearings last year of Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan, who was a vice president and part owner of Schiavone, even though Donovan's name came up in the recorded conversations. FBI Director William Webster last week sought to shift the blame for this lapse away from his organization. In an unusual, hour-long press briefing, he said that a member of Ronald Reagan's transition team told the FBI that it was not necessary to delve more deeply into Donovan's possible relationship with organized crime.

Last January, on the day before Donovan's Senate confirmation hearings began, an FBI agent called Fred Fielding, a transition-team lawyer who is now the White House counsel, to tell him about a recording that seemed to link Donovan with known organized-crime figures. Fielding, according to Webster, "didn't think it was necessary" to pursue the matter or to question Donovan about it. Fielding, who was an assistant to John Dean in the Nixon White House, told TIME: "It wasn't presented to me as a substantive charge. They had a bald allegation by two hoodlums."

However, the FBI was responsible for steering members of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee away from the Masselli recordings during the confirmation hearings. "The judgment was made that we should not volunteer information," said Webster. At one point during the hearings, Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch of Utah asked about a Manhattan grand jury that was investigating Masselli. Francis Mullen, who was then executive assistant director of the FBI, indicated that the probe involved a different case.

Hatch said last week that his committee will pursue the Donovan case as soon as Special Prosecutor Leon Silverman concludes his investigation of the Labor Secretary. Hatch and the committee's ranking Democrat, Edward Kennedy, have persuaded the Senate Judiciary Committee (of which both are also members) to delay confirmation of Mullen to his new post as head of the Drug Enforcement Administration. This time they want all the information before a final vote is taken.

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