Yesterday, The Observer sifted through the latest batch submitted into court.

One interesting nugget: according to documents recently submitted into evidence, in the fall of 2004, CBS executives apparently took steps to disguise that they had hired an investigative firm (to look into the network's flawed report on President Bush's military service) which had ties to Republican pol Rudolf Giuliani.

To wit: in the fall of 2004, facing increasing public pressure--in part from conservative bloggers who were portraying CBS News' flawed report on the President's military service as just another instance of liberal bias run amok--CBS executives decided to hire an outside investigative firm to look into the problematic story, which had initially aired on 60 Minutes Wednesday on Sept. 8, 2004.

By October, network executives had settled on the investigative firm of SafirRosetti--a New York-based company lead, in part, by Howard Safir, the former New York City Fire Commissioner and New York City Police Commissioner, who had been nominated to both positions by then Mayor Giuliani.   

At one point that fall, Thomas Cowley, a regional managing director at SafirRosetti, began working on the CBS account. As part of the investigation, SafirRosetti had hired Erik T. Rigler a former Navy aviator and F.B.I. agent to get to the bottom of the controversial documents at the heart of the affair.

On October 1, 2004, Mr. Cowley sent an email to one of his colleagues, specifying how the company would be billing CBS for all the field work. "We are presenting ourselves as 'Valley Associates,'" he wrote at the time. "CBS wants to keep Howard [Safir] in the background."

Why?

"Valley was a shell company used to purposefully disguise the identity of his real employer, SafirRosetti, because of the close association of its principal, Howard Safir, with leading Republican Rudolf Giuliani," Mr. Rather's lawyers allege in a recent memorandum to the court.

In support of the claim, Mr. Rather's legal team has also submitted into evidence a set of hand-written notes which Mr. Cowley made on Sept. 30, 2004.

"Billed to Valley Associates," wrote Mr. Cowley.

And then, on the next line of his note pad: "Add a cloak of secrecy."

And finally: "Keep Howard Safir's name out-aligned with Rudolf Giuliani."

But the scenario gets an unexpected twist. In a video available on the Web site of Safir Rosetti, a security and intelligence firm headed up by the partnership of Howard Safir, a former Police Commissioner and Fire Commissioner, and Joseph Rosetti, former security czar for I.B.M., the office workers have a last-resort option: the ResQLine.

"The Safir Rosetti ResQLine is a high-volume evacuation solution designed to minimize loss of life and injury in cases of fire, terrorist attack or other life-threatening situations where civilians and emergency responders are otherwise unable to escape imminent harm," Mr. Safir's voice incants in a monotone as the computer-animated figures swirl across the screen.

Developed by a small upstart firm in New Jersey, the ResQLine is a system for evacuating the upper stories of a compromised building. Office workers are outfitted with special harnesses; a box under a window is removed to reveal a mechanism that unfolds twice. One flap unfolds to the left to reveal six spools of blue cable affixed to spindles. Another unfolds from the top and over the window sill, providing a small, two-step ladder out into the sky above the city streets. Left under the window is what looks like a box fan with a large empty spindle protruding from its center. The first evacuee attaches one end of one of the spools to his harness. An emergency coordinator pulls the spool from its spindle on the left and affixes it to the fan-like structure. The evacuee climbs onto the window sill-and jumps.

According to the device's makers, the fan mechanism relies on the force of the blades generated by the evacuee's descent to create a dynamic tension that slows the speed of the fall. In the video, evacuees are shown landing light as a feather on the sidewalk outside their buildings. A slight bend at the knees upon landing is the only register of the force of their descent. One almost pictures the evacuees in the video, as they make their several landings, skipping off to a Pret A Manger together for a quick bite to eat.

The Underwriters Laboratory (purveyors of those ubiquitous "UL" stickers) has approved the ResQLine for use in buildings of any height for occupants weighing as much as 400 pounds. The units themselves will sell for about $3,500 each; office workers would have their own harnesses and cable cartridges, which they may buy outright for around $200 or lease for $6 a month.

The catch: Major emergency-management authorities consider the product to offer an inadvisable form of escape from a tall building.

"We have not supported any of these devices," Fire Department spokesman David Billig told The Observer . "We have not supported any device that's being sold where the manufacturer tells you, 'Use this to jump out the window.' We don't advocate these devices. We haven't tested them, we don't use them."

"In theory, they are interesting ideas," said Robert Solomon, assistant vice president for building and life safety codes for the National Fire Protection Association, referring to ResQLine and all other "external evacuation" devices. "And then, in the practical world, they are not going to function the way you think they are. These are systems that the NFPA would still not recognize in our codes."

Mr. Safir noted the Underwriters Laboratory finding. "We're working to get the New York Fire Department to test it," Mr. Safir said. "Because as they know and I know, once you get above the 10th floor, if you have a fully evolved fire, the people above are virtually unreachable."

The difference of opinion between the Fire Department and its former commissioner highlights a growing ambivalence about the ability of a property owner or government officials to ensure that there will be no repeat of the hellish circumstances in which inhabitants of the upper stories of the World Trade Center found themselves on the morning of Sept. 11. The emergence of "external-evacuation devices" like ResQLine and its relatives, such as the Executive-Chute (parachutes designed to allow people to jump out windows at least 10 stories high) and the German-made Escape Chute (a long, double-layered fabric tube that hangs from a window to the ground), demonstrates just how little officials can do to protect the residents of tall office buildings under attack by terrorists. But in the sometimes morbid calculus of security services, if nobody can guarantee your safety, anybody can address that last, desperate moment that is, today, more vivid than ever before.

"[Sept. 11] changed the world entirely," said Louis Coletti, president of the Building Trades Employers Association. "It has exposed the vulnerability of the United States to attacks. I don't believe-whether we're talking about skyscrapers, tunnels, bridges-that we are going to be able to plan for every single potential form of attack."

Desperate Measures

Mr. Safir and his firm are careful to note that the ResQLine escape system is meant only as a last resort, when stairs and elevators are unavailable and there is no promise of rescue. "It was invented in response to that horrible scene of people jumping off the World Trade Center," Mr. Safir said. "[The inventor] said, 'Let me come up with a device that will be an alternative to committing suicide.' That's what this device is. It is a last-resort device that works."

"There were 374 documented jumps from the World Trade Center," Mr. Safir continued. "And if ResQLine were there, some of those people might be alive."

It is difficult to argue that certain death is more attractive than attempting an escape with ResQLine-but at the same time, the ResQLine escape is far from easy.

In promotional literature, makers of the product claim that landing on the ground from a height of as much as 80 stories would feel like the landing from a leap off a 22-inch chair. Experiments, the makers of ResQLine say, have verified this claim.

But it's the journey from window to ground, rather than the arrival, that worries many skeptics.

"How on earth does somebody get on a pulley with a cable, with broken glass, aluminum, marble and concrete falling on top of them?" said Mr. Solomon of the NFPA. "It's just another in a bad series of choices that people would have to make."

"Of course it could be dangerous," Mr. Safir responded. "But the reality is that if your alternative is to stay and die, or get out, even if you did have a minor injury getting out, isn't it a better alternative? … So, yeah, is there a possibility someone could injure themselves on the way down? Sure-probably not, but possibly so. It certainly beats being dead."

The ultimate test of the device won't take place until, or if, there is another high-rise attack or a tragedy, like a fire. In the meantime, the city's Department of Buildings has been hammering out recommendations for building-code changes that would make emergency exits through stairs and elevators more secure. Rehabilitating older buildings may be difficult, but at least, the reasoning goes, new buildings will be that much stronger and escapable. Whether the political will exists to enact those building-code changes and enforce them remains to be seen.

"I think until our society at large decides that they want the engineering community and design community to start designing buildings for these extreme events, like airplanes flying into a building, there wouldn't be any place for these types of devices to be used," Mr. Solomon said.

The conclusion is particularly sobering in light of a federal investigation into the cause of the Twin Towers' collapse. The blue-ribbon panel heard its first round of testimony in the United States Customs House in Lower Manhattan on March 28.

The panel, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, was created by Congress last year to conduct a broad investigation into the attacks of Sept. 11 and the intelligence and other government failures before them.

The panel's staff of 50 to 60 will draft a report by May 2004. But the central question facing the panel is: Why did so many die in the attacks? The panel will consider such things as lax immigration controls, faulty intelligence procedures and the lack of disaster planning. But it will also examine how residents are evacuated from high-rise buildings; how those buildings are constructed to protect against sabotage and collapse; and why so few could be rescued from the upper stories of the World Trade Center.

Such questions signal a shift in the assumptions of many New Yorkers, who are now demanding a full inquiry and accountability as they anticipate possible future disasters. New Yorkers know better than anybody what it must have been like on the upper floors of the World Trade Center after the attack. Thousands of New Yorkers are instructed to be aware of their environment even as they make daily trips into the upper stories of the city's most prominent skyscrapers. With the war on Iraq escalating and Black Hawks buzzing over Manhattan, the tension in the city is palpable.

As a result, the media consistently seek to interpret the meaning of alert levels and of the vague threats that send emergency-management and counterterrorism task forces into high gear-and frequently, to do so, they turn to people like Mr. Safir.

The former commissioner currently serves as a security analyst for the Fox News network. During his Jan. 19 appearance on Fox Wire , reporter Rita Cosby asked whether there would be an ever-increasing and visible apparatus to prevent terror attacks.

"Of course," Mr. Safir told her. "There's no question in the mind of people involved in this business that there's going to be another attack."

Asked about a then-recent F.B.I. report claiming that there was little Al Qaeda activity in North America, Mr. Safir said he was "surprised."

"We found cells in Buffalo. We've found cells in other areas," he said. "And there's no question that there are sleeper cells throughout the United States. And certainly, Al Qaeda is capable of activating them."

Asked whether the "heartland" was being viewed in the intelligence community as a potential target of terrorist attacks, Mr. Safir was somewhat circumspect.

"Of course New York is a major target, as are other major cities, because they're media centers," he said. "But certainly I think the next attacks, unfortunately, are going to be more widespread, going to hit the heartland of America as well as the big cities, and probably will be multiple attacks."

More recently, in a Feb. 11 interview with Pat Buchanan on MSNBC, Mr. Safir was asked whether the level of alert in New York City should be raised to red.

"I think, without specific information, you have to stay at orange," Mr. Safir said. "But, de facto, we're at red. De facto, we have put all the resources available in the city on a terrorist alert. And I think the reality is that we believe that this country is going to get hit again. I think people in the government believe that. And it's a question of where and not when."

Responding to a question from Mr. Buchanan about Mayor Michael Bloomberg's urging the city to work and play as they normally would-even after the report of a potential threat to the subway system appeared in the New York Post -Mr. Safir appeared skeptical.

"Well, I think the reality is that nobody has specific information about chemical or biological weapons being put into the subways, but there is always that possibility," he told Mr. Buchanan. "I mean, we have experience in the fact that the sarin attack in Japan killed 12 people and injured hundreds. And it's certainly a possibility, and something that we have to be prepared for. I don't think there's a city in the world that has more emergency-response capability than New York City, but it's still not enough for what we're faced with."

Source, Salesman

If the media haven't often reflected on the conundrum of seeking information from a source that determines the value of the product he sells, Mr. Safir has.

There shouldn't be any problem with the practice, he said, "as long as you're straightforward and honest. I insist that they put under my name, 'chairman and chief executive of Safir Rosetti.' I make sure that they make it clear that I'm in the security business. And they put 'former Police Commissioner,' because that's why they want me."

Mr. Safir said that Safir Rosetti has begun putting ResQLine in buildings in Israel and San Francisco, and is currently negotiating with several New York companies to install the product, though he declined to specify which ones. Meanwhile, since Sept. 11, his firm has grown to six offices in six different cities in the U.S. and abroad.

Mr. Safir is not the only former city official to make his way in private life as a security consultant in the wake of Sept. 11, or to appear on television to assess the level of threat that the general public confronts.

Rudolph Giuliani's firm, Giuliani Partners, has taken aggressive steps to market itself as a security consultant to property owners in New York City and elsewhere. The firm recently completed an alliance with the Los Angeles–based real-estate brokerage and management powerhouse CB Richard Ellis, which upped the ante in New York by acquiring the city's largest brokerage, Insignia Financial. The alliance capitalizes on the experience that Mr. Giuliani and many key partners in his firm-including former Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik and former Fire Commissioner Thomas von Essen-gained on Sept. 11 and in the weeks afterwards. That marketing strategy appears to have been pursued further in Giuliani Partners' other recent alliance with Aon Corporation, the British-based insurer with a reputable private-intelligence arm.

But Mr. Giuliani is considerably less shrill in evaluating government responses to the terrorist threat. Asked about the run on cellophane and duct tape during the most recent chemical-attack scare, Mr. Giuliani echoed Mayor Bloomberg and others in his assessment of the situation.

In an appearance on Hannity & Colmes on Fox News on March 3, Mr. Giuliani was asked, "Have we been oversold on duct tape?"

"Not oversold," the former Mayor said. "But I mean, the reality is, there are more complex answers to it. And I guess, if it makes people feel better …. "

"But does it do anything?" Mr. Colmes interjected.

"I guess under limited circumstances it does, but it's certainly not the answer," he responded. "The answer is preparation at the government level, large institutions focusing on drills and exercises, and the things that you have to do in large groups to protect people."

Mr. Safir said his dire pronouncements are not meant to instill a climate where his services seem more indispensable.

"I believe [that another attack is imminent] based on knowledge that I have. I don't believe that based on speculation; I base that on information I have from various sources. What I try to do when I'm on TV is not let people lose their resolve, because I truly believe that the reason that we've not been hit yet is because we're faced with a patient and well-funded and well-trained enemy, and they are waiting for us to lose our resolve so they can hit us again.

"And that's the message that I'm trying to get out: that it will never and should not be business as usual."

To support the anecdotes, we now have cold, hard facts: Tourism grew by 11 percent in New York last year. Some 36.7 million people visited here in 1999, making New York the second-most-popular tourist attraction in the United States. The city now trails only Orlando, that "no there there" subdivision that owes its bland existence to a cartoon character and his market-savvy creator.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani called the numbers "staggering" and noted that the tourism business creates or supports tens of thousands of jobs throughout the five boroughs. According to statistics compiled by NYC & Company, the city's convention and visitors bureau, tourists spend about $15.6 billion last year, proving that tourism is hardly a Mickey Mouse business.

Beyond the jobs and the money, the explosion in tourism means that New York has regained its special place in the hearts of other Americans and those from across the seas. For too long a time in the 1970's, 1980's and early 1990's, the city was the punch line of many a late-night comic, and the city itself seemed to stand for all that had gone wrong with society since the 1960's. Folks who lived west of the Hudson, north of the Bronx and south of Staten Island seemed to take inordinate pleasure in the city's troubles.

Now, however, the city is thriving, crime is down and New York–based television shows are earning wide audiences. Americans, and citizens around the world, are laughing with us, not at us, as they open their hearts and wallets to this magnificent metropolis.

We're happy to have them, happy to take their money, and happy that they seem ready to admit that maybe they had it all wrong about New York, back in the bad old days.

A Safir City

After stabilizing matters at One Police Plaza following the turbulent, and astoundingly successful, era of Bill Bratton, Howard Safir has announced his retirement as Police Commissioner at the end of August. He'll be missed, not only by the Mayor he served dutifully, but by a public that has grown accustomed to startling victories in the war on crime.

He was not a colorful character, like Mr. Bratton was (and is). He didn't have the street-smart experience and outreach of Mr. Bratton's underrated predecessor, Raymond Kelly. He didn't know how to get a great table at Elaine's. But he did understand how to run a vast bureaucracy, and he refused to allow his ego to get in the way of his performance. He understood that he worked for Rudolph Giuliani, a man who owed his political career to crime-fighting. So he knew it would be pointless to draw attention to himself; instead, he carried out the Mayor's mandates, built on the successes of Mr. Bratton and let the cops do their jobs.

Critics will note that it was under Mr. Safir's watch that police officers killed two unarmed black men-Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond. Those killings were tragic. But they were not emblematic of Howard Safir's four-year term as the city's top cop. In fact, under Mr. Safir, New York's Finest have resorted to deadly force far less than under previous Commissioners and Mayors. The Commissioner also helped maintain New York cops' admirable record of discharging their weapons far less often than police officers in other cities.

He was far more innovative than he was given credit for: He eagerly grasped the importance of DNA evidence, and he toughened the department's anti-drug efforts. And just as politicians win acclaim for presiding over good economies, a police commissioner deserves public praise when crime falls. History will note that Howard Safir was in charge of the NYPD when, in 1998, murders fell to a 34-year low.

He has had his share of clumsy moments, as when he missed a City Council hearing on crime because he was at the Academy Awards. But he leaves the city far better off for his service. New Yorkers owe him thanks for a job well done.

Stressful Happiness

New Yorkers have never been particularly good at being happy, and they tend to like it that way. Masters of melancholia? Virtuosos of anxiety? Connoisseurs of compulsion? Hey, those are New York trademarks. But happiness tends to raise suspicions. Now science may have found a way to make happiness palatable even to New Yorkers: Researchers at Ohio State University report that happiness may actually increase stress.

What better arena in which to study happiness and stress than marriage? Researchers at Ohio State began a study 10 years ago in which they asked 90 newlywed couples to talk about the ups and downs of their marriages, while doctors drew blood at 30-minute intervals. Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, professor of psychiatry and psychology, recently reviewed the data and discovered that when the subjects spoke about happy moments, such as courtship, mutual attraction and the decision to marry, many of them-25 percent-showed elevated levels of the hormone cortisol, an indicator of stress. And the stress was real: Over the past decade, those women who showed increased stress when talking about the happy moments in their marriage ended up being twice as likely to divorce as the other women in the study.

So if you catch yourself in a happy mood, New York, don't feel too good about it. You might have been better off depressed.

enforcement, Mayor Giuliani said: "This is another one of those guffaws by Mark

Green." The mere utterance of Mr. Green's name so enrages the Mayor that he

loses control of his well-stocked vocabulary of invective. Another one of those

"guffaws"? Mr. Green is rather notorious for immensely quotable flippancy, but

few would describe him as a regular guffawer. Perhaps the Mayor meant to say

that by daring to suggest that perhaps some police officers are a little, you know,

overly enthusiastic in the pursuit of law and order, Mr. Green had committed

yet another gaffe. From the Mayor's point of view, Mr. Green's list of gaffes

is endless, beginning with the Public Advocate's impertinent insistence on

getting out of bed every morning and showing up for the work voters have

assigned him.

Mr. Giuliani will do everything he can to make sure that Mr.

Green does not inherit the master bedroom in Gracie Mansion after New York

voters send the Mayor to Washington next year. He would rewrite the City

Charter if he could get away with it to change the line of succession. Failing

that, he will utilize his wondrous capacity for incivility to smear Mr. Green

as a mugger-loving pinko who can't wait to make the city safe for homicidal maniacs.

To wit, this choice quote from Mr. Giuliani regarding Mr. Green: "I guess he

wants to position himself as the anti-police, anti-law-enforcement candidate."

Yes, yes, yes: Mark Green, father of teenage girls, is

eagerly awaiting the day when he can stay up late at night worrying about the

safety of his children.

What got Mr. Giuliani spouting bilge was the Public

Advocate's revelation, based on statistics and public information that had to

be wrenched out of City Hall, that police brass

unilaterally decided not to discipline hundreds of

officers whom the Civilian Complaint Review Board cited for misconduct. Mr.

Green based his findings on a study of complaints filed against the police from

1994 to 1997. He'd have looked into complaints filed last year, too, but City

Hall decided that the second-highest elected official in the city shouldn't be

privy to such information. As the Mayor said, "This is somebody running for

Mayor and running for Mayor by attacking the Police Department." Howard Safir,

the Police Commissioner who can be depended on to echo his patron's every

utterance, chimed in with cheapness worthy of the Mayor: "What Mark Green is

doing is flaunting things that reflect negatively on the Police Department,

which is not uncommon for Mark Green."

Uh, are you sure about that, Mr. Safir? Does Mr. Green really  flaunt things that reflect negatively on the Police Department? Is

he at the head of every demonstration against police brutality? Does he rally

the forces of outrage every time the police shoot an unarmed civilian? Is he

the go-to quotemeister the press turns to when police are found to be, say,

strip-searching perps allegedly guilty of petty misdemeanors? Not exactly -

that's why we have the Rev. Al Sharpton.

If anything, Mr. Green is perhaps a bit too cautious, a bit

too aware of the stereotype that City Hall, the New York Post and others have created. He may have been a Nader's Raider, and he may still leap at

the chance to denounce heartless merchants

who raise the price of eggs by a dime a dozen every Easter, but

ultimately Mr. Green is a politician who can read poll data and judge public

sensibilities. He is no more likely to run as

an "anti-police" candidate than Bill Bradley is to embrace the

Democratic Party platform of 1972-the year Mr. Giuliani supported George

McGovern.

What Mr. Green may ask, however, is that the Police

Department and its officers be held to high standards of conduct, and that

officers who dishonor their badges be disciplined. In Mr. Giuliani's world,

this is akin to demanding that the Police Department be turned over to the

administrators of the city's Human Resources Administration.

No serious city politician in full possession of his or her

faculties would run, or indeed has ever run, on an anti-police, anti-law-enforcement

platform. Mr. Green has been to enough police funerals to know that law

enforcement is dangerous work, that police officers put their lives on the line

with every tour of duty. He may not be a former prosecutor noted for his

skepticism of civil liberties, but he understands that police officers perform

heroic work.

Mr. Giuliani's loathing of his rival is such that he

probably really believes that Mr. Green secretly harbors dreams of leading a

parade for the freed F.A.L.N. members, making Mr. Sharpton his Police

Commissioner and flinging open the doors at Rikers Island. He probably has

convinced himself that Mr. Green really would reduce the size of the Police

Department to make room for more social workers.

He's entitled to his opinion. But you have to wonder.

Heck if a potential takeover of the New York City Police Department wouldn't be just the albatross to hang around the neck of a certain senatorial candidate-to-be. It would sully his vaunted crime-fighting record and–ugh–vindicate the Rev. Al Sharpton and his fellow campers outside 1 Police Plaza.

Facing this, the Mayor and the Commissioner announced on Aug. 10 that the Police Department was seriously considering adopting the Civilian Complaint Review Board's investigations of misbehaving officers as its own.

That's a big change–the civilian review panel, an independent body, has been one of the Mayor's and Commissioner's favorite punching bags. Now, no more extra layer of investigation by the police, and no more delays in prosecuting officers. It would seem to be an arrangement that would satisfy the Justice Department, plus soften the Mayor's and Police Commissioner's reputations as control freaks. Right off, The New York Times editorial board signed on.

But hidden inside Mr. Safir's olive branch is a prickly thorn–a cushy loophole that allows Police Department brass to, in essence, order a do-over if they don't like the review board's results. So much for relinquishing control.

According to a Police Department memo obtained by The Observer , Mr. Safir wants to be able to do something the law doesn't appear to let the department do: Shove the review board's guilty verdicts right back to the panel for them to reconsider.

That has some of the board's 10 members worried. "I'm suspicious of the motives behind this," said one board member, Earl Ward. "I think it's a direct response to the Eastern District probe. When this probe is over, eventually you'll have the N.Y.P.D. kicking a lot of cases back to us."

That rejection would be nothing new. During any given year this decade, at least half of the officers that the board deemed culpable enough to warrant punishment have not received even a slap on the wrist from the department. Federal prosecutors are looking at that fact pretty closely, to judge from the weight of material they have extracted from the review board.

But now Mr. Safir and the Mayor would like to, in essence, formalize that rejection by building it into the process. That's likely to spark more bureaucratic fights between the warring agencies.

And then there's the larger question of whether this would put the board under Mr. Safir's thumb. "If we can't put in his in-box any case that he doesn't want, where does that leave us?" said one review board source. "We can interview eight witnesses and they can always say we want you to investigate 12."

Marilyn Mode, the Commissioner's spokesman, said board officials are overreacting. "When you're leaving it up to them, how possibly could you construe this as abridging their independence? I still don't get it, you're asking them to take actions, asking them to go back and finish the job that they're mandated to do," she said.

Ms. Mode said that the department's stance is about standards, about "giving them more information so they can consider their decision." Why didn't the civilian panel have the information before? "They might have had access to the information, they might not have recalled it," she explained.

The review board was initially housed inside the department. It was moved out by the Charter Commission in 1993, and ever since the police have scorned its findings. Specifically, the department has ignored its work and rarely used the board's findings in departmental trials.

Instead, the Police Department's disciplinary team would do its own investigation–adding precious months to the process that would often swallow up witnesses or obscure additional evidence. As bad as this was for a civilian reeling from a negative encounter with police, it was just as bad for the police officers who were the targets.

In fact, the board's probes drag on for months, police officials like to point out. In 1995, the average investigative time on a complaint was 16 months; the statute of limitations for trying an officer is 18 months.

The board, meanwhile, blames the department for some of the delays. Board officials said department bureaucrats drag their feet, failing to produce roll calls, photo arrays, rosters of license plates, telephone records or other investigatory materials in a timely manner.

Yet Mr. Safir has been coming around. As the probe by Federal prosecutors hovers in the background, he has noticed that the board has hired more seasoned investigators, revamped its investigative method in the past two years, and lowered its average investigative time to seven months. As a result, in March, Mr. Safir first told board members he was exploring the possibility of giving them responsibility for investigations.

In July, deeming the board sufficiently improved, Mr. Safir decided to move ahead–a decision he said had no connection to the Federal investigation. He told Kevin Flynn of The Times that his plan "would make the C.C.R.B. totally independent as far as the investigations are concerned."

Mr. Safir first broke the news to a review board delegation during a meeting at 1 Police Plaza on July 29. They had gathered to discuss problems in their relationship–primarily review board folks' belief that the police could be cooperating more. At the meeting, said two people familiar with the board's workings, Mr. Safir offered to get information to the panel in a more timely fashion. Then he dropped the bombshell that the department would no longer rework their cases.

He never mentioned, however, the do-over clause. That came on Aug. 6, in a memo from Joseph Flynn, the director of the department's disciplinary assessment unit, to Gene Lopez, the executive director of the review board. On Aug. 12, two days after Mr. Safir and the Mayor announced the new plan, Mr. Flynn reiterated the demands in a nonconfidential memorandum to Mr. Lopez. "Reconsideration of cases would be fair to police officers, would enable the department to dispose of referrals in the most appropriate manner, and would underscore the C.C.R.B.'s commitment to the integrity of the entire civilian complaint process," he wrote.

A majority of board members is needed to implement any proposal, and right now the Mayor and the Commissioner have only a slight advantage. The board panel is made up of three former high-ranking police officials appointed by the Commissioner, three former prosecutors appointed by the Mayor and four members (usually lawyers) recommended by the City Council. The Mayor's contingent has two vacancies. A vote could come on Sept. 8.

Some of the board's members said the proposal is especially stinging, given their hopes and beliefs that the relationship between the two agencies was finally improving. Besides promising better access to crucial investigatory information, Mr. Safir has actually met with the board twice this year, after pretty much ignoring them in previous years. More crucially, Mr. Giuliani has said he would raise the board's budget 21.3 percent this year, after raising it 18.9 percent last year.

Mr. Ward said the Police Department could engage in case-dumping. "I am a little concerned that they will just send cases back to us as a way to clear out their backlog. To put it on our backlog instead of theirs," he said. At the end of 1998, the department had resolved only 19 of the 300 cases the board referred during the year.

"There has to be a time limit during which they could send the case back, say after three months, to say this needs further investigation, if this proposal is going to work at all," Mr. Ward said.

Ms. Mode conceded that justice could be delayed under the proposal, then put responsibility on the review board: "Well, that's something they need to be cognizant of, but if you're doing the investigation properly from the get-go, there shouldn't be any delay."

He will, for the third consecutive year, lead some 3,000 Rollerbladers up 10th Avenue, through the Lincoln Tunnel, over to New Jersey and then back to Manhattan via ferry as grand marshal of the National Multiple Sclerosis Skate-a-thon. He'll feed the CD player in his car with Jimmy Buffett's best, try to get in a few hours off Long Island on his sailboat and play his weekly, two-hour, full-court basketball game over at Chelsea Piers with an 18- to 60-year-old crowd that includes his 6-foot-6 son.

But play to the media? Not a chance. "The Mayor and I do what we have to do and aren't terribly influenced by the press, and I don't think the press likes that very much," Mr. Safir said.

Yet the Police Commissioner said all this during an interview in his 1 Police Plaza office, a sit-down designed to offer a glimpse into the man who once complained to The New York Times that negative perceptions of him stemmed from his downturned mouth.

Is this the rehabilitation of Howard Safir? Only a few months ago, there were loud whispers around City Hall that he was Mayor Giuliani's hand-picked choice as successor. Mr. Safir acknowledges that he has been approached. "Oh, sure. I've been approached by people who've asked me to be mayor. I've been approached by people who would like to form exploratory committees. It's not something I'm considering at the moment."

But then came Louima-gate, Diallo-gate, wife-gate, Oscar-gate and an unprecedented vote of no confidence from the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, revealing a deep vein of anti-Safir fury in the city (he calls it a "feeding frenzy"). Even now it is not over: Any day, city investigators will be releasing their ethics report about his jet-set weekend at the Academy Awards, courtesy of a Revlon Inc. executive.

But Commissioner Safir hasn't just been sitting around behind his-and former police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt's-old desk waiting for it. Reporters in "the shack -the press room at 1 Police Plaza-said he's been more visible recently than he'd been in months. It was his face on the evening news May 7, when an off-duty cop was shot. And he landed a stunning blow on the P.B.A. by announcing a brilliant, divisive plan to promote loads of cops and reward them with raises (taking them out of that union, to boot). He's also out pushing a crime-fighting initiative to create a DNA bank in New York State.

Lest anyone forget, he's also the guy who led a police department that brought crime statistics to the lowest point since Dragnet was on the air.

But who is this guy? By all accounts, Mr. Safir-he of the character-actor mug, large, powerful hands and subdued Fed-like demeanor-is a tough son of a gun. And he's got the enemies to prove it.

"I don't want anything to do with Howard Safir," his famed uncle Louis Weiner (who captured the bandit Willie Sutton) told The Observer from California. "If you put my name anywhere in an article about Howard Safir, there will be repercussions."

"Howard Safir is the reason I gave up 19 years in the [U.S.] Marshals Service," said veteran lawman Terry Merrifield.

"He's pond scum, and you can quote me on that," said Charlie Thompson, an award-winning television producer who investigated Mr. Safir for ABC's 20/20 .

Mr. Safir spent much of his career as a Federal agent before Mr. Giuliani called him to New York, and where, it seems, he left an overheated station wagon packed with bad karma. He began his professional life as an idealist, thinking, at age 23, that he could defeat the world's crime problems. After growing up in the Bronx and Long Island, the son of Russian Jewish immigrant parents (his father was a presser in the garment district, his mother a switchboard operator), Mr. Safir followed his Uncle Louis' example and became a lawman. Their preference? "Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, whatever Jewish parents want for their kids," he laughed. Instead, he made his professional bones in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (later the Drug Enforcement Administration) working a series of daring undercover stints, including as a hippie drug buyer in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. He moved to the dispirited U.S. Marshal's Service in 1979.

"The Attorney General of the United States personally told me, he said, I want you to fix this," Mr. Safir recalled. By many accounts, including his own, he did, transforming the agency from a criminal baby-sitting service to a fugitive-hunting, ass-kicking task force that tracked down bad guys by any means necessary. His collar hit parade included notorious renegades like Christopher Boyce (the Falcon of the Falcon and the Snowman), and ex-C.I.A. agent turned Libyan stooge Edwin Wilson. He eventually became associate director for operations, supervising everything from courthouse security to fugitive retrieval, but he made his mark cleaning up the Witness Protection Program.

He did it by being Howard. "Howard has a strong ego," said Gerald Shur, a high-ranking Justice Department official who founded the Witness Protection Program. "He [also] had a very strong desire to be perceived as doing a good job, and that combination worked wonders for us.

"To this day, they love him for what he did," said Mr. Shur, who is writing a book about the history of the program. "He brought in modern equipment and insisted on training-he did very well in straightening it out."

Beyond that accomplishment, however, the consensus divides sharply. In a proposal for a prospective autobiography, Mr. Safir trumpets his proximity to history: "I thought about all the events I had participated in, during my 25 years as a Federal agent, and realized, that there were few major crimes, disasters or government conspiracies, that I has [sic] not had some contact with."

But Mr. Safir's life story simply was not as captivating to others as to himself. Publishers' rejection letters (which became part of a subsequent legal dispute) explained that they found the story "interesting, but not compelling." Indeed, others who worked with Mr. Safir remember him more as a tough inside fighter, but not as the second coming of Wyatt Earp. "He had the Marshal's Service issue him a Smith & Wesson 9- millimeter, and he asked me how to use it," said Mr. Merrifield, a marshal under Mr. Safir.

It's tough to separate Mr. Safir's authentic exploits from the puffery. But he does seem to have a knack for hyperbole, not to mention an appreciation for a touching story-even if the details are a little hazy. Mr. Safir often cites the influence of Uncle Louis to show his deep roots in law enforcement. In fact, the touching story line was written into the plot of an NYPD Blue episode in which he appeared. But Mr. Weiner told the Daily News several years ago that Mr. Safir has never reached out to him, and in fact snubbed him at the funeral of Mr. Weiner's daughter. When The Observer asked Mr. Safir about his uncle's remarks, he replied: "He's had a tough life. As is not unusual in Jewish families-if you've ever seen the movie Avalon -I think somebody's cut the turkey on Uncle Louis a few years ago … That doesn't change my view of him when I was young and he was a detective."

Mr. Safir, however, has had his own, weirdly disjointed moments. According to the transcript of a 1992 appearance at an obscure Carnegie Foundation Mideast policy roundtable, Mr. Safir suggested that he suffered the consequences for criticizing the Bush Administration's appeasement of Saddam Hussein before the Gulf War. "[I] opposed this tilt," he told his small audience. "Those of us who did were suppressed and eventually evicted from the policy process toward Iraq …"

Yet, according to Mr. Safir's friends and former colleagues, as well as Iraq policy experts, Mr. Safir had nothing to do with Iraq. "I can't imagine why he would have been involved with policy toward Iraq," said Howard Teicher, a top National Security Council staff member on Iraq from 1982-87. (Mr. Teicher said he had never met Mr. Safir before their joint panel appearance.) And former Safir colleague Larry Homenick, now Chief Deputy U.S. Marshal in Denver, said: "I don't know Howard was ever in a position to make U.S. policy toward Iraq … I'm not familiar with any of those things, and I was chief of the international operations branch."

Asked about his Iraq comments, Mr. Safir said he did not recall, but by way of possible explanation told a story about a Beirut snatching that was vetoed by Ollie North.

Getting Safirized

Then there was the time Mr. Safir, referring to the notorious lord of the Southeast Asian opium triangle, declared: "I went after Khun Sa." But even his fans remember nothing of the sort. "He had nothing to do with Khun Sa," said William F. Alden, a D.E.A. veteran who worked with Mr. Safir and considers himself a friend. (Khun Sa remains at large.) Mr. Safir said he had been misquoted. "That's not what I said. I said I had worked on Khun Sa up in the golden triangle with the D.E.A. I personally have never gone after Khun Sa. Have I ever personally run into the jungle to find Khun Sa? No. I've done that for others, but not Khun Sa."

Mr. Safir also showed a talent for putting his imprint on the ideas of others. "He didn't have to like you to use you," recalled Mr. Merrifield. "Every idea that you presented became Safirized."

Like Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Safir gained a reputation for rewarding loyalists and crushing dissent. Field operatives who questioned his mandates were exiled or run out of the service. "If you're not one of his people, he will transfer you, he will bury you," said Mr. Merrifield, who worked under Mr. Safir. "If I licked his ass and never disagreed with him, I'd still be in Washington." Mr. Safir acknowledged his hard edge. "It certainly makes me less than popular with some people."

One field officer warned that a protected witness was gambling his rent money, and asked that the money not go directly to the man. According to subordinates, Mr. Safir declined to stop the direct payments, and when the field officer requested a telegram confirming the policy, Mr. Safir snarled, "I'll send you a telegram all right." The field officer was transferred for the remainder of his career.

Indeed, though press accounts of Mr. Safir at the time of his arrival in New York described him as a disciplinarian, colleagues remember a more complicated reality. "There was one standard for Howard Safir, and another for everyone else," said a former associate. (If true, such a pattern would explain Mr. Safir's recent transgressions, from accepting a free flight to the Academy Awards from Revlon to schlepping a military-strength security retinue to his daughter's wedding.)

But there were also times when Mr. Safir followed rules, to the letter. While presiding over the Witness Protection Program, Mr. Safir dismissed a whole raft of witnesses for breaches of security procedures despite the objections of some field officers. Some of the banished witnesses were later killed. Interpretations vary as to whether it was the victims' carelessness, or the withdrawal of the protection, that was to blame. "[Mr. Safir] did what he had to do, I guess," said John Partington, who guarded Federal witnesses under his direction, left after a feud and is now the Public Safety Commissioner in Providence, R.I. "My job was to save lives, his was to save money."

It was questions about Mr. Safir's witness policy that sparked the first of several lawsuits he has filed against critics-most often, the press. He sued Geraldo Rivera for chasing him down in a mall in pursuit of that story. (He got a settlement from ABC-TV over its injudicious editing of a sound bite.) He has also sued WCBS-TV's Marcia Kramer (the suit was settled recently, although no details were announced), filed a complaint against a former boss (for discrimination) and even took his sister-in-law to court.

Most recently, Mr. Safir and his wife, Carol, filed suit against a woman who rear-ended Mrs. Safir's car. Mr. Safir noted ruefully that "a big deal was made [by the media] because I wanted to find out whether or not somebody who ran into the back of my wife was a threat to me or to my wife."

Mr. Safir, in turn, has been sued a number of times. According to Mr. Rivera's producer at the time, Mr. Thompson, when Mr. Safir finally consented to an interview about the witness protection program, he secretly taped a microphone under the interview table. Mr. Thompson then counterpunched with a suit charging Mr. Safir with illegally wiretapping the duo.

Another case (whose files are creating a field day for Mr. Safir's most zealous journalistic interlocutor, police reporter Leonard Levitt of Newsday ) found Mr. Safir defending himself against a lawsuit by Dan Moldea, an investigative journalist Mr. Safir had retained to help him pen a proposal for a prospective autobiography. After working with Mr. Safir for several months, Mr. Moldea discovered that the commissioner had neglected to mention that 12 publishing houses had rejected a previous book proposal. Mr. Moldea won his case, and $17,500, in 1995. (Mr. Safir sold an option on his life story to Columbia Pictures' television group in the early 1990's, but it was not renewed or developed.)

In New York, Mr. Safir has had to play the challenging role of the shrinking violet, shunning personal glory as a sort of Russian nesting doll inside Mr. Giuliani's outer layer. It's been a tough act for him, according to those who know him well. But if anyone could tame Mr. Safir's ego, it's Mr. Giuliani. "He's the only one with an ego bigger than Howard's," said a friend. Yet Mr. Safir insists he's delighted with his role. Asked how he felt when Mr. Giuliani, as is his penchant, took possession of Mr. Safir's idea to seize the cars of New Yorkers arrested for driving while intoxicated, Mr. Safir said: "I came up with the D.W.I., the Mayor supported it."

The Mayor has generally been supportive of him, he said. "I told him I was going to go out front on DNA, he supported it. Cameras in housing developments-he supported it. There's nothing that I have proposed to the Mayor that he hasn't supported. Does he deserve credit for it? Of course he does. He's the Mayor, he selected me, he provides the resources. Why shouldn't he?"

Not a Bratton Fan

So the hammer falls elsewhere, and Mr. Safir seems to match the Mayor's parsimoniousness with praise. After Mr. Giuliani ousted William Bratton and installed Mr. Safir, the new commissioner quickly began ridiculing his predecessor. And he's still not that impressed. Although he noted that Mr. Bratton had done a good job, he added: "He was somebody who courted the press, and I think he was somebody who very much liked being in the limelight. To me it is not the part of the job that's best. I am much more interested in substantive accomplishments than in seeing my picture on the front page of the Daily News ."

Mr. Bratton, too, has something to say. He believes that Mr. Safir (and his boss, for that matter) came to their roles with clear handicaps: "The training both he and the Mayor had in the Federal system didn't necessarily prepare them for the nuances of urban policing," Mr. Bratton said. "[In Washington], the press is usually only there when you want it." Mr. Safir concurs. "Perhaps it's my background," he said. "I spent most of my life doing relatively covert work, always goal-oriented and not especially affected by outside influences."

If anything, Mr. Safir has adopted what to many seems a Nixonian suspicion of the media. "The press has been rooting around my personal life since I've been Commissioner," Mr. Safir groused. In keeping reporters at building's-length, he relies on his Ron Ziegler-like, loyal longtime protégée, Marilyn Mode, whom he brought with him to New York and installed as his spokesman. "We have nothing for you," Ms. Mode habitually tells reporters under pressure to deliver details to demanding editors and curious readers.

Indeed, say some former employees of Mr. Safir, he never saw the point of letting out bad news. According to Mr. Merrifield, his former colleague in the Witness Protection Program, Mr. Safir warned his staff before an impending visit from Senate investigators that "if any of you have any dirty laundry, you'd better keep it to yourselves."

And so Mr. Safir's minor mishaps find a ready audience. Mr. Safir's chief tormentor, Newsday 's Mr. Levitt, delights in publicizing the unseemly minutiae of life at 1 Police Plaza, devoting a weekly column to such niceties as cracked front doors, press secretary inconsistencies and evasions, and arcane, interdepartmental plots. "The more unpleasant he is, the better for me," said Mr. Levitt. "He makes himself an easy target, unfortunately, because he is so unpleasant and tries so hard to manage the news." One scoop-in the truest sense of the word-Mr. Safir could not manage was when Mr. Levitt reported that Ms. Mode brought her pet dog, Lil, into the office and had a member of New York's Finest clean up the resulting mess.

For her part, Ms. Mode-sitting in her office, where a stain indeed marks the rug not far from a framed picture of her, the dog, and NYPD Blue actor Dennis Franz-decries Lil's victimization. "If I targeted somebody or the Commissioner targeted somebody in the same fashion, we'd be hung out to dry. Lil has never 'pooped and I forced somebody to pick it up.' I would quote F.D.R.: It's fine to take your shots at me and the way my office is run … but to go after my little dog …"

As for Mr. Levitt, Ms. Mode sighed. "He's a very bright fellow." When pressed, she offered this anecdote: "You know what he said to me one time, he said, 'Is the Commissioner a self-hating Jew?' and I said, 'Are you?' And his colleagues-and there were several standing around-said, 'No, just self-hating.'"

While many of Mr. Safir's Washington enemies are retired, his critics in New York are active indeed. Even rank-and-file police are getting in on the act, angry about the demands placed on them to crack down ever harder on minor infractions. With morale at its lowest level in years, the upcoming election for the leadership of the P.B.A.-the most important police union-has turned, improbably, into a Safir-bashing contest.

In recent months, it has been death by a thousand paper cuts for the once-unstoppable Mr. Safir, whose proposed memoirs were to be entitled You Can Run but You Can't Hide . Taken to task, fairly and unfairly, for rules violations of a breadth and variety unimaginable in his more secretive days as an undercover lawman in Washington, Mr. Safir seems at a loss to adjust to the heightened scrutiny of his current position. But he is a survivor, and indications are that while it may be hard to adjust, he's giving it his best shot. He recently withstood with an unnerving calm one tough question after another from veteran WNBC-TV newsman Gabe Pressman, and he told The New York Times , "When I'm just sitting somewhere-I look like I'm mad. But I'm not."

In Rudy Giuliani's world, the tougher Mr. Safir is, the more he may be likely to survive. Mr. Safir is confident he will stay in the Mayor's good graces. "The Mayor and I know each other very well. The Mayor sees these attacks in the press for what they are … He's the only mayor I'd work for. The reason that I'm here is because I know what kind of tough, loyal and fair guy he is. I know the real Rudy Giuliani. This is a mayor who believes in his people and stands by them."

In any case, he's not sweating it out. "I've always believed I could make a living anywhere, whether it's here or in the private sector. I'm not sitting here saying 'Oh my God, am I going to be police commissioner tomorrow?' If I'm not police commissioner tomorrow, I'll be something else."

Perhaps publishing. "Somebody offered me a book deal last year. I turned it down." He declined to elaborate, but noted: "It was a pretty good offer."

And there's always Hollywood. The producer of NYPD Blue , Bill Clark, said Mr. Safir was a "natural on the set." Might Mr. Safir be welcomed back? If the story line calls for it, Mr. Clark said, "Absolutely." Mr. Safir, who displays a signed picture of the young actor Ronald Reagan on his office wall, is equally enthusiastic. "They were very nice," Mr. Safir said. "Everybody on the set was very gracious." Mr. Safir explained that he had flubbed some of his lines - as, he noted, had actor Jimmy Smits, whose Detective Bobby Simone met quietly with "Commissioner Safir" before a big promotion. "[But] it was a blast for me." Mr. Safir points out that his original role called for just two lines, but by the time he'd finished, he had a whole scene. It even included a reference to Uncle Louis.

But when a mischievous piece of legislation showed up in the Republican-controlled State Senate at the behest of the city's Law Department, no one seemed to notice. As it happens, though, the two developments have some key points in common. As matters of substance, neither counts for much-the Commissioner's big night out, no matter how ill advised, is no more relevant to the real lives of New Yorkers than is a piece of legislation that has, by most accounts, no chance of passing.

But as the aftermath of the Amadou Diallo killing sends Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's approval rating southward, both make one wonder when the political-judgment fairy is going to quit sprinkling funny dust in the Cheerios at City Hall.

In the unlikely event that it does become law, Senate Bill No. 3429 would change the venue for cases brought against the city from State Supreme Court to the Court of Claims. Supreme Court cases are heard by juries, but cases in the Court of Claims are decided by judges appointed by the Governor. Proponents argue that people who trip over potholes would not be able to tie up the courts in their quest for millions of taxpayer dollars. Or, as its opponents would put it, people (often uninsured, nonwhite people) who fall down elevator shafts in city projects, or whose surgeries are botched in city hospitals, or who suffer some level of police misconduct, would be denied their opportunity to have damages assessed by a jury of their peers.

Guess whose argument gives off more sparks right now.

"Certainly it is noticeable that at a time when you have such high-profile race cases pending, the Giuliani administration is championing this cause," said Mr. Sharpton, who may be the most incendiary Democrat happy to make hay of this, but not the only one. "This is a masterpiece of bad timing on the part of the Mayor," said State Senator Eric Schneiderman, a Democrat of the Upper West Side. "This legislation would amend the New York State constitution to deny plaintiffs the right to a trial by jury and put them in front of the Court of Claims, which is not exactly reflective of the diversity of the community." And even if, as could well happen if the bill becomes law, the 22-judge Court of Claims were to expand and diversify in terms of race, "you're still removing the citizenry from the process," said trial attorney Daniel O'Donnell. "You're still going in front of judges, not juries."

All the same, whatever the merits of its substance or its timing, the legislation in question is nothing new.

"This has been on a city wish list for a long, long time," said David Gruenberg, counsel to the State Senate Judiciary Committee. He's right: In seeking to avoid making fat payouts from the till of torts-the city paid out roughly $347 million in 1998, up from $149 million in 1989-Mr. Giuliani is only following in the footsteps of his predecessors, including former Mayor David Dinkins. Nor is he unique among his fellow mayors, whatever their political stripes: "I think if you talked to the mayor of Syracuse or Buffalo, they would say, 'Yeah, we're getting banged on this, too,'" said Anthony Piscitelli, director of the Mayor's Office of State Legislative Affairs in Albany.

Indeed, under ordinary circumstances, the bill would assume its customary place in a dark, dusty corner of the greater American debate over tort reform. Those in favor (and their business backers) would decry the clogging of the courts and the picking of deep pockets by frivolous case-makers in our litigation-loving society. Those opposed (and their backers in the trial bar) would protest that the average Joe's sacred right to a trial by jury extends very much to a civil trial by jury. Under ordinary circumstances, it would die a quiet death.

But, as those of you who have lately strolled past 1 Police Plaza may have noted, today's are not ordinary circumstances.

"I intend to make it very public," said Mr. Sharpton of the issue. "I'm just waiting to see if it gathers steam."

"Tort reform is very important to the city because judgments are skyrocketing," said Lawrence Kahn, chief litigating assistant to the Corporation Counsel. "This legislation is structural reform that mayors as far back as Mayor Koch have considered extremely important to rein in excessive verdicts that have subjected the taxpayer to a real financial burden."

That is an argument worth making. But given the fact that the legislation has far less chance of passing than it has of enhancing his reputation as racially insensitive and-lately, at least-politically tone-deaf, one can't help but ask: Why would this Mayor want to make it now?

Terry Golway will return next week.

Sometimes, that verve leaks into his printed decisions. And sometimes, well, he just can't help himself, and the sarcasm wells up and froths all over any old unlucky chap who lands in his courtroom. Even if that chap happens to be a fellow judge. A recent lapse of courthouse cordiality has set other judges sniping–and questioning whether the honorable Judge Tolub has some kind of agenda, perhaps of the political kind, hidden up his judicial sleeve.

The target of Judge Tolub's recent salvo is Jeffry Gallet, a bankruptcy judge of Federal District Court in Manhattan, who has been party to a messy divorce for more than six years. Most recently, Judge Gallet had filed a complaint against his ex-wife over child support issues. "Put most charitably, the parties have had an acrimonious relationship," wrote Judge Tolub in his bristling style.

Four other matrimonial judges had taken a pass on the complaint filed by Judge Gallet, who was previously a Family Court judge in Manhattan and the author of a law tome called Spouse and Child Support in New York . But Judge Tolub agreed to take the case. Both he and Judge Gallet said they had never met.

One issue at stake was how much money Judge Gallet's ex-wife should reimburse him for their 11-year-old daughter's health insurance. After the hearing on Feb. 3, Judge Tolub determined that the ex-wife owed Judge Gallet even more money than he thought. But taking another swipe at Judge Gallet, Judge Tolub ruled: "The plaintiff, for all of his mathematical expertise, undercalculated his costs."

Judge Tolub also seemed amused by the divorced couple's petty acrimony. "Needless to say, the plaintiff never furnished the defendant with documentation to support his claim for reimbursement and, not to be outdone, defendant refused to provide documentation as to the amount of life insurance she was required to keep in force pursuant to the agreement."

Even more stinging, however, was Judge Tolub's decision to invalidate the couple's 1993 separation agreement. His grounds: that it had violated three different provisions of the state's child support statute, something that Judge Gallet, both sides' lawyers and the mediator all should have known at the time. Judge Tolub ruled that he would have to determine the child support arrangement anew.

The invalidation of a separation agreement involving a former Family Court judge amused The New York Law Journal , which blurbed the decision on its front page, then published it in its entirety. Included in the text, courtesy of Judge Tolub, was the name of the couple's daughter and the fact that she was adopted, neither of which were significant to the questions of law at hand.

Fellow judges saw it as a low blow. "It's a wise-ass thing to do," said one judge, "gratuitously nasty." But some said they weren't surprised. Judge Tolub once hung up on another colleague while negotiating over the schedule of a lawyer they both needed in their courtroom.

Judge Gallet himself had little to say. Calling the decision "kind of a security breach," he nonetheless shrugged it off. "It's unpleasant, but that's life."

Other judges wondered how the case had found its way to the Law Journal . Judge Tolub wouldn't comment, because the case is pending, but his law secretary, Paul Alpert, said the judge's office did not provide his ruling to the law newspaper of record.

But some judges said he should have anticipated that a ruling involving a fellow judge would attract media interest, and that greater discretion was warranted. Unless, of course, there's a political motive here–as courthouse insiders are openly speculating.

Judge Tolub comes up for re-election later this year. Elected in 1989 from the East Side with the support of Ray Harding's Liberal Party, Judge Tolub is in the sights of the Democratic Party. They want him out, with a Democrat picked by Herman (Denny) Farrell, the party's boss in Manhattan, in his place.

Judge Gallet is a Democrat, as is his current wife, a lawyer named Bonnie Cohen-Gallet. She is known to be interviewing for a Housing Court position, but courthouse insiders said her name has emerged as a possible challenger to, er, Judge Tolub. In fact, said Ms. Eileen Zucker, staff director to Mr. Farrell, Ms. Cohen-Gallet is one of two candidates being considered for Judge Tolub's spot.

Was Judge Tolub's decision a pre-emptive strike? Some fellow judges think so. Judge Gallet said he thought it was a coincidence. "I don't see what political advantage it could have given him," he said.

Safir Case Argues Drinking and Law Don't Mix

Are you still working when you're having a Campari and soda with your boss in the evening at the "21" Club? That essential question came before Civil Court Judge Diane Lebedeff. Earlier this month, the judge decided that at least in the case of Marilyn Mode, the spokesman for the New York Police Department, she was almost surely still on the job.

The question came to the fore in a slander suit filed by Ms. Mode's boss, Commissioner Howard Safir, against WCBS-TV. Correspondent Marcia Kramer had reported that Mr. Safir had eaten at La Ristorante Taormina, a restaurant that once had mob ties, and used city funds to pay for the meal, as well as to give a $500 tip. Mr. Safir denied it, saying his dinner had been paid by the Finest Foundation, a private police support group. WCBS later retracted its report, acknowledging that Mr. Safir paid for the meal with private money, but Mr. Safir went ahead and sued, anyway.

Mr. Safir brought the suit as a private citizen; attorney Raoul Felder is handling it on a contingency basis. At issue in Judge Lebedeff's discovery ruling was whether Ms. Mode also acted as a private citizen when she talked with Mr. Felder about the WCBS report.

On the night of the broadcast, Ms. Mode had made a brief rest stop at "21," filling in Mr. Safir and Mr. Felder about her discussions with WCBS during its reporting about the Taormina dinner. When WCBS's lawyers asked her to recount the conversations, however, she declined. She claimed she had been working as Mr. Safir's private agent, and that the discussion thus was protected by the attorney-client privilege.

The judge said prove it: "Commissioner Safir, suing as a private citizen and represented by private counsel, cannot transform Mode into a purely private agent unless she was acting in a purely private capacity while not on the government payroll."

Judge Lebedeff said that Ms. Mode could still see her comments to Mr. Felder ruled out of bounds. All she had to do was produce time sheets that showed she was off the job.

You can reach N.Y. Law by confidential e-mail at mfleischer@observer.com.

On Feb. 20, he stood alongside Police Commissioner Howard Safir and handed police a powerful new tool, announcing that cops will seize the cars of people arrested for drunk driving. The next morning, he told Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson on ABC-TV that some of his critics were trying to "racially exploit" the police shooting of Amadou Diallo in order to "divide people." A day later, news leaked out that the Police Department would assign 600 new cops to controversial buy-and-bust operations, escalating the never-ending war on drugs.

These were familiar gestures from a man considered by many to be a cop's Mayor, a no-nonsense politician who aggressively defends the cops through one crisis after another. But the same Mayor who ranted outside David Dinkins' City Hall in 1993, stirring up a crowd of rowdy cops, has seen relations with police fall apart over the years, amid ugly salary disputes.

As Mr. Giuliani sets out on his quest for higher office, the people who have helped make him a rising star feel as shafted as ever. They say they are underpaid. Some think the Mayor's quality-of-life campaign has reduced cops to the status of repo men, meter maids and municipal nags. Meanwhile, the cops watch resentfully as Mr. Giuliani barnstorms the country, boasting of accomplishments that have put them in the line of fire.

Now a Patrolmen's Benevolent Association election set for June is stirring up even more anti-Giuliani sentiment in the precincts. The crescendo of rank-and-file grumbling is strange background music at a time when the Diallo shooting has forced Mr. Giuliani to mount perhaps the most spirited defense of cops in his five-year tenure.

Diallo's death in a hail of 41 police bullets on Feb. 4 has etched predictable battle lines across the city: Rudy Giuliani versus Al Sharpton; cop defenders versus cop detractors. But those faction fights have overshadowed another, equally explosive, divide: the long-brewing hostility between City Hall and rank-and-file police officers over pay and a host of other labor and policy issues. And that ongoing standoff, coupled with the searing racial tensions created by the Diallo shooting, has produced a critical moment for Mr. Giuliani and the Police Department at a time when both might otherwise be reveling in the city's historic drop in crime.

Former Police Commissioner William Bratton, who was pushed out of his job three years ago by Mr. Giuliani, was happy to take the side of his former troops. "The cops certainly appreciate that he has offered them a lot of support and provided the political authority to take back the city," he said. "But relations are strained. The cops feel that they haven't been treated fairly, and they're correct in that assumption."

When Mr. Giuliani came to power in 1994 amid soaring murder rates, he offered the police a tacit political bargain. He would throw the muscle of City Hall behind cops, boosting their prestige and summoning the political will to allow the department to aggressively pursue its quarry. In return, the cops would deliver on the central tenet of the Mayor's political vision, the insistence that safety and order are the pillars of a civil society.

It worked for Mr. Giuliani: Plummeting crime, above all else, is propelling his quest for higher office. But as Mr. Giuliani prepares to move on, many cops remain dissatisfied with their dividends.

For one thing, police representatives are seething over an internal Police Department directive, obtained by The Observer , that calls for many officers, sergeants and lieutenants to be rated in three bell-curve categories by their commanders according to their performance. Union officials have been fighting the directive, called "banding," arguing it would force officers to compete against each other for spots in each band, including the lowest category, which must include one-fourth of the officers. According to union officials, the city is preparing to move forward with the plan.

A Police Department spokesman didn't return a call requesting comment.

Other officials complain of relentless pressure from police headquarters-regarded by many as an annex of City Hall these days-to write summonses for petty quality-of-life offenses. That earns street cops scorn from civilians as they play the undignified role of ticket-writing machines, targeting petty offenses they would just as soon ignore.

"You have cops hiding in bushes looking for dogs off their leashes," cracked one former police official. "Are you kidding me?"

Finally, according to street cops and current and former police officials, many officers still resent that their starting annual salaries of $27,800 are many thousands of dollars less than their suburban counterparts'. As Mr. Giuliani campaigned toward decisive re-election in 1997, the police were waging a tumultuous labor battle with him over a five-year contract-retroactive to 1995 and through 2000-that included a two-year wage freeze. (It was settled in September 1997 when an arbitrator upheld the city.) In one case, officers by the scores marched outside every station house in the city, chanting slogans like "Mayor Giuliani, we give you heroes, you give us zeros."

"The men are still frustrated," said Jim Higgins, the recording secretary for the P.B.A., which represents rank-and-file officers. "They're demoralized. They've gone out and done the job. The Mayor hasn't recognized them where it counts-in the paycheck."

It's Intense Out There

Mr. Giuliani has defended the salary of police officers, arguing that the raises offered cops in 1997 outpace those offered other city workers. And he has said cops are under no particular pressure to produce tickets. "They are under tremendous pressure from supervisors to keep the city safe, and many of them put that pressure on themselves," the Mayor has said. "Police work is highly pressured work. It's very intense."

Mr. Higgins disputed that view. "We're always under pressure to give more summonses out," he said. "The department says there's no pressure. But there is."

City Hall's hard-line approach has set off a raucous power struggle within the P.B.A. The outcome of an upcoming P.B.A. election could shape City Hall's relationship with the cops for years to come. The current union leadership is facing a serious challenge from dissidents who charge that the union leadership has not fought the Mayor hard enough on pay and other issues.

Adding to the uncertainty and tension, Mr. Giuliani's war on crime has fallen under harsh scrutiny in the aftermath of Diallo's death. Under Mr. Bratton, the department launched an assault on crime and disorder which reflected a "zero tolerance" policing movement sweeping the country. Mr. Bratton contributed to the department's swaggering image, holding court at Elaine's and other hot spots like a Vietnam-era American general on leave in Saigon, as he vowed to "take back the city block by block." Crime fell even faster under Mr. Safir, who implemented many of his predecessor's successful no-tolerance policies.

But now, with crime at its lowest point in a generation, critics and boosters alike question whether Mr. Safir-or the Mayor, in his hands-on management of the Police Department-has a peacetime plan. So far, Mr. Safir's initiatives-seizing the cars of drunk drivers, adding buy-and-bust operations-suggest a war footing. Many community and political leaders urge a return to "community policing," in which officers are attached to, and grow familiar with, a neighborhood. And they want elite undercover squads to scale back the large-scale frisking that has helped give the department its paramilitary image.

"Now that crime is down, these strategies need to be adjusted-big time," said one former high-ranking police official. "It's not an occupying army anymore."

Mr. Giuliani certainly has expressed new-found interest in the department's manners. In a speech to 689 eager young officers on Feb. 18, the Mayor instructed his listeners to be nice to civilians. "[W]hen you deal with people, [say] 'Yes, sir,' 'No, sir,' 'Mr.,' 'Mrs.,' 'Ms.,'" the Mayor said, adding that the officers were, in some sense, "civil rights workers."

Those sentiments aside, Mr. Giuliani has yet to prove he can convincingly play the role of peacetime general. He seems to see himself as an embattled warrior engaged in epic struggles with forbidding foes: political corruption, street crime, even lax thinking.

A former city official suggested a historical comparison, noting that Gen. George Patton was "driven to despair" by the prospect of peace as World War II came to an end. "This is sort of the same thing," the former official said. "[Mr. Giuliani] is a wartime general. He thrives on conflict."

So critics are less inclined to give his anti-crime policies the benefit of the doubt. For instance, Mr. Giuliani recently announced plans to hire 1,000 new cops, bringing the number of officers to an unprecedented 41,000. The Mayor has said he hopes to build on past crime-fighting successes. But others said that another troop buildup without a new crime-fighting strategy or a residency requirement only enhances the image of the Police Department as a force of outsiders.

"In my day, most of us were born in [the city]," said Joe Coffey, a retired detective who's now a law enforcement consultant. "Now these kids come in from the suburbs. They never knew the mean streets. They only know from what they've seen on TV. Their attitude is very good for fighting crimes, but it's very bad for community relations."

In another development, The New York Times reported on Feb. 15 that the vaunted street crimes unit-four members of the elite squad were involved in the Diallo shooting-had nearly tripled its size under Mr. Safir, to 380 officers. The Times said that the expansion was carried out despite the objections of unit commanders who warned that training and oversight would suffer in the wake of the buildup.

While the elite units grow, the number of precinct-based cops apparently is shrinking. A City Council report of Feb. 23 noted that in the past year the number of uniformed personnel had dropped in scores of precincts all over the city. Precinct-based cops, in theory, are central to the "community policing" ideal some hold out as the best hope for good will between cops and locals.

"You get rid of the personal interaction ... and all the good will is gone," observed Mr. Coffey.

Mr. Giuliani harshly derided such notions in 1994, suggesting that community policing's "social services aspects" had to be eliminated in order to get serious about fighting crime. And he has repeatedly argued that now is not the time to let up on crime.

But some observers are wondering if success has morphed into excess. As one quality-of-life crime after another is banished from the landscape, officers are under pressure to crack down on increasingly petty offenses, according to one retired cop who is constantly in touch with onetime colleagues.

Bust Those Spitters!

Mr. Giuliani has helped in that regard, launching one new crusade after another against taxi drivers, food vendors, gum spitters (he was joking) and jaywalkers (he wasn't). And with the tacit (or, if union officials are to be believed, overt) pressure to produce summonses, cops sometimes find themselves playing an unpleasant, indeed reviled, role.

"You're climbing on the backs of citizens," the former cop said. "Cops don't have the discretion to say, 'Have a nice day,' and let people go. Are we here to help people, or are we here to tax people at every possible opportunity?"

As he balefully surveyed the protesters ringing City Hall on Feb. 22, one cop conceded that it's part of his job to give civilians tickets for niggling infractions. But it occasionally gets crazy, he said. Jaywalking? The officer scoffed. "I can't really comment on that," he said, venturing out into traffic on Broadway, "because I'm about to jaywalk right now."

Yet Mr. Giuliani's wartime approach to minor disorder suggests a broader policing dilemma produced by the "zero tolerance" approach. The Police Department has employed an in-your-face approach to crowd control, greeting public events-demonstrations, sports events, concerts-with a show of force that would have been unheard of in previous administrations. Visitors to Yankee playoff games last year were astonished to witness hundreds of officers in riot gear flood the field the second after the final pitch was thrown. (The show of force had been standard procedure for decisive games, but under Mr. Giuliani, the riot police have been deployed for every playoff game.) Meanwhile, the shabbiest of street protesters have been barricaded into spaces the size of chicken coops. And sharpshooters stood atop City Hall during a demonstration of AIDS activists on Dec. 1.

Whatever the rationale for this startling approach to crowd control, the constant show of force has a downside-for cops, as well as civilians. Their constant presence risks making even the law-abiding feel bullied, which in turn can make situations like Diallo's death all the more explosive.

"People feel as if the numbers are overwhelming-maybe they feel overly controlled," said another former official who was a part of the Safir administration. "It makes it difficult for the public to give these four police officers the benefit of the doubt."

Additional reporting by William Berlind and Nick Paumgarten.

-Peter Bogdanovich

Wednesday, Dec. 10

Police Commissioner Howard Safir and his friend Raoul Felder, the celebrity divorce lawyer, are making noises about filing a libel lawsuit against aggressive reporter Marcia Kramer and WCBS-TV.

The Commissioner was enraged by Ms. Kramer's News 2 report in July charging him with spending more than $1,000 in taxpayer money on a sumptuous meal in Little Italy. The Channel 2 story was indeed partially mistaken. Mr. Safir's meal, it turned out, was not taxpayer-funded.…

Weeks after the original piece was broadcast, Ms. Kramer and WCBS did correct the error-but that hasn't appeased the commish.…

"We're mulling things over," Mr. Felder said. "I'm appalled by what happened." …

The fight started when Ms. Kramer spotted a good story on the front page of the July 24 Daily News : The city's top cop was caught dining with around 20 colleagues at Taormina of Mulberry Street. Not only was the restaurant off-limits to cops, the News revealed, but it had long been owned by a reputed Gambino capo. It was also a favorite hangout of John Gotti.…

Ms. Kramer got to work, and her report was ready for the 6 P.M. broadcast. " News 2 has learned that taxpayer dollars paid for Safir's meal," Ms. Kramer said in the report. "He's a big sport. Tipped 50 percent. Your tax dollars at work." …

How did News 2 pull off such a scoop? Easy. A field producer from the station shoved a mike in the face of the manager, a man with faltering English and a heavy Italian accent.…

"Did he pay for everybody last night, or did he just pay for himself?" asked the field producer, off camera.…

"No, no, he pay-a, I think he pay-a, some check for the city, ah, New York. That's, ah, New York City check," the manager stammered.…

That was all Ms. Kramer needed. Moments before air time, a spokesman for Mr. Safir called the station with a denial. But that didn't stop the newscast from going with its saucy report. "You might call this the scene of the crime," said Ms. Kramer in the voice-over as the camera showed the restaurant's facade. "The Police Commissioner chowed down last night, eating a little pasta, a little antipasto, a little fish. Tonight, he's eating lots of crow." …

Facing the camera at the end of the report, Ms. Kramer tacked on Mr. Safir's denial. In the 11 o'clock version of the story, Ms. Kramer played down the angle that the meal was paid for by taxpayers. (A private group called New York's Finest Foundation actually footed the bill.) …

Mr. Felder complained on Mr. Safir's behalf the next day. Ms. Kramer delivered her correction on Aug. 6: "The Commissioner was hopping mad at the story," the reporter said, "and he had a right to be." A nice start, but her correction ended up heaping blame on the stammering source. "It seems the manager of the restaurant in Little Italy got it wrong," Ms. Kramer said.…

Mr. Safir was not satisfied with that.…

Asked if he would file suit, Mr. Felder turned suddenly oracular. "It's like wine," he told NYTV. "Eventually, you have to open the bottle, or get rid of it." A spokesman for Channel 2 news had no comment at Observer press time.… [WCBS, 2, 6 P.M., 11 P.M.]

Monday, Dec. 15

You won't see the naked Howard Stern intern in any reruns of The Howard Stern Show on the E! channel. Why? Because Mr. Stern is a wuss, claims Zach Waldman …

Mr. Waldman is the intern who, with Mr. Stern's encouragement, let it all hang out one morning for the cameras. "In my opinion," said Mr. Waldman, "Howard doesn't want a bunch of yes men around him, but that's what he has. He told Roseanne on the air that he thought what I did was great and that I was their favorite intern, but that they had to make an example out of me and fire me. But when did the king of all media become management's little bitch?" …

On tonight's edition, a beautiful mismatch: Fiona Apple takes Howard seriously. [E!, 24, 11 P.M., 11:30 P.M.]

-By Deirdre Dolan and Greg Sargent