Message for a Mobster

A second witness in the Donovan probe is murdered

In most ways it was a rather standard gangland slaying. The victim was driving his 1977 Lincoln Continental through The Bronx in New York City one evening last week when a passenger in the car suddenly placed a .38-cal. pistol to the back of his head and fired a single shot. The Continental swung out of control and smashed into a parked car. The assassin jumped out and climbed into a trailing red Buick LeSabre, which then sped away. But the victim happened to be Nat Masselli, 31, son of Mobster William ("Billy the Butcher") Masselli, 55. And that made the hit something special.

As it turns out, both Nat and William Masselli were crucial witnesses in the investigation, reopened in mid-July, into charges that U.S. Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan had dealings with organized crime when he was part owner of the Schiavone Construction Co. The investigation is being conducted by Special Federal Prosecutor Leon Silverman, who stated in June that there was "insufficient credible evidence" to prosecute Donovan. TIME has learned that Silverman's investigators had in fact questioned Nat Masselli at least once in the renewed probe. William Masselli was recently transferred from a prison near Lake Placid, N.Y., where he is serving a seven-year sentence for hijacking, to a Manhattan jail in preparation for his appearance before a grand jury investigating new charges against Donovan. The FBI is looking into the Masselli assassination as a possible obstruction of justice. It is the FBI's second such probe. Last June, the body of Fred Furino, a Mafia bagman who was alleged to have received payoffs from Schiavone Construction and who became a Silverman witness, was found stuffed into the trunk of a car parked on a Manhattan street.

Tracing the license-plate number of the getaway car, New York City police at week's end arrested Salvatore Odierno, 67, a reputed associate of mobsters who have been questioned in the Silverman probe, and charged him with second-degree murder. Federal investigators believe that the Mob, unable to "reach" the elder Masselli in prison, may have ordered the death of his son as a message to keep quiet. Masselli is also co-owner of Jo-Pel Contracting & Trucking Corp., which has been named in a half-million-dollar New York City landfill and excavation scandal. But investigators tend to discount this as a possible motive for Nat Masselli's murder.

In the first phase of Silverman's investigation, the elder Masselli provided evidence that, he claimed, showed a Schiavone official had arranged for Masselli to receive a $200,000 loan from the firm in return for a $20,000 kickback. But the special prosecutor did not find the evidence clear-cut, and the Schiavone official denied the charge. Masselli's son Nat also consented to telephone taps of his conversations with a Schiavone lawyer. Silverman told TIME: "Those conversations, although they may have been illadvised, were not criminal."

Federal investigators have hoped that the Massellis could shed Light on fresh charges that Donovan had met with the elder Masselli and another mobster, Albert ("Chink") Facchiano, in Miami in January 1979 to discuss a complex and illegal financial skimming scheme. Donovan has denied knowing Facchiano and has said he encountered Masselli only a few times at job sites.

At week's end no one knew if investigators' hopes would be fulfilled. "Billy Masselli may be hell-bent for revenge," says one official. "It's a question of whether he'll take it on the street or whether he'll even the score by telling the special prosecutor everything he knows."

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