The duo returns, with Two Against Nature , just as they left: with trumpets, saxophones and trombones blazing away, Mr. Fagen's voice laced with self-pity and doubt, and Walter Becker's keen musicianship underneath it all. The album was made, painstakingly and at great cost, over the last three years in Mr. Fagen's home-away-from-home, River Sound Studios,a four-story walk-up in the East 90's.

Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen were ensconced in the studio where they made the album, watching videotape from their upcoming PBS and VH1 specials. (When they split up 19 years ago, there was no VH1 or even MTV, and PBS was living on rerunsof Upstairs, Downstairs .) Mr. Becker, who once sported Rick Wakeman-like tresses, keeps his hair short now. He's the kind of hip 50 you get to be if you've spent the better part of two decades in Hawaii. Mr. Fagen, who has remained in Manhattan, is a different story. Gray-haired, thin-lipped, round-shouldered, he resembles someone's cool Jewish doctor dad who plays weekends in a neighborhood jazz combo. Unlike his partner, he's certainly not the kind of guy who would feel at home in Maui. "Did you ever see Burden of Dreams ? I feel like Werner Herzog when I'm there." Mr. Fagen put on his best Mel Brooks German accent. "And the trees are miserable, the birds are screeching in misery!"

They've each been through some stuff. Mr. Fagen got married in 1991, to songwriter Libby Titus. He gained two stepchildren. Mr. Becker, who is divorced, has a son in high school and a daughter in college.

In the 20 years spent away from the studio as Steely Dan, Mr. Fagen put out two respected solo albums, The Nightfly and Kamakiriad . Mr. Becker, even in his seclusion, issued a solo self-titled album, produced some jazz things for other artists and for Rickie Lee Jones. He also conquered what he refers to as "health problems," i.e., substance abuse. In '93 and '94 the band toured as Steely Dan, issued a live album, Alive in America , and toured again in '96.

Through the magic of sampling, Mr. Fagen and Mr. Becker never really went away, playing a major role in songs by such rap artists as De La Soul, Coolio and others. In fact, Mr. Fagen and Mr. Becker were the winners of the 1999 award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers for most-played rap song, "Uptown Baby," by Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz, who relied on a riff from the 1977 Steely Dan song "Black Cow."

"Ascap sent us these handsome plaques, but they told us we shouldn't come to the ceremony," said Mr. Becker. "They said there was some violence the year before and we should stay at home. So I did."

Mr. Fagen had been planning an acceptance speech. "I would have thanked Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz," he said. "But they were angry because the sample had already been licensed for Puff Daddy and Mase. But then my stepdaughter heard it on the radio and said it was a different record. And they-Lord Tariq-had never asked for a license. So there was a copyright violation and we made them pay a little extra, and they were mad … We actually heard," added Mr. Fagen, laughing, "that Puff Daddy was riding around in a limo with Lenny Kravitz and went crazy when he heard it. He said, 'They stole my sample!'"

They were asked if sampling was really all that different from, say, wind player Wayne Shorter adding some Miles Davis-flavored riffs to Steely Dan's Aja album.

"It's not exactly the same thing," said Mr. Becker with an edge of sarcasm to his voice. "We wrote new music, hired new musicians. In those days nobody [sampled]. We could do it now, and we didn't consider it. I have nothing against people who do it. Our whole thing is to try and write some songs."

But doesn't that take a lot of time?

"It does!" said Mr. Becker. "But at the end of the day you've actually written some songs, which is the fun part."

"And that's the intellectual property that you eventually own, which you can sell for samples," said Mr. Fagen. "There's no other reason to do it anymore, apparently."

Steely Dan may seem out of step with a pop music world dominated by sampling, lip-synching, and beautiful faces and bodies, but they were unique even in their time. Their early days as Steely Dan, circa 1971-72, were not marked with the hedonism that infected other rock outfits of the day. Groupies were never a big factor.

Mr. Fagen: "Even when we did tour we were too-"

Mr. Becker: "-anxious and weird."

Mr. Fagen: "We were quite introverted. But we had extroverted members of the band. We were writing the songs." He paused. "There were groupies no matter who was playing every Saturday night. By 1972 the groupie action in, say, Portland was not that appetizing. And the better-looking class of those was already gone by the time we got to them. Walter and myself and [band member] Denny Dias were more into the cannabis crew than the alcoholic crew, and we were just too slow on the uptake. We just didn't have enough enthusiasm."

By the time Mr. Fagen and Mr. Becker split up in '81, Steely Dan had turned out seven platinum albums and a dozen or so hit singles, including the sarcastic "Reeling in the Years" and "Rikki Don't Lose That Number." What is that latter song about, anyway?

Mr. Fagen: "We always thought of Rikki being a girl and the number being a phone number. He [the narrator] was a desperate guy."

Mr. Becker: "The idea that this girl has stumbled into some kind of debauched situation and has momentarily recoiled from it."

Mr. Fagen: "In the 70's, linear lucidity wasn't that big a priority."

Mr. Becker: "The depravity of the day contained drugs and sex."

There is some of that in the new songs.

Mr. Becker: "Well, I hope so. We have our reputations."

Growing Up Dan

Mr. Fagen, who describes his family as "poor," was raised on jazz near Princeton, N.J. His mother, a singer, fronted a dance band at the Ideal Hotel in the Catskills and "used to sing constantly." (His dad, who seems to turn up in the new Steely Dan song, "Don't Take Me Alive," was a bookkeeper.)

"That's why I'm familiar with those standards from the 20's, 30's and 40's," Mr. Fagen said. "My grandmother gave us a piano when I was 11, and I started fooling around on it. I took a few lessons but learned off jazz records." Mr. Fagen, who "despised" his music teachers, started a trio at South Brunswick High School. "I was really an amateur jazz player by the time I was 14 or 15." And a self-described jazz snob. "I despised rock-and-roll," he said. "To a jazz fan or jazz musician it seemed dumb. They only used simple chords, a couple of chords. It seemed to be very repetitive."

He met Mr. Becker at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., around 1966. Mr. Becker, who came from Forest Hills and was a year younger, had picked up blues guitar from Spirit founder Randy California. Before Mr. Fagen graduated from Bard (Mr. Becker never got the diploma), they were joined on drums for a time by fellow student Chevy Chase.

In short order Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen arrived in Los Angeles, writing songs for ABC Dunhill Records and playing behind Jay and the Americans. "We were supposed to be writing for groups like Three Dog Night and Grass Roots," Mr. Fagen said. "But we were terrible at it."

The pair turned to their literary influences for their own lyrics, everyone from Nabokov and Bruce Jay Friedman to Philip Roth and Terry Southern. Students of the band's lore know that the band's name is an allusion to a dildo mentioned in William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch .

Very few bands have had the combination of platinum sales and critical respect the Dan achieved over their 10 most fruitful years. But the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has yet to recognize the band, even three years after they became eligible. For the guys, it's a tongue-in-cheek puzzlement. They've written the hall several times and posted the letters on their Web site. Among the inducements they've offered: dozens of old 3-M digital recorders, Mr. Fagen's childhood piano, which at the time was already in Cleveland, and a case of honey mustard.

"That was for Jann Wenner personally, though," Mr. Fagen added, referring to the Rolling Stone founder who is behind the museum. He recalled his attendance-along with Warner Brothers music boss Mo Ostin-at the early Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies, at the Waldorf-Astoria: "Mo Ostin would come from L.A., and he needed someone to talk to. So he'd get me and Paul Simon and Lorne Michaels. It was fun. Mike Love made an insane speech. There was all this insane stuff, and it was kind of interesting. Then they decided it was going to be a Grammy-type video thing, and it lost all its character. All the main people are already in there, and now they're going to have to induct people from the 80's."

"We've qualified several times," said Mr. Becker. "Ozzy Osbourne described us as the perennial losers."

"We tell them we want to be in it and that we're devastated when we lose," said Mr. Fagen.

"The first year we became eligible we wrote a letter on a lark," Mr. Becker said. "We though it would be funny to be inducted by ourselves and not with our old band mates, just for crassness. Subsequently, we found out there was a real debate about that with some other band. So we stumbled into this minefield. So then we reversed our position. We demanded that all of our band members be inducted, plus other bands that had been neglected, like the Fugs, Jimmy Carl Black, the drummer from the Mothers of Invention. Different incarnations of the Jefferson Airplane. We might be the very last band inducted."

Maybe the Rhythm and Blues Foundation is more in their line?

Mr. Fagen: "What do they like over there? Honey mustard? Belgian chocolate? Swedish ginger cookies?"

With or without the hall, they will continue to go their own way. Indeed, Two Against Nature reveals only slight changes in their thinking. In the single, "Cousin Dupree," the main character is an older guy sleeping on his aunt's couch and fantasizing about his young teenage cousin. "It's just a little rural love song," Mr. Fagen likes to say. "What a Shame About Me" concerns a Strand book clerk who's gone nowhere in his life while his girlfriend has become a major movie star.

"He's gotten a certain integrity," Mr. Becker said. "He's having a moment of bleak epiphany and is in a state of grace."

But some of Two Against Nature reflects a stark change from the past. Set against a rich melody, "Almost Gothic" is an exuberant love song in which the narrator announces he spells love "L-U-V."

"It's a little quote, you know," Mr. Fagen said. "From the Shangri-Las, I think, some throw away thing from 'Leader of the Pack.' I guess maybe because I connected the Shangri-Las with unwholesome sex. There's no way to explain how powerful his feeling is for this woman is so he has to spell it out."

What accounts for the un-Steely Dan-like feeling of glee that infects the song?

Mr. Becker: "Well, we have to enlarge the franchise a little bit, expand the territory. We don't want to be stuck in a rut."

Mr. Fagen: "You have to perk yourself up every morning when you get older. So you start thinking of these perky subjects."

And yet, there he was, still standing on the night of Dec. 10, commanding the lobby of the Cineplex Odeon Beekman for the premiere of The War Zone , a movie directed by one of his clients, actor Tim Roth. Mr. Giacchetto's shaggy hair was extremely blond that night. His Prada pants were tight, and he was nuzzling a Meg Ryan lookalike. Singer Nona Hendryx was in his entourage.

"Where are we going?" Ms. Hendryx asked after the movie. "Are we going to the party?"

"No, no," said Mr. Giacchetto. "We'll go someplace else."

The implication: someplace hotter, better than the Lava Lounge, where the rest of the audience was headed. But 20 minutes later, a comedown: Mr. Giacchetto had been forced to go to the Lava Lounge, since Mr. Roth was obligated to go there.

"I'm only staying a few minutes," Mr. Giacchetto said, giving no indication that he was in any way bothered by the exodus of his clients, the press attention, or the suicide of his friend and colleague, Jay Moloney, the Creative Artists Agency agent with a drug problem.

Mr. Giacchetto's run of bad luck can partly be traced back to investments he made for his clients in three companies: Digital Entertainment Network Inc., still thought to be a potential leader in Internet videos; Paradise Music & Entertainment Inc., a wobbly amalgam of video and music production; and Iridium L.L.C., a Motorola-backed global satellite system.

But perhaps the hipster money manager's recent woes have more to do with the knotted business and personal relationships he has with Mr. Ovitz, Mr. Ovitz's Artists Management Group partner Rick Yorn and the hunk of Titanic himself, Mr. DiCaprio. First off, Mr. Giacchetto introduced Mr. Ovitz to Mr. Yorn, thereby helping to bring along the partnership that would become Artists Management Group. Among Mr. Yorn's client roster was Mr. DiCaprio, whose star power gave legitimacy to the fledgling management company and attracted others to the Ovitz fold. So all was happy among Messrs. Giacchetto, Ovitz, Yorn and DiCaprio for a time- until that Far East deal, according to industry sources.

Last summer, Mr. Giacchetto opened negotiations to merchandise the DiCaprio name and likeness in the Far East, where the matinee idol had been making The Beach . "He was making a deal that would have paid Leo $25 million," said one business source, "and Dana would get $100,000 a month."

But there was a problem with the would-be deal: It had Mr. Giacchetto functioning less like a mere money manager and more like, well, a manager. In addition, sources said, Mr. Giacchetto had not consulted Mr. Ovitz and Mr. Yorn about the whole thing. And when Mr. Ovitz found out about it, the sources said, he was not pleased. The short version: He retaliated by cutting off Mr. Giacchetto and taking away his clients. "He had to teach him a lesson," said a source.

Mr. Ovitz had no comment on the matter of the Far East deal. Neither did Artists Management Group spokesman Howard Rubinstein. Mr. Yorn was traveling and could not be reached for comment. Mr. Giacchetto did not return phone calls left at his office or with any of his representatives, including former Beatles publicist Peter Brown and attorney Kent Karlsson.

If the attempted Far East deal delivered the knockout blow to the Giacchetto-Ovitz relationship, then that May 9 New York Times Magazine profile of Mr. Ovitz softened it up. Mr. Giacchetto made an amazing cameo appearance in the piece, written by Lynn Hirschberg, in which he gave unwise-seeming quotes, such as: "You want to know about Michael. Well, everyone wants to know about Michael. Everyone wants to know about his money. The whole world is interested in this moronic little management company. All I can say is that it makes me realize that Michael Ovitz is the best agent that ever lived. I don't think he even knows what his company is going to be, and yet the whole world is interested." In the presence of the writer, he also barked out things to an assistant: "Get me Leo," was one such jewel; "Get me Michael!" was another.

Apparently, "Leo" is no longer taking Mr. Giacchetto's calls. "He hung out there all the time," said one former Cassandra Group staff member of Mr. DiCaprio. "And he literally lived in Dana's apartment." And as recently as two months ago, Mr. DiCaprio was seen with Mr. Giacchetto at the Mercer Kitchen restaurant. Now, however, their friendship has been ruptured, sources said.

Mr. Giacchetto, until recently, was also handling investments for Mr. Ovitz and Mr. Yorn. An industry source said Mr. Ovitz did not lose money because of Mr. Giacchetto's investing.

As recently as July, Mr. Yorn was a believer in Mr. Giacchetto, telling CNN-FN cable network that he was "an incredible money manager … He's probably one of the few guys that I know that can analyze a spreadsheet as well as run A&R [artists and repertory] at a record company."

Which brings us to a simple but baffling question: Who is Dana Giacchetto? His friends say he was reared in the lower-middle-class town of Medford, Mass. For three years, from 1980 to 1983, he attended the University of Massachusetts in Boston. What Mr. Giacchetto has omitted from interviews with fawning reporters is that he dropped out of school in 1983, a year shy of graduation. This is where his past becomes somewhat murky. In a 1992 Boston Herald interview, he said that he'd gone to work at age 21 for Shearson American Express in Boston. To the New York Post and others, he has said that he worked for the now-defunct Boston Safe Deposit & Trust Company, which was a division of Shearson until it was sold with its corporate parent, to Mellon Bank.

No one at Mellon Bank in Boston contacted by The Observer , including those who worked in personal banking during the Boston Safe Deposit days, had any memory or record of Mr. Giacchetto. Mr. Giacchetto also told GQ magazine that he was a few credits shy of a Harvard M.B.A. The Harvard Business School has no record of him, however.

"Dana likes to embellish," said one lawyer who has worked with him.

According to Nasdaq records, Mr. Giacchetto failed the only test he ever took, for a Series 2 license to make interstate deals, in 1996. Nasdaq also has no employment history on record for Mr. Giacchetto at all. A Nasdaq spokesman said: "I'd be suspicious if someone held this experience out to me and we had no record of him."

Another thing from Mr. Giacchetto's back pages: He returned to the University Massachusetts for one year, in 1989-90, to get his bachelor of arts degree in English, according to university records.

Mr. Giacchetto also claimed in interviews that he had control over more than $400 million through the Cassandra Group. But a March filing with the State Attorney General's office shows that the figure was actually $100.2 million.

Sometime around 1987, Mr. Giacchetto started doing business in New York and became a regular visitor at the then-new and terribly chic Royalton Hotel. He began to meet people who could help him, starting with Artemis Willis, who went to Wellesley College and came from a Mayflower family. Mr. Giacchetto, according to friends, started investing the Willises' money. Ms. Willis, who also declined to be interviewed for this article, was apparently his girlfriend for several years.

In 1990, Mr. Giacchetto circulated a flier for a roommate in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood and ended up moving in with Craig Kanarick, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's labs with ambitions of his own. Within a couple of years, Mr. Kanarick himself would move to New York and start Razorfish Inc., the hugely successful Web site design firm.

"He used to have meetings on our dining room table," Mr. Kanarick said. "From the beginning, Cassandra was like an investing club."

In 1991, Mr. Giacchetto started cold-calling art galleries in New York, looking for someone who would cotton to his idea of helping artists with their cash. His charms worked on the Pace Gallery. Soon he was meeting the artists who sold their work to the stars through Pace. Some of his earliest clients were Pace artists George Condo and David Salle. Soon he was fervently networking the artists and stars and making regular trips to Los Angeles.

By 1993, he was organizing Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, a charity for musicians in need of health insurance. Victoria Williams, the popular alternative country singer who'd been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, became one of his clients through Sweet Relief.

"He's been very helpful soliciting pledges from people," said Ms. Williams. "He was very caring, too. And maybe in a strange way, he was star struck."

Along the way he built up his star-studded client roster. In 1995, he moved to New York. In 1998, he merged elements of Cassandra Group with a Chase Manhattan Bank investment division called Chase Capital Partners. The result? The short-lived Cassandra-Chase Entertainment Partners L.L.C. The group had its roots in the friendship between Mr. Giacchetto and Jeffrey Sachs, a 48-year-old Democratic Party operative and friend of the Kennedy clan with a D.D.S. Mr. Sachs was supposed to be on that fatal flight with John F. Kennedy and the Bessette sisters, but canceled at the last minute, according to friends.

Mr. Sachs introduced Mr. Giacchetto to Mitchell Blutt, of Chase Partners. "Dana started involving himself in transactions," said someone who witnessed the beginnings of the short-lived Chase-Cassandra partnership.

The investment in Digital Entertainment Network was the partnership's first unlucky turn. Digital Entertainment Network founder Marc Collins-Rector left the company after a lawsuit filed against Digital Entertainment Network accused him of molesting a teenage boy. A planned initial public offering was sidelined.

While trouble was brewing between Mr. Giacchetto and Mr. Sachs et al., he was facing a challenge within Cassandra Group. Soledad Bastiancich, a graduate of Yale Law School who joined the SoHo company in '97, convinced him to conduct an outside audit, according to company sources. When the outside auditors turned up only minor mistakes, she negotiated her way out of the company. (Ms. Bastiancich had no comment.) No Cassandra client interviewed for this article seemed to know about last winter's audit-and the fact that Mr. Giacchetto turned up clean.

Things were still chugging along for the talented Mr. Giacchetto. He made Moomba his home base. He gave a wild party on Oscar weekend at the Standard in Los Angeles, a restaurant owned by his friend Andre Balazs.

In June, the Sweet Relief fund held a fifth-anniversary celebration at the Hollywood Athletic Club. The invitation read in part: "Paying tribute to Dana Giacchetto, the founding director." Art Alexakis of Everclear and the group General Public were among those who performed. Mr. DiCaprio was in attendance while Mr. Giacchetto worked the room in a black suit.

Over the summer, it seemed that Mr. Giacchetto had in fact supplanted magician David Blaine as Mr. DiCaprio's most photographed companion. Medford, Mass., where his parents Cosmo and Alma Giacchetto live close to a cemetery, must have seemed very far away.

"I just hope the people who pledged money stick to their promises now," said Ms. Williams, the singer involved in Sweet Relief.

All along, Mr. Giacchetto had hoped to turn Paradise around by investing $2 million for himself and for clients like Mr. DiCaprio, who got 50,000 shares. He installed Jay Moloney, the former C.A.A. agent with a drug problem (and Mike Ovitz's onetime assistant) as president for $1 million a year. In May, Paradise's stock peaked at 8 on Nasdaq. But by Nov. 1, it had fallen to 3. After a sharp rise for a week, Paradise then fell to 2, where it has remained. Everyone lost money on it, from Mr. DiCaprio to Ms. Williams.

On Nov. 16, Moloney hanged himself. That same week, Mr. DiCaprio bailed out of Cassandra, and the exodus began. Mr. Giacchetto gave money back to any client who asked for it.

By Thanksgiving, Mr. Giacchetto-who still had the Cassandra Group- got his walking papers from the joint Cassandra-Chase Bank venture, according to his legal complaint. One friend of Mr. Giacchetto's said, dryly, "Dana had a bad month in November."

Mr. Giacchetto's complaint, in which he claims that the Chase-Cassandra partners "slandered [his] professional name and reputation," was filed this month in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. It asks for $50 million to $100 million in damages from Mr. Sachs and Chase's Samuel Holdsworth and Robert Egan. The new, Giacchetto-less version of the venture firm is called Chase Capital Entertainment Partners.

"It's like a lovers' spat," said one employee who has worked with both Mr. Giacchetto and Mr. Sachs.

"They'll probably make a movie out of it," said Ms. Williams. But what will she do with her money now that she's no longer one of Mr. Giacchetto's clients? "I'm moving it into land," she said. "Real estate!"

High above Times Square, in bright letters, we see the intimate thoughts of regular folks-intimate thoughts about Jell-O. "I make Jell-O gelatin shimmy, shake, and jiggle just for fun. It makes me giggle," wrote one Joan Verdeal of Arvada, Colo.

It's part of a contest. Those who entered were asked to explain why Jell-O makes them "smile more," in 75 words or less. The grand prize winners got to meet Bill Cosby. The runners-up got their name in lights over Times Square, alongside their writing. Reached by phone, Mrs. Verdeal, a 68-year-old mother of five grown children, said she wasn't aware her name was up in lights over Manhattan.

She said she enters contests as a hobby and wins something in one out of every 15 she enters. "I do a lot of rewriting," she said. " A lot! You can spend three days writing one 25-word entry, sometimes more."

Last May, Mrs. Verdeal won a trip for two to New York in a contest sponsored by Equal sugar substitute-but it was "a trip from hell," she said. Mechanical problems with the plane. Taxi strike. Cold rain. Dirty looks from Al Gore's Secret Service detail in the hotel lobby.

Mrs. Verdeal wasn't exactly thrilled to be talking to a reporter. About 30 years ago, she said, she won a contest that allowed her to go on a grocery-store shopping spree, and the woman from the Rocky Mountain News got it all wrong.

"The reporter who wrote the story," said Mrs. Verdeal, "she made me sound like somebody in tennis shoes racing through the store. That just wasn't how it was! I saw a headline in the paper, 'Woman Goes Berserk in Supermarket,' and I thought to myself, Oh, the poor thing. And I read the article and I realized- My gosh! That's me! Oh! "

Mrs. Verdeal said there was nothing "berserk" about her performance that day. In fact, she was methodical. She even made prior arrangements with the meat department to have a turkey and a roast ready for her to pluck on her way by. And when she was done with the spree, she still had time to spare.

-Andrew Goldman

No Jazz Fest This Year

Guys,

I know you've been talking about it since November-$268, round trip! Everyone's gonna be there! Terri, Kari, Kristy, Brimley, Big Money, Spanker, Jeeker!-and you need to know if I'm in. But I don't think I'll be going to Jazz Fest this year.

The thought of flying into New Orleans on a Thursday night, dropping the stuff off at the condo and immediately hitting the bars (Mermaid Lounge!) until 3 A.M., then having a couch nap, waking up woodless at 9 A.M., mouth full of sawdust, empties everywhere … slurping some frozen daiquiris at Daiquiris, dragging myself to the fairgrounds by noon, and it's smoking hot on that field, 11 stages of continuous music, jazz and blues and zydeco and don't forget the gospel tent, and we're eating crawfish Monica and fried po' boys and jambalaya in a paper bowl, washing it all down with Miller Genuine Draft … the sorority girls from Tulane and 'Bama, the old-timers in Hawaiian shirts and shades, women in bikinis riding the shoulders of topless men, ambulances at the edge of the field, the lines, the folk artists in lawn chairs with their folk art, 80,000 people sharing 600 Porta Pottis cooking in the sun all day … alligator sausages, the whole ritual of getting lost and looking for the group's decorated pole … keepin' up the good mood, stokin' the old enthusiasm, mushrooms, beer, ecstasy, beer.

Then what? It's 7 P.M. We're filthy. Drive back to the condo , take a nap ("mergin' with the couch"), a shower, cram ourselves into a restaurant and it's off to Fat Harry's, Tipitina's, and we're all doing that dance, the White Man's Overbite, where you bite your lower lip and don't move too much, get that second wind, hit that biker bar the Dungeon (opens 4 A.M.! dude! ).

The Meters! The Neville Brothers! Dr. John! It's 5:30 A.M. and Smilin' Myron are still playin' on Maple Street, everyone's sweatin' and spent, body shaking from lack of sugar, pop 15 milligrams of Vicodin, ahhhhh … but here come the spicy-chicken-gumbo squirts… look into a red plastic cup filled with butts and tobacco juice and get ready to do it all over again on Saturday and Sunday … but only after those big bowls of chickory coffee.

Can't do it, guys. Call me a dick, but I'm not going to Jazz Fest this year.

-George Gurley

The Real World: Auschwitz

Irene Zisblatt didn't tell her children until they were 13 and 11 years old, respectively, that she was a Holocaust survivor. "I didn't want to place that burden on them," she said in an interview, just after the Paris Theater premiere of The Last Days , James Moll's emotionally wrenching documentary about the final year of World War II at the Auschwitz concentration camp. "And my son is still in denial. Until tonight." She pointed at her 41-year-old son.

"Or tomorrow," said the son, who had just seen his mother relive the Holocaust in The Last Days prior to a reception at the Plaza Hotel.

Mrs. Zisblatt-a 68-year-old-blonde woman from Czechoslovakia-was one of five people gathered in the room who lived through the horror and emigrated to America in 1947 and 1948. The others were Representative Tom Lantos, 71, a tall, white-haired, 10-term Congressman from south of San Francisco; Renée Firestone, 74, a cherubic lecturer with the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles; Alice Lok Cahana, 70, an introspective artist from Houston; and Bill Basch, 72, a gregarious Los Angeles businessman.

They were originally filmed telling their stories by Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation. Later, thanks to a $1.5 million donation from the Kenneth and Evelyn Lipper Foundation, Mr. Moll, the director, began to fashion a film out of some 50,000 individual interviews. He focused on a group of Hungarian Jews at the war's end. All of them have powerful stories-but perhaps Mrs. Zisblatt's is the one most people will remember from The Last Days .

"My mother gave me five little diamonds when we were separated at the camp," she said. "To use if I needed to trade for something." In the film, she recalls hiding the gems in her mouth during inspections. Whenever the soldiers checked the mouths of the prisoners for gold fillings, she would swallow her diamonds and retrieve them later from her own excrement. Today, they are mounted on a silver teardrop pin, which she wears on a thin chain around her neck.

Renée Firestone, who breaks into a ready smile, has also been working for the Shoah Foundation since it started in 1994. In The Last Days , she calmly questions Dr. Hans Munch, an acquitted Nazi war criminal who performed chilling experiments on her beloved sister, Klara. Everyone who sees the film wonders how she kept from attacking him.

"It's not about fighting," she said sweetly. "It's about closure."

These days, Mrs. Firestone, a former fashion designer ("my picture was once in every window of Macy's"), lectures on tolerance. She's even pen pals with a neo-Nazi skinhead incarcerated in Texarkana, Tex. "It's a tight facility," she said.

Mrs. Zisblatt also knew the horrible Dr. Munch.

"I recognized him," she said, with a shiver, "when I saw the first cut of the movie. We called him 'the Bloodsucker.' In December 1944, we were on the tables, being experimented on. They were taking our blood, Jewish blood, and sending it to the German front. I can still remember the bodies-they were like zombies."

The group seemed to agree about most things-but they were split on Roberto Benigni's movie, Life Is Beautiful .

"I thought it was brilliant," said Representative Lantos. "It's a fable after all, and much of history has been communicated that way."

Mrs. Firestone vehemently disagreed: "It's not that it makes the Holocaust a joke, but it could never have happened, hiding a child in the camp. He should have gone into hiding in Italy with the little boy."

Bill Basch, who remembers Auschwitz acutely ("Hunger is an awesome pain," he said as trays of petits fours passed by), shook his head. "There is comedy in life," he said. "I was very moved."

Alice Cahana, red-haired and careful, was probably the quietest in the group. At one point during the reception, she mentioned that she was about to have her 70th birthday. "I never thought I'd live to 17, forget 70," she said. In The Last Days , she revisits Auschwitz and recalls leading prayers in the latrine. "It was the one place the soldiers wouldn't go," she said, "because the smell was so terrible."

-Roger D. Friedman

It is owned by the Wilzig brothers–Alan, 33, and Ivan, 43–two wild and crazy bankers who, in the last few years, have become the subject of juicy tabloid items. But behind the funny little gossip items (girls from Scores stripping by the pool, etc.) lies something more: While the Wilzig brothers have been enjoying themselves, something has nagged at them–the fact that their father, an Auschwitz survivor and self-made multimillionaire, Siggi Wilzig, 72, is not all that impressed. It's hard, after all, to impress a man who survived the death camps and a death march and then managed to turn himself into a wealthy banker in another country.

When the Wilzig brothers became boldface names in the gossip columns for their wild parties, there was some trouble in the family over the Hamptons castle. "My father was disgusted," said Alan, the younger brother. "He was inches away from blowing up the house with a bazooka."

During the week, the brothers live in separate apartments in the City Spire building on West 56th Street. They went in on the castle in the seaside town of Watermill, L.I., partly as an investment. Alan is the one who got it built, with the help of his longtime girlfriend, Karin Koenig. "I told my mother, my sister and my girlfriend, 'If you see something you like, buy it. We'll find a place for it,'" Alan said. With so many hands decorating the place, the décor ended up eclectic, kind of like an everything bagel.

Alan has mixed feelings about what the castle has become. "People didn't understand," he said. "I just wanted to do something to make my father proud." He laid blame for all the commotion at the castle on Ivan's "laissez-faire" attitude: "My brother felt bad that the people who worked in the clubs never got to come over because they were working," Alan said. "So he said if they want to come over at 3:45, O.K. All of a sudden, people are ringing the buzzer in the middle of the night."

As the owner of the Trustcompany Bank of New Jersey, a founder of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and the first Holocaust survivor to lecture the cadets at West Point, Siggi Wilzig is not interested in spending much time there. The whole notion of a summer home doesn't interest him, in fact. If he takes a vacation, he goes to Kutsher's Resort Hotel and Country Club in the Catskills.

Still, he admires certain things about the castle. "The quality is excellent," Siggi Wilzig said. "It's a credit to Alan, because Ivan likes design, but Alan built it. It is built like a fortress. Someone doesn't have to worry in a bad storm or hurricane. But I am a simple guy. I don't drive two and a half hours to a place."

He has made only two visits to his sons' castle. The first time, he climbed a ladder on the property in his business shoes. "I wanted to make sure you could see the ocean over the tops of the trees," Mr. Wilzig said. After inspecting the place, he told Alan to change four things. "And I made the changes," Alan said. "He saw the problems on just a quick walk-through."

In the cluster of buildings known as Auschwitz, Siggi Wilzig could not have imagined the Hamptons. There, he watched as 59 members of his family were killed over a three-year period. When he arrived in America, he had nothing and knew no one. His credo is carved in marble above a fireplace in one of his offices at the Trustcompany bank: "Free men who forget their bitter past do not deserve a bright future."

The 12-story Trustcompany building is the only moderately tall structure in this part of Jersey City. Mr. Wilzig greeted me in its executive offices and led me to a modest dining room. He's 5 feet 5 inches tall, with a shock of coarse fly-away hair sprouting out of his scalp. "I remember every single day I was there," he said. His eyes were black and deep.

The Nazis sent the Wilzig family to Auschwitz in 1943. Siggi was 16 years old at the time and already hardened from two years of forced labor. Just after he reached Auschwitz, his brother was beaten to death. His mother was murdered immediately upon her arrival at the death camp. His father was killed in front of him. Siggi Wilzig knows the date: April 8, 1943. Two other family members were killed two days before the liberation of Auschwitz–and buried two days after the war was over.

Siggi Wilzig was nearly sent to the gas chamber many times: "I went through 18 to 20 selections," he said. "Standing naked with a bundle under my arms. But I tell you this: I never thought I was going to die.… It was such a will to survive, it would have been impossible to me not to survive!"

His last four months in Auschwitz were spent toiling in a laundry. There, the workers were charged with washing the clothes of murdered Jews–clothes that were later redistributed to the Germans. Toward the war's end, he came upon clothing belonging to his mother's relatives. "They all fled to Holland," he said. "They got caught and came with the last transport in the beginning of August, two months after D-Day, from Holland to Auschwitz–and I found the laundry marks on the clothes."

And something else, which he will include in the memoir he's working on now: "In 1943 and '44, they took blood from the stinking Jewish people and gave it to the wounded soldiers on the Russian front. No one ever recorded that. I did it twice. They gave me an extra piece of bread and one time a bone. Like special soup from horse meat." He paused. "I never told the children that."

His tenorish voice rose to shrillness from time to time. "Are you getting this down ?" he cried. "Is that thing taping ?" Mr. Wilzig's forearm bears the tattooed number the Nazis branded him with, 104732, in addition to a triangle denoting his nationality. He was asked to tell his worst memory from those years.

"Night shooting of people, Dutch and Greek Jews," he said, almost in an incantation. "Raining all day and having no clothes. They don't teach you this at Harvard: Do you sleep in wet clothes so that the warmth of the body dries them, or do you take it off and freeze to death?"

And an odd, stray memory: "There was a wedding in Auschwitz–did you know that? In a bordello. A Spanish girl was engaged to a German socialist that was in the army, they emptied the bordello and he got married there. No one reported it."

In January 1945, he left Auschwitz on a forced death march. He was rescued on May 8, 1945, in Mauthausen, Austria, by the U.S. Army.

The first years in America were not so easy: After emigrating in 1947, he worked as a bow-tie presser, then sold school notebooks to reluctant university bookstore managers. "I was the original Death of a Salesman," he said. "My fingers got arthritis from holding the cases." In 1954, he married Naomi Sisselman, the daughter of a New Jersey real estate mogul. Her parents did not approve of Mr. Wilzig–so the couple eloped to New York.

In the early 60's, he started playing the stock market. He saw something in Canadian oil and gas stocks that looked undervalued. He found one, Wilshire Oil, particularly attractive. "Wilshire Oil was half-American, half-Canadian," he said. "I was so happy when I bought it. But when I came home my wife said to me: 'You bought more stock?' And I'd say, 'They must have had an open order from me.' I lied."

So began his slow takeover of the company. His days as a traveling salesman were over. But even after he had managed to acquire a major share, he was not accepted by the people at Wilshire Oil. "For five years," he said, "they wouldn't give me a directorship. I started a proxy fight and they wound up giving me four seats on the board."

Picture Tevye as J.R. Ewing–that's what Siggi Wilzig became. In 1968, he set his sights on the Trust Company of New Jersey, as it was then called, as a way to offset the risks in oil exploration. The bank had been founded by a military man with a German-sounding name. Mr. Wilzig heard stories about what went on at the Trust Company during the war: "When two officers in this bank heard the Nazis took Paris, they played Nazi songs and danced in the main branch," Mr. Wilzig said. "That's how German it was here."

But he persevered, much the way he had with the oil company. "Half the board called me behind my back little Jew bastard, and I didn't fire one when the time came," he said. "I'm not a fighter. I did all my fighting in Auschwitz."

Over 30 years, Mr. Wilzig took the Trust Company from a $170 million business to just under $3 billion. He gained a reputation for working 14-hour days and for knowing all his customers. Forced to spin the oil company off to comply with the Bank Holding Company Act of 1980, Mr. Wilzig and his family cashed in: For every 1,000 shares of Wilshire stock, shareholders received 111 shares of the bank. Mr. Wilzig officially became a $75,000-a-year consultant to the oil company, while remaining in control of the bank. His daughter Sherry, a Brown graduate, now serves as the titular president of Wilshire.

Until recently, he never used the president's office at the bank, preferring instead to roam from office to office, conducting his business on the go. "I didn't like the confinement of being behind a desk," he said.

His sons remember having to keep out of crowds when they went out with their father. "Even something happy, like a movie, was a problem," Alan said. The Holocaust was with them during their upbringing in Clifton, N.J. Ivan, who grew up in the late 60's and early 70's, said: "My friends used to go crazy when they'd come over–every single TV was tuned to The World at War ."

"We could be on a trip to Colonial Williamsburg," said Alan, "and my mother would say, 'Don't buy a pewter cup. No metal cups in the house for your father.'"

But both sons joined the family business.

"From the time I was 8, sitting on my dad's knee, I knew I wanted to be a banker and work with my dad," said Alan, who is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, undergraduate division. "I have a passion for it."

After 15 years with the bank, Ivan seems less committed. Also a University of Pennsylvania graduate, he once planned on becoming a psychologist, but got a law degree from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University because his father thought it was more valuable. Still, Ivan cut a deal recently–to open 40 new bank branches in A.&P. supermarkets–that impressed his father. "It's the most important event in the bank's history," Siggi Wilzig said.

Both brothers said they will probably not marry as long as their father lives. Siggi Wilzig's requirement for purely Jewish wives is more stringent than that of the Council of Orthodox Rabbis. "My father can be very a powerful and demanding figure to contend with," said Alan. "He rules with an iron hand." Indeed, Siggi Wilzig has little flexibility, more than 50 years after the war, about certain issues. He explained why he does not drive a Mercedes: "It's not because of the quality of the Mercedes truck. Because it never broke down once when it took the children to the gas chambers!"

After the bad press in the gossip columns for the Wilzig brothers (and, no, those girls by the pool weren't Scores dancers, Alan claimed, but "guests or dates of our guests–and they were sunbathing topless, not naked or in G-strings"), Alan is trying to improve his image, for the sake of the bank and the family name. He recently appeared on the front page of a Jersey City Coptic newspaper with Pope Shenouda III–a nice Jewish boy from New Jersey receiving a large silver cross from the Orthodox Copts' bearded patriarch. He's also the bank's point man in a $7 million restoration of Jersey City's Journal Square.

Now, if he can only get that castle sold before the weather gets warm and the trouble starts all over again …

A short notice in Dan's Papers proclaimed the existence of a rare Picasso oil painting from 1898, supposedly discovered at a Barcelona flea market and now on sale at the Vered Gallery in East Hampton for $900,000.

Johnny Cossa, a 24-year-old assistant at the Vered Gallery, led me into the room. There, propped up on a wooden box and lit by a small spotlight, was Gypsy Boy , the purported Picasso. The nude adolescent figure in the painting looked contemplative. Mr. Cossa looked ecstatic.

"The man who found it does this sort of thing," Mr. Cossa said. "He goes looking for a painting and then he finds it. He goes away for five years at a time and then comes back with … with this!"

There is a very great possibility that Gypsy Boy is indeed the real thing. But Pablo Picasso's pre-1900 works, before the familiar Harlequin period, are always problematic for scholars and collectors-they're difficult to authenticate, difficult to price. People like to see a mention of any given lost painting in Picasso's correspondence or diaries or evidence from the sketchbooks, things that haven't been discovered in this case. And Gypsy Boy , apparently painted when Pablo was 17 years old, has something else keeping it out of the generally accepted Picasso canon: Unlike many other works from the same period, it's not signed.

So the Vered Gallery will have to do some pretty fancy salesmanship before separating a wealthy collector from $900 grand-especially since other signed Picasso paintings from the same period sell from anywhere between $75,000 and $300,000.

Mr. Cossa handed over a brochure with several interesting, if dubious, claims: that the painting is "being considered for acquisition by both the Museu Picasso in Barcelona and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston." That the man who found the painting in a flea market took it directly to Josep Palau i Fabre, the famed Picasso scholar in Barcelona, who gave his stamp of approval immediately. That Picasso's mistress and the mother of two of his children, Françoise Gilot, a great artist in her own right, had also seen Gypsy Boy and had found "that the painting was a Picasso and an important one." That Marina Picasso had also supplied "a letter of authenticity."

Why is Marina Picasso, the artist's granddaughter, involved?

"Why, she's in charge of the estate!" Mr. Cossa said with authority.

And not Claude, Maya or Paloma Picasso, the artist's children, who usually authenticate such works?

"No," he replied. "They have nothing to do with it."

The charming Mr. Cossa made another claim about Gypsy Boy : "This is the only oil painting of the period!" But any art history major knows there are other Picasso oil paintings from the late 1890's.

The Indiana Jones of Art?

What's going on here? And out of all the art galleries in the world, how did a potentially important find like Gypsy Boy make its way to an obscure shop tucked snugly in an alley off East Hampton's Main Street? Young Mr. Cossa is quite willing to tell the whole tale. Last summer, he said, he met a mysterious collector named Enrique Garcia-Herraiz who just happened into the Vered Gallery …

"What he had done-his interests are the same as my interests, he's just much further along in his endeavors than I am," Mr. Cossa said. "In that way, when he talks about these obscure periods of Picasso, I know what he's talking about. When he came back to the East End, we spent a lot of time going over things. I found out about his discoveries and what he was really like and what kind of world he lives in."

This mystery man, said Mr. Cossa, likes to keep a low profile and would prefer not to be interviewed. According to Mr. Cossa, Mr. Garcia-Herraiz told some wild tales of hunting for masterpieces, saying that one of his biggest finds was a painting by Francisco de Zurbarán. The Zurbarán, added Mr. Cossa, ended up at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean after a cargo plane owned by the Marcos family went down.

In 1991, Mr. Garcia-Herraiz-according to Mr. Cossa-unearthed Gypsy Boy at a flea market when he saw it lumped in with other Catalan school paintings. Immediately, he rushed to tell the scholar, Mr. Palau, who authenticated it and called Marina Picasso for her approval as well. After that, Mr. Cossa said, Mr. Garcia-Herraiz hoped to place the painting in the Museu Picasso in Barcelona.

"He would rather see it there than make a lot of money from it," Mr. Cossa added. "He's like that."

He added that the painting was also supposed to be the centerpiece of last year's Early Picasso show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.-" but it was Enrique who withdrew it at the last minute," Mr. Cossa said.

In a second interview a few days later, over coffee at the Park Avenue apartment of Vered Gallery co-owner Janet Lehr, Mr. Cossa was holding forth: "I pity artists a little bit because they have to do this. This is the road they musssssst go down." He gesticulated with a sweep of his arms. "I was into restoration, painting with a tiny brush before this. That made me interested in where the art came from, who owned it. That people enjoyed these things in their own homes, not just museums. This is an adventure."

Without hesitation, Mr. Cossa can reel off a hundred reasons why Gypsy Boy is an important Picasso-how it's a study for future paintings and a result of even earlier sketches. "Look at the hands!" he said, referring to the Picasso-esque fingers. "This is all you need."

And what is his art background, exactly? "I've been in interested in art for 15 years," Mr. Cossa said. (That is, since he was 9.) "When I began to paint."

Mr. Cossa has a very nice rap, but his story doesn't hold together all that well upon examination.

Francoise Gilot, who spells her name with one "l" (and not two, as the Vered Gallery's brochure would have it), denied ever having seen Gypsy Boy or meeting anyone connected with it.

"Fakes spring like mushrooms after the rain," she said. "I don't know if this is a fake, but I never, ever get involved. Only my son Claude and the Picasso Administration can verify whether or not it is a Picasso."

Ms. Gilot does recall something that could be in Gypsy Boy 's favor, however: Early on, Picasso had a young Gypsy friend, and many years later, in the 30's, a thief stole several early paintings from the artist's mother. But she said she would never base an authentication on anecdotes.

The museums aren't going with Mr. Cossa's claims, either. Directly contradicting the Vered Gallery brochure, the Museu Picasso in Barcelona said in a faxed statement: "The Museu Picasso has never considered the acquisition of this painting." Further, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the National Gallery refused to comment. What about the signed letters from them requesting Gypsy Boy for the 1997 Early Picasso show? A Boston Museum spokesman said only: "We send letters out like that all the time."

Several others who specialize in Picasso have not been consulted: William Rubin, the Museum of Modern Art's Picasso expert, for instance, is on holiday in the south of France. Arne Glimcher, whose Pace Wildenstein Gallery has represented the Picasso family for years, is in Little Rock, Ark., directing a movie.

Said Ms. Lehr: "MoMA is an interesting idea. But they're more involved in their building fund right now, bricks and mortar." As for Mr. Rubin?" He doesn't like us," said Mr. Cossa. "We're not big enough for him."

But the Vered Gallery brochure includes one mistake that actually helps make the case that Gypsy Boy is a genuine Picasso. It seemed foolish of Mr. Cossa to boast of the granddaughter, Marina Picasso, having authenticated the painting-but a close look at the signature on the certificate shows it is that of Maya Picasso.

Maya Picasso is one of the Picasso children who give the family's stamp of approval on lost works out of an office on Place Vendôme, Paris. (The other Picassos who work in the office were sailing in the Greek islands and could not be reached for comment.) When it was pointed out that the signature on the certificate of authenticity is actually that of Maya Picasso, not Marina Picasso, Mr. Cossa said: "Oops! That was a goof! I was staring at the signature so long it just became Marina."

Mistakes like that one, which could cast doubt on the unsigned work, could risk the wrath of the gallery's owner, Ruth Vered, who once served as a paratrooper in the Israeli Army. There are few Hamptonites who wouldn't recognize Ms. Vered from the society circuit or from pictures in local newspapers and magazines. Twenty-five years ago, she emigrated from Israel with her children to East Hampton. Vered, as she likes to be called ( à la Cher and Madonna) is a Hamptons character known for her leather pants, Italian eyeglasses and her year-round tan. Until recently, her gallery showed local artists. Then, with the influx of Hollywood money into the Hamptons, Vered merged her operations with Manhattan photography dealer Janet Lehr. Gradually, Vered Gallery began to offer Picassos, Chagalls and other big-ticket items. But in all cases, the work was either marginally interesting or part of an edition. High quality, but not earth-shattering.

Enter Johnny Cossa, who started working at the gallery two years ago. Mr. Cossa, originally from Chatham, N.J., said he is a graduate of Syracuse University, where he studied some art but majored in communications.

The Mysterious Collector

And now we come to Gypsy Boy 's mysterious owner, Enrique Garcia-Herraiz. He is not really some Indiana Jones of the art world, as Mr. Cossa would have it, but an art writer and the former head of the Spanish National Tourist Office in New York.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Garcia-Herraiz, who is 70, said he did consign Gypsy Boy to the Vered Gallery, but he disputes nearly everything in the brochure as well as Mr. Cossa's statements about him. For one thing, he said, he did not find the painting at a flea market. The truth is more mundane: He bought it at an auction for about 30,000 pesetas, or $200. The original owner of Gypsy Boy discovered it in a drawer of a furniture store.

Mr. Garcia-Herraiz faxed a statement: "I never met Francoise Gilot, never offered the painting to the Picasso museum in Barcelona, nor to the Boston Fine Arts, and I can't understand what is going on anymore." He added that he is not the one who withdrew the painting from the National Gallery of Art's 1997 show. The museum itself, he said, retracted its offer to show the painting without explanation.

Mr. Garcia-Herraiz is the man who got Maya Picasso's signature on that certificate of authenticity; he is also the man who brought Gypsy Boy to the scholar, Mr. Palau. He said Mr. Palau believes it is genuine, but that a feud between him and the director of the Barcelona museum has led to the confusion that surrounds the painting.

By the way, what about that Zurbaran at the bottom of the sea? "The Zurbaran was sold to a New York dealer for the Marcoses and was destroyed in a fire!" said Mr. Garcia-Herraiz.

So who's to blame for this Picasso mess-is it Johnny Cossa? No, said Ms. Lehr of the Vered Gallery: "Everything we know is what Enrique told Johnny. He saw our materials before they were printed. He promulgated this."

Mr. Garcia-Herraiz added that Gypsy Boy 's residency at the Vered Gallery represents its second stop in New York. In 1996, six months before Maya Picasso gave her blessing, the collector arranged to have it shown at Kazuhito Yoshii's gallery on West 57th Street. Mr. Yoshii said he's still not certain if Gypsy Boy is a Picasso: "There's no way of knowing. Palau is the expert, but even that is not 120 percent proof."

Nonetheless, Mr. Garcia-Herraiz believes he's going to see some money from Gypsy Boy one of these days. "The painting has to be judged on its own merits," he said. "In due time, when someone really studies it, I think it will finally sell."