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 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.”
