Earlier that day, Dr. Zarkin had tried to sneak quietly out of the courtroom, but just when he had made a clean getaway, his lawyers hauled him back before the judge. "Dr. Zorro," the man who carved "AZ" on a female patient, had forgotten to sign his own court papers.

Friends said they then didn't see Dr. Zarkin for weeks. But The Observer found him in Florida, where he had been lying low, visiting his 88-year-old father. When The Observer called, Phillip Zarkin picked up the phone and said he was just as shocked by his son's behavior as Dr. Zarkin's patients were.

"I don't know what happened, I just don't know what made him do it," said Mr. Zarkin, a retired kosher poultry worker from the Bronx who now lives in Fort Lauderdale. "He's a wonderful son, a wonderful doctor. There's nothing I know of that would have led to this."

Sources, however, have told The Observer that the sordid Zorro episode was just the latest in series of disturbing incidents involving the doctor that stretch back years. Apparently, the Manhattan District Attorney's office is hearing the same thing. According to law enforcement sources, some two dozen women patients and doctors have contacted the D.A.'s office, reporting incidents of "bizarre," "distracted" and just plain "weird" actions by the doctor.

"So far we've received about 24 complaints on Zarkin," said Linda Fairstein, chief of the sex crimes prosecution unit, which is handling his case. She would not provide details of the complaints.

However, a law enforcement source said some of the callers have raised a common theme: drugs. The Observer has learned that Dr. Zarkin quit two high-profile posts at New York University Medical Center and Bellevue Hospital Center in the late 1970's, a period when he was stoned on painkillers and failed to show up for office visits and surgeries.

"He had a serious drug problem," said Kenneth Platzer, his lawyer in the civil lawsuit filed in the Dr. Zorro incident. Dr. Zarkin himself did not return numerous phone calls for comment.

The drug problem could not have surfaced at a worse time for Dr. Zarkin. His attorneys are interested in a plea bargain with the D.A.'s office. To get a deal, they are going to need to prove that there was something wrong-in the strict medical sense-with their man's brain.

At first, they claimed Dr. Zarkin suffered from "Pick's disease," a debilitating ailment that short-circuits brain activity and causes severe mood swings. But recently, after the results of a brain scan didn't back up their claim, they ditched the Pick's defense and opted for a vaguer diagnosis. "It's some kind of an Alzheimer's-like condition," said Mr. Platzer.

The lawyers have scheduled another, more detailed round of brain tests next week to narrow down the range of possible diseases. The results should be ready just in time for Dr. Zarkin's preliminary hearing in criminal court on March 14.

Even if Dr. Zarkin can escape punishment, his profession may not. He has become the poster boy for a renewed push to make doctors' professional records fully public.

"Dr. Zorro has become the McDonald's coffee cup of the whole medical accountability debate," said Martin Brennan, policy director for the New York State Trial Lawyers Association, which is backing a bill that would post health department disciplinary files on the Internet. "Zarkin's personified the whole accountability problem in a really graphic way."

It would seem, based on numerous interviews The Observer conducted to piece together the details of Dr. Zarkin's life, that accountability is indeed the missing link. How else could Dr. Zarkin have managed to slip by so many people?

One answer is that weird surgeons are so common, people hardly notice them, unless they do something so crazy they're forced to. "It's not unusual to have a surgeon who's eccentric; they get away with anything," said a midwife who worked with Dr. Zarkin. "You know, that doctor-is-God kind of shit. I mean, you've got doctors who kill patients, so who's gonna pay attention to someone who's just kind of weird?"

That's fine-unless you happened to be one of his patients. "Nobody did anything to protect us," said Marilyn Mode, the New York Police Department's deputy commissioner for public information, a longtime Zarkin patient who was so angry she could hardly speak. "Nobody ever reported any of this stuff to the state until it was too late. I mean, they talk about a blue wall of silence; well, what do those guys wear? Scrubs? Blue surgical scrubs? Well, they have this blue scrubs wall of silence."

A Chronic Yenta

Many surgeons are oddballs, but Dr. Zarkin has long lingered in the boggy no-man's land between eccentricity and looniness.

"Zarkin was always kind of weird," said a former colleague who worked with him in the Beth Israel Medical Center delivery room. "He would always be saying these wildly inappropriate things, but he did his job. At some point, though, he must have lost his marbles."

Exactly when that was, no one can say. Longtime friends of the doctors claim, contrary to his bizarre "Zorro" image, Dr. Zarkin has always been a touchy-feely type, a serial talker with a penchant for getting himself wrapped up in other people's lives-whether they wanted him there or not. That he became a dinner companion of Liana Gedz, the 31-year-old dentist he is charged with carving up, doesn't shock anyone who really knows him.

"Whether you are talking about a disease or his basic yenta personality-it's hard to say," said a friend who has known him for more than 40 years. When asked to describe the doctor's hobbies, the friend replied: "talking."

Allan Zarkin was raised in the middle-class Pelham Parkway neighborhood, a leafy enclave of striving Jewish boys and their hovering mothers. Growing up in the 1950's, Allan was a bright and normal kid, his father said. By all accounts, the doctor took after his mother, Ruthie, whom neighbors recall as loud, charming and, like the doctor, prone to say the first thing that popped into her head.

Her three boys made her proud, hitting the Pelham Parkway trifecta: Allan became a doctor and the other two boys became lawyers.

Steven Zarkin, the second-youngest, rose to prominence as the principal law clerk for outspoken Bronx Supreme Court Judge Burton Roberts, who was the model for Tom Wolfe's gavel-busting jurist in Bonfire of the Vanities . In 1988, Mr. Zarkin earned an appointment as a Housing Court judge. "He was a regular Bronx Democrat," recalled Justice Roberts. "They were the ones who helped him on the race."

But his tenure on the bench was tragically brief. In 1991, Mr. Zarkin, a former serviceman with a tough-guy's profane streak, died of AIDS. It was a loss Dr. Zarkin took very hard, friends say.

The youngest Zarkin boy, Fred, founded a successful personal injury firm that brought so many cases against the city he has earned the sobriquet "Pothole King."

Dr. Zarkin, too, has seen his fair share of rough pavement. In the late 1960's, he attended medical school in Chicago, returning to New York for his ob-gyn residency at Bellevue in 1970. He was apparently in a partying mood, sharing his medicine chest with friends from the old neighborhood. "He wrote prescriptions, mostly Quaaludes," said a childhood buddy from the Bronx, who recalled visiting Dr. Zarkin at his apartment in Kips Bay, which he shared with his Irish setter. "We heard that he later had a problem with drugs." [Mr. Platzer, Dr. Zarkin's attorney, said he had no comment on the prescription allegation.]

According to sources close to the disgraced surgeon, Dr. Zarkin developed a nasty addiction to Talwin, a potent painkiller he began taking to deal with a painful infection of his heart lining. The drug-also known as "T" or "poor man's heroin"-produces a euphoric high and can lead to hallucinations and delusions if abused over many years.

In 1975, the doctor seemed on the fast track to establishing a major reputation, earning attending physician privileges at Bellevue, where he had served as chief ob-gyn resident, and a prestigious clinical professorship at N.Y.U.'s medical school. But before long, Talwin took over and the 37-year-old doctor began blowing off his duties.

"He was absolutely hooked on the stuff," said an associate who is familiar with Dr. Zarkin's professional history. "He basically stopped showing up for work. He got down to 108 pounds, it consumed his life. It was a nightmare, it took him years, years to recover."

Recently, investigators have gotten wind of the old problem.

"We got a call from a physician who knew him for years, saying that, basically, his problem wasn't a brain problem, that the problem was drug addiction," a senior law enforcement official told The Observer .

Dr. Zarkin's condition never made it onto any of his professional records. But by August 1976 he resigned both jobs.

For the next two years, the doctor didn't lift a scalpel, lingering in drug treatment programs, friends and associates told The Observer . From there, it was a slow road back, starting at abortion clinics until the early 80's, when he began working for HIP Health Plans, the giant health-maintenance organization, at Beekman-Downtown Hospital in lower Manhattan.

Around that time, Dr. Zarkin also made his way out to Queens, where he began performing abortions for Choices Women's Medical Center, the Queens women's clinic he retreated to last year as medical director after carving his initials into Dr. Gedz. By the early 90's, the doctor had made it back to respectability, earning attending privileges at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center and its sister hospital, Beth Israel.

Still, he couldn't quite escape controversy. In the spring of 1991, Dr. Zarkin, who was still working with HIP, admitted the 18-year-old Malanie Valentin into the St. Luke's obstetrics unit to deliver her first baby. As the hours of labor dragged by, Ms. Valentin, who had suffered no complications during the pregnancy, would not dilate, according to Ms. Valentin's mother, Mildred Mora, who was present for the whole ordeal.

Mrs. Mora said she was struck by Dr. Zarkin's nonchalance. She said she was particularly alarmed when the doctor disappeared for more than an hour at the height of her daughter's trouble. "He was just walking around, not paying attention," she recalled. "He seemed very, very relaxed. The nurses were complaining, they were saying he was taking too long, waiting too long, that we should do a C-section right away."

Instead, according to Mrs. Mora, Dr. Zarkin opted for a natural delivery, a decision medical experts say was a legitimate, if questionable, judgment call. At some point, Mrs. Mora said, the baby became lodged in the birth canal and was deprived of oxygen. When the baby finally emerged, the oxygen tank in the room turned out not to be functioning, she said.

As a result, according to Mrs. Mora, the little girl, Desiree, suffered frightful brain damage and had to be fed through a tube. The eight-month-old died in her grandmother's house on Dec. 6, 1991. "I don't even like to think about it," Mrs. Mora said.

The Mora family filed suit against Dr. Zarkin in 1993, but dropped the case after the baby died. The reason was simple, according to lawyers who worked on the case: Under a quirk in New York State law, plaintiffs recover next to nothing in wrongful death cases involving infants.

Dr. Zarkin couldn't be reached for comment and his lawyers said they didn't have enough information to respond to the allegations.

Mrs. Mora, who has been following the Zorro case carefully, said she regrets that Dr. Gedz didn't take Dr. Zarkin to trial-and that his damages were paid entirely by his malpractice insurance company. "I'm just sorry they settled," she said. "But at least somebody got him into court."

Brain Disorder?

Dr. Zarkin's best hope in the criminal trial is the bad-brains defense, but that means having to prove that his behavior is the result of some medical condition-and one that came on suddenly.

So far, that tack has encouraged a swift resolution in the civil case. In February, Dr. Zarkin relinquished his license to practice medicine. But it was his malpractice insurance company that paid all of the $1.75 million settlement to Dr. Gedz, who has called upon District Attorney Robert Morgenthau to drop the criminal charges.

Dr. Zarkin's lawyers told The Observer they are confident they'll be able to convince a skeptical Mr. Morgenthau with their arguments. But it may be a very hard sell.

According to state Department of Health investigators, Dr. Zarkin's bizarre behavior dates back at least to early 1999, when he began making strange sexual comments while performing surgery and inexplicably tugged hard on a newborn's arms moments after delivering the child. But the D.A.'s office has received complaints that date back seven years.

And if Dr. Zarkin has lost his wits, it's a come-and-go kind of madness. At his Feb. 9 arraignment, the doctor certainly seemed sane, if a tad absentminded. In the elevator ride down, a patient of his, a heavy-set woman in her 30's, jammed herself between the doctor and reporters who were straining to pick up any scrap of overheard conversation.

"I just love you," she said.

"Thank you, darling," the doctor replied, flashing a bit of the old charm.

Dr. Zarkin's saner side was also in evidence last December when he took a group of doctors and administrators on a tour of

Choices shortly after he was fired by Beth Israel. "He was very together, very personable, very excited about showing us exactly what the place did," recalled Frank Monk, who runs a clinic in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. "A really charming guy. His affect was appropriate; on a social level there were absolutely no signs that anything was wrong with him."

Around that same time, Dr. Zarkin had the presence of mind to sue his ex-partners at New York Gynecological and Obstetrical Associates for $50,000 after they kicked him out over the Zorro incident. The case is still pending.

Beth Israel's brass also claim they had no reason to believe Dr. Zarkin was cracking up. In March 1999, they approved Dr. Zarkin's re-application for attending physician privileges, which included a form attesting to his physical and mental fitness filled out by an unnamed doctor at N.Y.U. "Everything was fine as of last March," said Jim Mandler, a Beth Israel spokesman.

Dr. Zarkin is reportedly back in the city. Friends said he has been in a state of shock, spending most of his time in his Sutton Place apartment, leaving only to go to the movies and his lawyer's office.

"He's basically a train wreck," said a friend who has been in daily contact with him. "There's a big disconnect between him and the whole incident. There are times when he is shocked by everyone's reaction to the whole thing.

"He'll be in denial, he'll say things like, 'I don't see what the problem is, I delivered a good little baby.'"

When Mr. Ewing shattered his right wrist two years ago, Mr. Ewing's handlers immediately paged Dr. Melone, the country's best-known hand surgeon, who rebuilt the center's dislocated lunate bone and torn wrist ligaments But Mr. Ewing is just one of the many player-patients Dr. Melone has patched up over the years. On the walls of his office are pictures and autographed thank-yous from Jayson Williams, Keith Van Horn, Evander Holyfield, Allan Houston, Gary Sheffield, Tommy John, Don Mattingly and Dikembe Mutumbo-to name but a handful.

The man who assisted Dr. Melone on many of these operations was Dr. Keith Raskin. His picture, however, is nowhere in sight. That's because Dr. Melone is mired in an ugly legal war with Dr. Raskin, a man who was once his protégé, partner and, to hear Dr. Melone tell it, surrogate son. At issue is the dissolution of their high-profile and highly profitable surgical practice, which, for reasons neither man can quite explain, has degenerated into a testy, yearlong slap fight.

"It's getting a little unseemly," said one gossiping orthopedist. "Everybody knows they're beating each other up. They just need to end it and move on with their lives."

There is, undeniably, a lot at stake. Over the past decade, the prominence and wealth of sports physicians has grown, along with their clients' fortunes. As a result, the diplomas are tucked in dusty back offices while rainmaker memorabilia-like a signed Patrick Ewing poster-are prominently displayed.

Dr. Melone's clients-and his reputation for restoring them-has made for a profitable practice. According to court papers, the practice paid Dr. Melone and Dr. Raskin an estimated $1.2 million and $750,000 a year, respectively-not counting their academic salaries and lucrative deals with medical equipment manufacturers.

Still, dividing up the assets-and the debts-shouldn't have been too hard. If only the principals could keep their hands off each other.

First, Dr. Raskin and his lawyers charged that Dr. Melone used the practice as his "personal piggy bank," pulling out $530,000 for various expenses without reimbursing the business. They say the famous surgeon was so small-minded and vengeful he tried to swipe the practice's catchy 683-HAND phone number. He also prodded the landlord to evict Dr. Raskin from the 34th Street building both doctors still occupy, they claim. And you never saw such nepotism, according to Dr. Raskin. Dr. Melone paid his daughter $9,000 for office work and even used his cousin's wife as the office comptroller.

"Charlie does this kind of thing because Charlie is a guy with a big ego," Dr. Raskin told The Observer . "He would actually say, 'I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king.'"

For his part, Dr. Melone paints Dr. Raskin as an ungrateful apprentice trying to get his paws on his master's business. Among other things, the Melone legal team is charging Dr. Raskin with steering his boss' patients to himself, failing to pay for about $180,000 in old office furniture and whiting out Dr. Melone's name on co-authored academic papers.

"It's a betrayal," said boxing trainer and ESPN fight analyst Teddy Atlas, a close friend of Dr. Melone's. "Charlie feels, you know, like he's been stabbed in the back."

"Until last week, Raskin even had Charlie's nameplate up on his wall so that people would think Charlie was still working there," said another Melone confidant. "It was like telling people they were buying a Sony and giving them a Samsung."

Eventually, all of these grievances will be sorted out by a court-appointed arbitrator, who is expected to rule this spring. But whatever happens, both men will have to learn to live with each other, because they still share the same building on East 34th Street, near the mouth of the Midtown Tunnel. Dr. Raskin is in the practice's old third-floor digs. Dr. Melone's office is a newly constructed medical nirvana on the first floor.

Dr. Melone enters his suite, thankfully, through a separate entrance, so the two principals haven't talked to each other in more than a year. "The funny thing is that we've never actually had an argument," Dr. Raskin said.

The lawyers have. "I've been doing litigation for 25 years, and I've never dealt with anything remotely like this," said an exhausted Rodney Brown, Mr. Raskin's attorney, sitting at a scuffed conference room table, shirttail out, hair tousled, hand atop a two-foot pile of legal papers. "I mean, we've got six files with correspondence alone. Nasty letters back and forth. It just goes on and on and on and on."

Hand Wrestling

Walk through Dr. Melone's cheerful new office and you get the creepy feeling you are about to be grappled. Hands are everywhere-palms carved into bronze ashtrays, grasping fingers popping out of pen-and-inks, posters and pastels. Finally, there's Dr. Melone himself, pinning a visitor's palm between his two steady hands. "Look," he said, "Look at the complexity, the beauty of this thing! That's why I do this!"

Ordinarily, Dr. Melone is not an effusive, or even a chatty, man. But three topics seem to excite him: hands, sports and the endless trouble with Dr. Raskin.

"There's a total lack of respect, a lack of loyalty, a lack of camaraderie," Dr. Melone said. "And this was a guy who was supposed to be part of my family."

The trouble began in early 1998, when Dr. Melone vacated his longtime post as chief of hand surgery at New York University Hospital Center to take over the hand department at Beth Israel's East End Avenue campus. Dr. Raskin, who had a one-quarter share in Dr. Melone's practice for 10 years, stayed behind, in the hopes of securing Dr. Melone's old academic post at N.Y.U. (He didn't, as it turned out.) The younger doctor also hoped to retain a significant piece of the old business the two shared.

Like any bad divorce, the bitterness of the breakup is directly rooted in the innocence of the courtship. The friendship began in the mid-80's, when Dr. Raskin was a talented, somewhat lonely resident who spent evenings with the Melone family eating dinners and listening to his mentor's war stories. From the start, the pair were opposites who attracted. Dr. Raskin is tall, talkative and jokey in a Catskills way. Dr. Melone is laconic, short and trim-he looks like Michael J. Fox in late middle age.

Their skills were similarly complementary. Dr. Melone is an expert on carpal tunnel syndrome and adult trauma injuries-à la Patrick Ewing. Dr. Raskin specializes in pediatric cases and microsurgery. "It was a sort of father-son sort of thing," Dr. Melone said, reflecting dourly in his office, looking at a picture on the wall across from his desk. In it, a 20-something Dr. Raskin is hoisting Dr. Melone up to the rim of a basket for a slam dunk. Everyone in the picture, including Dr. Raskin, is wearing a white "Team Melone" T-shirt.

By the mid-1990's the prosperous Team Melone was becoming frustrated with the lack of support services and available operating rooms at N.Y.U. In 1996, they began shopping their skills to likely suitors, including the Hospital for Special Surgery, the Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital and, in 1997, Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.

But it was the Beth Israel offer Dr. Melone really wanted: The draw was Dr. Melone's pal Norman Scott, team doctor for the Knicks, who is chief of the orthopedics department at Beth Israel. "Charlie's got his Knicks thing," Dr. Raskin said. "He wanted to be close to Norm."

To this day, Dr. Raskin claims that Dr. Melone's defection to B.I. came as a complete shock to him. "He wouldn't even tell me himself," he said. "I got the news from his lawyer."

From there, things got, well, out of hand. Dr. Melone moved into the first floor, putting up a huge shingle on the front of the building almost as big as the "Midtown Tunnel" sign 50 feet away. Meanwhile, Dr. Raskin had to wrangle with the landlord-a friend of Dr. Melone's-just to keep the lease on his $20,000-a-month third-floor space. "I had nothing to do with that," Dr. Melone told The Observer .

Then there was the scrum over 683-HAND-the golden phone number through which the metacarpal millions once flowed. Last May, an annoyed State Supreme Court judge, Ira Gammerman ruled, Solomon-style, that the number should go to no one. Dr. Raskin was given his HAND suffix, but without the old 683. Dr. Melone was left to seek out less promising digits. "This is silly," Judge Gammerman said before slamming the gavel down.

At that point, Dr. Melone decided to proceed with his own lawsuit, the arbitration about the old furniture. Seizing on the opportunity, the Raskin legal team audited the corporation's books. The lawyers now say they have found that Dr. Melone owes the corporation about $530,000 in various pension fund payments, legal fees and unspecified checks totaling $80,000 that Dr. Melone wrote to himself.

"It was revelation," said Dr. Raskin. "It was like, O.K., Charlie owes me a half-million dollars, he's taking the phone number, he's moving downstairs to compete with me, and he wants me out of the building. Hey, that's just great."

Dr. Melone's lawyers say he owes only "a fraction" of the half-million. They counter with the patient-diversion charge. As proof they have submitted the affidavit of a former secretary who claimed Dr. Raskin ordered her to funnel only "bullshit" cases to Dr. Melone.

"Both of those people now work for Charlie at B.I.," responded Dr. Raskin. "That's why they said what they said. I didn't divert anybody, I didn't need to."

And so it goes, on and on. Curiously, while both camps fire their salvos-and hint at future legal action after the arbitration case is settled-both doctors said they yearn only for an end to the war.

And a final handshake for old times' sake.

"This is all very sad," Dr. Melone said. "I'm godfather to Keith's kids, you know."

Dr. Raskin, not surprisingly, denied the allegation. "It's not true," he said. "I'm Jewish, we don't do godfathers."

After months of open warfare with 300 of its doctors, the hospital, known as Meeth, was ordered by a Federal judge on Sept. 30 to halt its $41 million going-out-of-business sale to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. That means the hospital's board will likely have to seriously consider offers from three of Memorial's competitors to take over its coveted East 64th Street campus-and keep Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital alive. So much for a quick, painless mercy-killing.

Lenox Hill Hospital, Continuum Health Partners Inc. and Mount Sinai-New York University Health System are all actively competing for what is suddenly the hottest piece of hospital real estate in New York City. A fourth titan, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, is in talks with Meeth's board to take over its proposed clinics and its library.

"Overnight, this thing went from being a fait accompli to being a competitive situation," said an executive with one of the three hospitals bidding against Memorial Sloan-Kettering for control of the Meeth site. "We're alive."

Making things even messier, the State Attorney General's office-which monitors nonprofit hospitals and other charities-hasn't liked what it's been seeing. It's considering pulling the plug on Meeth's board of directors.

"The board's decision-making process and overall behavior have been unacceptable," State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer told The Observer . How unacceptable? "It's conceivable that at a certain point in time we might determine their behavior's been so bad that we'll seek their removal in court," Mr. Spitzer added. "We're not close to that point yet, but we'll be watching their behavior very closely. Very closely."

Mr. Spitzer's scrutiny comes as no surprise to Meeth's beleaguered board. The shocker for the would-be deal makers was that the Democratic Attorney General cleared his campaign against the Meeth sale with a cordial call to Gov. George Pataki, a Republican.

The doctors who have been vehemently fighting the Memorial Sloan-Kettering deal have been saying for months that the blueblood board, led by Lindsay (Dinny) Herkness III, a vice president at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Company, has a real talent for making enemies.

The Meeth-Memorial deal was supposed to be a neat cash-and-close-shop arrangement. Meeth administrators contend the hospital has been losing $2 million a month, and that they were compelled to act, stat, to end the hemorrhaging.

Under the agreement inked in July, Memorial would have built a brand-new breast cancer center on the site of Meeth's main building; two smaller parcels of land were to be sold to Downtown Development, a luxury housing developer. Meeth would walk away with $41 million. Gone would be its renowned East Side base, its 17 state-of-the-art operating rooms, its fabled residency programs.

But to fulfill the board's mandate to provide health care-and to sweeten the pot for state monitors-Meeth's board voted to use the proceeds to build a half-dozen clinics in poor neighborhoods like Harlem and downtown Brooklyn.

State monitors, however, aren't buying it. On Sept. 30, Mr. Spitzer scored a victory when State Supreme Court Justice Bernard Fried ordered Meeth to keep its doors open and commence "good-faith" talks with any suitor who might make a reasonable offer to keep it running at its current location. On Oct. 14, Meeth will have to defend the Memorial deal in a brief trial.

Meanwhile, the atmosphere at the East Side cosmetic surgery mecca will likely remain, in a word, ugly. "Starting in July, they hired security guards who have basically been frisking all of the patients and doctors," said Dr. David Edelstein, director of Meeth's respected ear, nose and throat program. "They've been checking everybody's bags, too. It's insulting. It's designed to make life as uncomfortable as possible for everybody so we'll just give up and leave. It won't work."

"We had no choice," responded Meeth spokesman Abigale Knapp. "We have had incidents where doctors were taking very expensive equipment."

Offers They Refused

Lots of people, it seems, want a piece of Meeth. According to Mr. Spitzer's office, no less than four medical institutions have made serious inquiries about buying the hospital, all with an eye toward keeping it running. In May, the Mount Sinai-New York University Health System offered $27.5 million to the board for the site.

Lenox Hill has cooked up three separate proposals, including a plan to keep the main Meeth building open while investing $3 million a year for 10 years to renovate the ailing hospital. The most recent Lenox Hill bid is a hybrid: They would sell the Meeth property to Memorial, and then use the proceeds to build a new ear, nose and throat hospital on Lenox Hill's East 77th Street campus. ("I don't know how the hell we'd do it," said a puzzled Lenox staff member. "We don't have enough space for ourselves as it is.")

The third, and most seriously discussed, proposal comes from Continuum Health Partners, the aggressive umbrella group that runs Beth Israel Hospital and St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital Center. Under their plan, Continuum would buy Meeth for an undisclosed amount and merge it with the recently purchased Manhattan Eye and Ear Infirmary, located at 14th Street and Second Avenue. Continuum would invest up to $10 million in Meeth while maintaining the hospital at the 64th Street site for at least five years. According to Mr. Spitzer, Continuum's chairman of the board, Morton Hyman, has pledged to take over Meeth on "24 hours' notice," if necessary.

The proposals, Meeth's directors say, are neither new nor particularly appetizing. "It appears to us that [the Attorney General's office] has a favored bidder-Continuum," said attorney John Aerni, a partner with LeBouef, Lamb, Greene & McRae, which represents Meeth's board. "I don't know why they are so hot on the Continuum thing. There have been many offers over many months, and we've considered them all seriously. Memorial's is the best."

The head of the State Attorney General's charities bureau, William Josephson, couldn't disagree more. In a scathing 43-page affidavit submitted to Justice Fried, Mr. Josephson blasted Meeth's single-minded pursuit of Memorial's money.

Throughout the summer, other suitors called, and Mr. Herkness and other board members slammed the door, according to Mr. Josephson. Continuum executives, when asked to see the hospital's financial records, were reportedly told No. Officials from New Jersey's Hackensack University Medical Center said they got the same response and decided not even to make a bid after Meeth refused to provide information. In mid-September, Mr. Josephson reported, Lenox Hill chief executive Gladys George had to cut off negotiations with the Meeth board after she was denied a copy of its feasibility study on the proposed neighborhood clinics.

Government fact-finders haven't fared much better. State Department of Health officials have repeatedly hectored Mr. Herkness and Meeth's executive director, George Sarkar, for key documents.

But apparently the board has been chatting it up with New York-Presbyterian Hospital in a bid to get the uptown giant to sponsor Meeth's proposed neighborhood clinics and to create a small Meeth division at its West 168th Street campus. In exchange, New York-Presbyterian would get $10 million in cash, $8 million in equipment and possession of Meeth's valuable medical library.

Condition Critical

Mr. Josephson said such news has trickled down to his office secondhand. "The Attorney General learned about the Memorial contract through a press release, even though the Meeth board had given us assurances of their willingness to keep the Attorney General apprised of major developments," wrote a piqued Mr. Josephson in his affidavit.

For their part, Meeth's defenders say they are simply trying to protect their plan to open clinics for the poor from attacks by politically motivated outsiders. Mr. Spitzer, they say, has been taken in by the hospital's 300 sacked doctors and their high-powered and politically connected attack dogs, lawyer Charles Stillman and public relations man Howard Rubenstein.

"It's sort of ironic that the charities bureau is spending all their time working with some wealthy plastic surgeons who are getting rich off Upper East Side patients," said Mr. Aerni, Meeth's lawyer.

"The Attorney General," added a source at Memorial, "is a brave man. He is making the world safe for cosmetic surgery."

But even Meeth's cherished clinic plan has come under attack as a rushed attempt at press-release altruism that is poorly planned and destined for failure. "They hatched this thing in a month," said Mr. Stillman, the doctors' attorney.

Meanwhile, day-to-day conditions at Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat could be labeled critical. Only nine of Meeth's 17 operating rooms are still operating, and the emergency room is barely running. There are chronic pharmacy shortages and new locks on many of the doors, and doctors are leaving in droves. To cut overhead, the hospital recently fired Dr. Iris Klatsky, director of the highly regarded Voice Restoration Program for throat-cancer patients. Meeth's 50 residents, who were given the sack in late June, are starting to be evicted from hospital-owned housing.

When Dr. Edelstein, Meeth's ear, nose and throat director, walked in the door a few weeks ago to read his charts, he said he was greeted by Mr. Sarkar, his boss, and ordered to leave.

"He told me I had no right to be there," Dr. Edelstein recalled. "I told him I did. There's the whole fight in a nutshell.

They had expected a few hours of intense face time with the Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital's president of the board, Lindsay Herkness III, but when they arrived at his lawyer's office, Mr. Herkness was nowhere in sight.

Not to worry, they were told, Mr. Herkness would hear their plan to save the 130-year-old institution over a conference call. But when Mr. Herkness' voice buzzed through the speaker soon after, the doctors said, the Morgan Stanley vice president sounded blithe and distracted.

A few minutes into the conversation, Mr. Herkness, known as Dinny to his friends, abruptly halted the talk.

"He said he couldn't stay," said Steven Fochios, who leads a group of 300 doctors trying to keep the hospital open. "I remember his exact words. They were: 'I have a crisis. The bartender for my cocktail party just quit.'"

Mr. Herkness did call back, presumably after quelling his single-malt rebellion. But by that time the $41 million sale of the hospital to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and a luxury housing developer was already a fait accompli.

Or maybe not. Despite Mr. Herkness' confidence, the deal faces significant obstacles. And like his little problem at the cocktail party, the disturbance is coming from the hired help-in this case, agitated doctors of the hospital.

For one thing, The Observer has learned, Gov. George Pataki will oppose any fast-track shutdown of the hospital. "We are exploring a variety of options to allow the facility to continue to operate as Meeth," said a senior aide to Mr. Pataki, using the hospital's acronym. That's no small threat, given that the State Health Department has ultimate approval over virtually every aspect of a hospital's franchise.

And despite the fact that Memorial Sloan-Kettering and Meeth have formally signed their agreement, at least three other hospitals-including Mount Sinai Medical Center, Lenox Hill Hospital and the people who run Beth Israel Medical Center and St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center-are negotiating takeovers with the doctors behind the board's back.

What's worse for Mr. Herkness is that these talks are proceeding with the blessing of State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who in his role as regulator of charities must sign off on the allegedly done deal. Mr. Spitzer is blocking Meeth from shutting its emergency room and has ordered Mr. Herkness to consider "any" new plan that would keep Meeth open and running just where it is. "The furniture," said a source in Memorial's camp, "is starting to fly."

All of this action seems distinctly out of place in a placid hospital where ills are rarely life-threatening and bills are often paid promptly and out of purse.

The physicians, led by the tart-tongued Dr. Fochios, a Meeth internist who runs a department that screens patients before surgery, have delighted in their odd yet effective lobbying campaign. It has included, among other things, enlisting one of the Pope's top men in Rome and relentlessly lampooning the board's WASP-ness. ("Half of these guys belong to the Union Club," Dr. Fochios maintains.)

And there seem to be no limits to the tactics they'll employ. They said they're even on the verge of drafting letters to Mr. Herkness' basset hound, Beauregard.

"I hope he has more sense than his master," Dr. Fochios said.

Help From Their Friends

To wage their war against the hospital's trustees, the directors scoured filing cabinets for rhinoplasties and cataract operations on anyone who could exert influence for their cause. "It's hard to come up with a poster child when you're talking about people who have had nose jobs," one of the doctors admitted. "It's not an easy sell."

Their search did yield a handful of celebrities (the doctors won't reveal who they've worked on), but they eventually decided to target one particular luminary. They placed a call to American-born William Cardinal Baum, a high-ranking Vatican magistrate who had his eye patched up at the hospital a few years back, according to Meeth's doctors.

Cardinal Baum, from his suite in the Holy See, reportedly contacted John Cardinal O'Connor's office, which then contacted Governor Pataki's people, who have taken an active interest in the case ever since.

Meanwhile, the doctors have worked other Pataki angles. They hired Charles Stillman, a velvet-mannered criminal lawyer who is close to Mr. Pataki-close enough to have earned him a recent appointment to the School Construction Authority. "Charlie's got the connections," an adversary told The Observer . "It was a very smart hire."

For the corps of physicians waging the antisale battle, no cause could hit closer to home. Although many have already made alternative arrangements to preserve their practices, they still have a lot to lose if the hospital closes. Meeth is a first-tier facility with state-of-the-art operating rooms, lab facilities and beds for the cases that require an extended inpatient stay. It has also garnered an international reputation as a teaching hospital, pioneering treatments for cataracts and physical disfigurement.

Those doctors who have made their careers there are less than excited about stepping to the back of the line of seniority and privilege at other institutions.

Then there's the small matter of location. The hospital is located right in the middle of the highest concentration of rich cosmetic surgery patients in New York. For plastic surgeons, whose procedures are not covered by standard insurance, this out-of-pocket "carriage trade" is their life blood. Apart from the 300 doctors who stand to lose their affiliations are 300 members of the unionized staff, who are represented by Local 1199.

Thus the doctors' fierce attempt to save the hospital-and their employ of Mr. Stillman, the equivalent of a cruise missile with a legal pad. First the lawyer filed an unsuccessful lawsuit to block the sale. Then he called his Albany contacts to consider alternatives to Memorial's plan, which includes handing over two of the hospital's three buildings to Colony Capital Inc., a luxury condo developer.

The lobbying-along with the support of State Senator Roy Goodman-has had an effect. "The Governor wants to keep the hospital open," Mr. Stillman told The Observer .

Acting as a fixer without portfolio, Mr. Stillman has opened negotiations with the half-dozen hospitals that had originally shown interest in the Meeth site, including Lenox Hill, Mount Sinai and Continuum Health Partners Inc., which runs St. Luke's-Roosevelt and Beth Israel hospitals. At the same time, the doctors said they have secured a private investor who is willing to pay $1 million more for the site than Memorial's development partner. That could allow the hospital to continue operating in some form at one of its three buildings. "These are real offers and I don't understand why the board is turning a blind eye to them," said Mr. Stillman, who would not reveal the investor's name.

Meeth and Memorial brush Mr. Stillman's dealmaking aside with contemptuous indifference.

"Despite the sentimental view of the doctors that something can be done, the numbers don't lie," said Meeth board member Charles Whitman, whose brother is married to Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey. "I understand the emotion. I went to Harvard and if somebody told me Harvard had to close down because it wasn't making money, I'd be upset, too."

Mr. Whitman added that the board did negotiate with other hospitals before settling on the Memorial offer, which he said was "by far the most attractive."

But that's not the prevailing sentiment among the government officials who have to sign off on the deal. On June 23, the head of Mr. Spitzer's charity bureau, Deputy Attorney General Bill Josephson, sent Mr. Herkness a stinging letter ordering the board to consider the counterproposals. He also chided Mr. Herkness for failing to set up a meeting with Lenox Hill officials. "We are not aware of one single shred of evidence that Meeth is actively exploring in good faith all or even any of these expressions of interest," a piqued Mr. Josephson wrote. It would be "impossible," he added, for Mr. Spitzer to approve the Memorial deal under present circumstances.

At press time, Mr. Herkness was in London and couldn't be reached for comment, according to his assistant.

For his part, Mr. Whitman didn't think much of the Attorney General's letter. "[Mr. Josephson] is a personal friend of the doctors' lawyer and he is basically acting as a creature of the doctors," said Mr. Whitman. "He's going to embarrass his boss."

In any event, the letter doesn't seem to have had much of an effect. A week later, Mr. Herkness and Memorial officials formally signed their agreement, a move that a Meeth source admits was intended to scare off the very hospitals the Attorney General asked them to negotiate with. "I would be surprised if, with a signed plan, the other hospitals will still be interested," the source said.

Memorial, for its part, also plans to soldier on, regardless of what Mr. Spitzer and the Governor's people are saying at the moment. "Memorial Sloan-Kettering is not exactly unknown in Albany," said Avice Meehan, a spokesman for the cancer hospital. "Our case will be heard."

A Charity Case

The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that the Meeth is in deep financial trouble and must change to survive. Over the past decade, Meeth has seen an exodus of patients and doctors that generated a $3.9 million deficit last year. "It's just the kind of place that doesn't work in the 90's," said Abigale Knapp, a spokesman for Meeth. "You don't need 25 beds, you need to deal with these patients in an outpatient environment."

The hospital was founded in 1869 by a group of wealthy members of the Union League Club-Roosevelts and Harrimans among them-who wanted to provide free care to poor soldiers returning from the Civil War. The first Meeth opened in a 34th Street brownstone and the hospital expanded over the years, creeping uptown until it landed at its current East 64th Street location in 1906.

But times have changed. Advances in outpatient care mean that most ear, nose and throat procedures can be performed in doctor's offices. That means, on any given day, most of the hospital's 60 beds are empty. About the only patients who stay the night are the cosmetic surgery patients, according to the administration.

So the hospital is underused. The drop-off is especially bad in the otolaryngology department, which has lost more than 400 throat and neck cases a year since the mid-1990's.

Last fall, the trustees commissioned a study that concluded the hospital had only one major asset: the land it sat on. The auditors recommended the board shut down the 265,000-square-foot hospital and sell it for its real estate value. Soon after, Mr. Herkness opened his closed-door talks with Memorial.

Incensed, the doctors presented their own report, slamming the hospital's executive director, George Sarkar, for running Meeth into the ground. Mr. Sarkar, they said, had failed to attract managed care companies, failed to update outdated billing systems and wasted millions on the construction of several underused operating rooms.

Then they took up the issue of Mr. Sarkar's paycheck: The board had voted to hike Mr. Sarkar's salary from $292,000 to $520,000 two years earlier, at a time when the magnitude of Meeth's problems were becoming known. "These people don't know what the hell they are doing," Dr. Fochios said.

Still, the Meeth officials maintain they are doing the right thing-and that they must destroy the hospital to save its mission. With the money they will make from the sale, the Meeth board plans to open four or five ear, eye and throat clinics in poor neighborhoods around the city. Mr. Sarkar has already leased 10,000 square feet in Brooklyn's Fulton Mall and is negotiating with Con Edison to expand a small clinic it opened in Harlem several years ago. A similar health care center in the South Bronx is also in the works.

The trustees are essentially Robin Hood-ing themselves out of existence: selling off silk-stocking assets so they can open a handful of Medicaid clinics in poor neighborhoods. The clinics would bear the Meeth imprimatur, but their affiliations would be with local hospitals or networks. The central hospital would cease to exist as soon as Memorial took over.

To Meeth officials, it's a return to their altruistic roots. "The idea is to bring the hospital back to its original mission of helping the poor," Ms. Knapp said. "There is the thought that the plastic surgeons have gotten a great deal on this hospital. They can use these facilities and mark up their procedures a couple hundred percent."

To the doctors, though, it's nothing more than a devilish ruse to sell Governor Pataki and others on their plan. Throw in the clinics, and the state-always desperate to expand health care to the poor-will have to say Yes.

Of course, even with that sweetener, there's no guarantee that Meeth will get the necessary state approval of its deal. Nonetheless, the trustees have taken steps to shutter the 130-year-old hospital as quickly as possible. In late June, Mr. Herkness and his board shut down the hospital's prestigious residency programs, sending about 50 doctors off. Ms. Knapp said all but three of the residents have found placements in other programs. But the doctors said it was a dirty trick that effectively puts the hospital out of business by cutting off its supply of medical foot soldiers.

"It was the worst thing they've done," said a frustrated Dr. Fochios. The doctor, a jazz lover who speaks in a muted bellow, believes he has finally exhausted face-to-face approaches to Mr. Herkness, a reedy patrician with a diffident manner and a prep school drawl. "I'm thinking about writing that letter to Beauregard," he said.

Apparently, a few problems have developed since that meeting six months ago. Republican insiders increasingly see Mr. Lazio not as a nice, polite young man from Long Island, but as a potentially lethal threat to the Mayor's political future. If Mr. Giuliani loses a hard-fought race against First Lady Hillary Clinton next year, he will live to fight another race. But if he loses to the relatively obscure Mr. Lazio in a Republican primary, he'll be lucky if he gets a post-City Hall job as national spokesman for the Club.

And there are signs that the race is becoming a bare-knuckled affair. In an interview with The Observer , Mr. Lazio charged that Mr. Giuliani's allies have threatened some of his supporters who have business before the city. "I think they're used to hardball tactics over there," Mr. Lazio said of Mr. Giuliani's camp. "There are some people who have been supporters … of mine [who] do business with the City of New York. [They] have gotten some messages that they have perceived as being threatening." Mr. Lazio refused to name the threatened supporters, and wouldn't offer further details.

Many people regard Mr. Lazio as the Eddie Haskell of Long Island politics–boyish, pleasant, willing to kiss up to elders. But since his chat with the Mayor, Mr. Lazio has skillfully exploited Mr. Giuliani's feuds with Gov. George Pataki and other powerful figures in the state Republican Party. Mr. Giuliani has no shortage of enemies, and Mr. Lazio wants to be friends with each and every one of them.

Mr. Lazio has yet to formally declare his candidacy. But there are clear signs that it's a go. For instance, The Observer has learned, Mr. Lazio's aides are seeking office space in Manhattan–an all but certain indication that Mr. Lazio is ready to run.

Mr. Lazio also confirmed that his campaign has discussed the possibility of hiring a noted opposition researcher and all-around political operative named Christopher Lyon. Mr. Lyon, wouldn't you know, was political director of Mr. Giuliani's 1993 mayoral campaign–which, if nothing else, could mean that his filing cabinet is jammed with useful information about the Mayor.

"It's sort of disconcerting that the Congressman has decided to go negative from the get-go," said an ally of the Mayor. "Lyon is a clear sign that [Mr. Lazio] intends to fling dirt."

As a matter of fact, in an interview with The Observer , Mr. Lazio offered his sharpest attack yet on Mr. Giuliani's Senate ambitions.

"There are some accomplishments for which he can be justifiably proud as Mayor," he said. "But I think for this position, he is a square peg in a round hole … This is just not right for him. I never felt as though this is a position he really wanted–outside of a temporary position to hang his hat while he searched for something more appropriate. The people of New York … don't deserve to have somebody who just is seeking it for personal power or for a temporary perch." (A spokesman for the Mayor's campaign did not respond by press time.)

Mr. Lazio talked about the Mayor, and his own ambitions, after spending two hours inside a veterans hall in East Islip on a sweltering Sunday in mid-June. His chores, which he performed with appropriate candidate-in-waiting enthusiasm, included pinning medals on the chests of 50 septuagenarian D-Day survivors. In the hall's bathroom, each toilet was tagged with its very own "Hanoi Jane Urinal Sticker" so the old soldiers could practice their marksmanship.

This is Mr. Lazio's turf, a well-preserved piece of middle America in Suffolk County as far removed from the malls and tract developments of Nassau County as it is from Newtown Lane in East Hampton. The heart of his Congressional district is a string of south shore towns strung along Montauk Highway and lined with delis and boat dealerships.

Weed-Free Student

Mr. Lazio grew up in the district. He's married, with two young daughters. He's 41, but he doesn't look much older than his 1976 West Islip High School yearbook photo (although he got rid of the Tony Orlando haircut). Back then, Rick Lazio used his given name: Enrico Lazio. In his only class candid shot, he is standing next to a friend, who is in drag. Mr. Lazio is wearing a blazer and a very uncomfortable expression.

"He definitely wasn't the guy you bought weed from," recalled Steve Lampasona, who went to junior high and high school with Mr. Lazio. "He and I struggled to keep an 85 average so we could stay in honors classes."

The son of an auto parts dealer who went to Vassar College in upstate Poughkeepsie, Mr. Lazio is a more polished version of former Senator Alfonse D'Amato, who rose to power 20 miles west, in Island Park. Like Mr. D'Amato, the Congressman worked his way up through the ranks of the Long Island machine, serving low-key stints as a county prosecutor and legislator.

And like Mr. D'Amato, Mr. Lazio made a sudden and successful grab for power by upsetting a well-funded, high-profile liberal. He defeated Representative Tom Downey of Amityville, an 18-year incumbent, in 1992 with a relentlessly negative campaign. He portrayed Mr. Downey as a complacent liberal, attacked him for a Caribbean junket and even targeted his wife for her role in the House check-bouncing "scandal." One flier featured a photo of Mr. Downey tossing a football on a beach in Barbados. Another offered "Tom Downey's limousine liberal guide to surviving the recession."

Once in Congress, Mr. Lazio played the moderate to his home constituents, staking out middle-of-the-road pro-choice and pro-gun control positions. Meanwhile, in the halls of the Capitol, he maneuvered his way into the good graces of the conservative House leadership, rolling back New Deal housing legislation and voting for two articles of impeachment against President Clinton earlier this year.

"He personally says he's moderate," said Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, "but as a guy trying to get ahead in the Republican Party, he makes peace with very right-wing elements."

Watts Likes Him

It is a rule of thumb that the more conservative candidate invariably wins a Republican primary (see D'Amato, Alfonse, in 1980), and Mr. Lazio certainly would fit that description in a race against Mr. Giuliani. Indeed, Mr. Lazio has been pushing hard for the backing of state Conservative Party chair Michael Long–and Mr. Long has hinted broadly that he has a good shot at winning his support.

If Mr. Lazio loses to Mr. Giuliani in the Republican primary but has the Conservative endorsement in the general election, he would split the anti-Hillary Clinton vote, possibly dooming Mr. Giuliani's chances. Meanwhile, the Representative already has the enthusiastic backing of Representative J.C. Watts of Oklahoma and of American Conservative Union chief David Keene, who recently described him as "giant-killer of the year."

It's true that the giant has clear advantages. He may not be jolly, but he has a lot of green. While Mr. Lazio has $2.3 million in campaign cash, Mr. Giuliani raised a similar sum in one night. And a Quinnipiac College poll in May gave Mr. Giuliani 36 percent of registered Republican primary voters to Mr. Lazio's 8 percent.

But here's where it gets interesting. An astounding 86 percent of the state G.O.P. primary electorate comes from outside the five boroughs. Mr. Giuliani will win the city. But Mr. Lazio has a good shot at winning Long Island, his base. And that means the battleground will be upstate New York. Mr. Lazio has spent a great deal of time there lately, talking to many Republican voters who still recall Mr. Giuliani's traitorous endorsement of a Democrat, Mario Cuomo, for governor in 1994.

But What About Pataki?

One of those voters, of course, is Mr. Pataki himself. Mr. Lazio has been diligently courting the Governor and his allies. Mr. Lazio has attached himself to the Governor and other Republican leaders, gladly following them to every ribbon-cutting ceremony and county committee dinner-dance he can, grinning and beaming and acting very much like a candidate in waiting.

Mr. Lazio, in fact, seems to recognize that his candidacy could turn on the backing of the Governor, who has the power to marshal Republican troops upstate. He has even told reporters he won't run if Mr. Pataki asks him not to.

Not that Mr. Lazio believes the Governor will make such a request. "I certainly would not be getting into this race if I thought it was something that the Governor would be opposed to," Mr. Lazio said, grinning again.

Would that Mr. Lazio's relationship with Mr. D'Amato were so blissfully uncomplicated. Last year, Mr. D'Amato reportedly hurled a string of obscenities at Mr. Lazio after the upstart Congressman had the nerve to introduce a housing bill. Federal housing was one of Mr. D'Amato's favorite issues, and he reportedly resented Mr. Lazio's intrusion onto his turf.

Since Mr. D'Amato's defeat, however, the would-be Senator and former Senator have had a few bury-the-hatchet chitchats. "They've made up and now they're butt buddies," noted one associate of Mr. Lazio.

But that doesn't exactly constitute an endorsement from the still powerful Mr. D'Amato. One of the former Senator's allies, Representative Peter King of neighboring Massapequa, has been threatening to play spoiler against Mr. Lazio by getting into the Senate race himself and slicing into Mr. Lazio's Long Island turf.

For the moment, however, Mr. Lazio remains the choice candidate for Rudy-haters. Mr. Lazio may not be well known. And he may not have vanquished crime in New York City. But while Mr. Giuliani has a gift for turning his friends into blood enemies, Mr. Lazio has a knack for making pals of his former foes.

"What do you want me to tell you? Yes, he's nice guy," said Patrick Halpin, a Suffolk County Democrat who served as county executive in the late 1980's, when Mr. Lazio was a county legislator.

Against Mr. Giuliani, nice may be the nastiest tactic of all.