HIGH-PROFILE PROSECUTOR June 9 1985

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THE WOMAN CANNOT BELIEVE IT: SHE IS IN THE same elevator as Rudolph Giuliani, the Federal prosecutor for Manhattan. ''You're Rudolph Giuliani,'' she says. ''Oh, I can't believe it. You're the one in the papers - with the mob.'' She is staring. ''Oh, this is a this a thrill!"''Frankly,'' Giuliani replies, ''I'm surprised you're not worried about riding the elevator with me.'' It is a line he often uses at speaking engagements. He knows joking about death threats is almost always good for a big laugh.Every era has a law-enforcement figure or two who captures the public imagination, who turns the job of police officer or prosecutor into ''crime buster'' and makes the fight against evil appear to be a personal vendetta. As a crusading New York City Police Commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt identified his enemies as ''vile crime and hideous vice.'' As special New York City prosecutor, Thomas E. Dewey declared war on ''organized gangs of low-grade outlaws.'' These men knew how to use the universal distaste for badness to their own advantage.Of late, Rudolph W. Giuliani, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, has marched into this arena. Since his appointment in 1983 to a four-year term as Federal prosecutor, Giuliani has succeeded in making his name well known from an office usually out of the public eye -even though many of his biggest cases are still awaiting trial. The Italian Government has presented the 41-year-old Giuliani with an award for battling the Mafia. The Thomas E. Dewey Association made him the speaker at its dinner this year.''I saw you on TV five nights this week,'' said the luncheon chairman of a junior high school principals' association that Giuliani addressed recently. ''Actually, it was only two nights,'' said Giuliani. ''Last week, it was five.''How have years of investigation by hundreds of Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, city police, state and Federal prosecutors come - for so much of the public - to be embodied in one man? How has it come to be Rudolph Giuliani versus the ''mob''?Part of Giuliani's secret has been hard work, an innovative legal mind and a courtroom flair. At the same time he was supervising 130 attorneys in the nation's largest Federal prosecutor's office, he was personally devising the imaginative strategy for one of the most significant Mafia cases in recent times.Until a decade ago, law-enforcement tactics had been directed at individual Mafia members. More recently, the F.B.I. has concentrated on individual Mafia family leadership. Giuliani's brainstorm was to go the next step: Attack the board of directors guiding all of New York's Mafia families in loan sharking, drug trafficking, labor racketeering and contract murder. Next fall in a single trial at the Federal courthouse in Manhattan, Giuliani will prosecute the purported heads of the Genovese, Gambino, Lucchese, Colombo and Bonanno families.But innovative blockbuster indictments do not in themselves explain Giuliani's prominence. In recent years, United States Attorneys all over the country have been breaking big Mafia cases. Yet most remain distant figures to the man in the street. In contrast, says Steven Brill, editor and publisher of The American Lawyer magazine, Giuliani has been smart enough and politically savvy enough to get his office involved in cases affecting the little guy.Right after coming into office, Giuliani announced a Federal ''sweep'' to rid Manhattan's Lower East Side streets of small-time drug dealers. Most Federal prosecutors believe their limited resources for drug enforcement should be concentrated on international cases. They leave the $40 ''busts'' to local authorities. Not Giuliani. He said his office could do both.Though his street efforts have had mixed results - drug dealing on the Lower East Side has gone way down, police say, but a good deal of it has relocated to Brooklyn and Queens - local officials lavishly praise Giuliani for trying. In a city where people are fed up with street crime, where the Mayor's shifting view on subway vigilantism has been chronicled daily, Giuliani struck a responsive chord. Mayor Edward I. Koch has dubbed himself, Giuliani and the city's director of investigation, Patrick W. McGinley, ''the three musketeers.''GIULIANI'S IMPACT CAN ALSO BE TRACED TO strong connections in the Reagan Administration, where he was Associate Attorney General under Attorney General William French Smith from 1981 to 1983. In many ways, he is a prosecutor for these times, the prototype of what the Reagan Administration feels a United States Attorney should be. In the Reagan Justice Department, Giuliani played a key role in remaking the crime-fighting priorities for the President. Under President Carter, the Justice Department had allocated extra resources to white-collar and business-fraud cases. Giuliani helped lead a Reagan initiative to shift many of those resources to narcotics enforcement, an area he felt Carter had badly neglected.For service to the Reagan Administration, Giuliani has been rewarded in his New York position with extra resources and titles. Prior to 1984, the United States Attorneys' offices in Manhattan and Brooklyn jointly directed the region's organized-crime and drug-enforcement task force. Shortly after Giuliani arrived, the Justice Department switched control to him alone.Giuliani also happens to be in the right place at the right time. The organized-crime indictments surfacing now are the result of a massive law-enforcement campaign that has taken 20 years, according to G. Robert Blakey, a Notre Dame law professor. Blakey, a consultant to the Senate Judiciary Committee in the mid-1960's, drew up the modern-day antiracketeering laws.''It's like stuffing in a pipe,'' Blakey says. ''You put it in at one end, and for a long time you don't see anything. And then finally it shows. Rudolph Giuiliani is the guy lucky enough to be standing at the end of the pipe.''Rudolph Giuiliani is the guy lucky enough to be standing at the end of the pipe.''And Giuliani is skilled at letting people know about his efforts. He has devoted more office staff and far more of his own time to the news media than his predecessors. ''The great thing about Giuliani,'' says Dick Brennan, a WMCA radio producer, ''he talks in 20- to 30-second bites. He's tailor made for the evening news.''And Giuliani is skilled at letting people know about his efforts. He has devoted more office staff and far more of his own time to the news media than his predecessors. ''The great thing about Giuliani,'' says Dick Brennan, a WMCA radio producer, ''he talks in 20- to 30-second bites. He's tailor made for the evening news.''While many of his precedessors have been basically private men, Giuliani clearly enjoys the press coverage. Manhattan Inc. magazine recently profiled Giuliani and included a photograph of him and his wife posing playfully on their bed aHis high profile has drawbacks, though. He has not placed himself above the political fray; he is more likely to discuss his political views than most prosecutors, and, as a result, has been an easier target for criticism than most of his predecessors. Former high-positioned Carter Justice Department appointees such as Philip B. Heymann, who was Assistant Attorney General, say that Giuliani's role in Washington for the Reagan Administration reflected a decreased interest in pursuing business fraud. Fellow prosecutors contend that because of his Washington connections, Giuliani's office gets cases that it should not. Civil libertarians such as Richard D. Emery, staff counsel for the New York Civil Liberties Union, predict that Giuliani's tactics in Mafia cases will come back to haunt society. Gerald Stern, administrator of the State of New York Commission on Judicial Conduct, called Giuliani's handling of the press conference announcing Mafia indictments a disgrace.His high profile makes Giuliani an attractive candidate for governor or senator, say state party leaders. However, defense attorneys accuse him of trying cases in the press in order to launch that political career''Damn them,'' says Giuliani, who, in one of several interview sessions, sat at his desk for six hours, offering lengthy rebuttals to each of his detractors' criticisms.He dismisses his critics as either competing attorneys who can't keep up or liberals who would find fault with any aggressive prosecutor, particularly a Reagan appointee. He says he knew that as soon as he started prosecuting ambitious Mafia cases involving extensive wiretaps and the subpoenaing of defense attorneys, some liberals would complain that civil liberties were being jeopardized.''If I don't tip in favor of law enforcement, who will?'' he asks. ''The civil libertarians won't. The defense lawyers won't. The liberal editorial writers won't.''If he seeks publicity, it is not for himself, he says, but so that the public will see that those who do wrong get punished. ''My view is: The way you end corruption, you scare the daylights out of people.''By 9:45 on a recent morning, Giuliani has already been at his desk three hours. With a compulsiveness and thoroughness that characterizes most things he does, he is reviewing cases, memos and first drafts of press releases. His desk is clean. ''If I'm not going to think about something, I'll move it on to somebody else, let them think about it,'' he says.He has turned off the classical music - a Handel concerto - he plays before his staff arrives. The first of several minor crises he must resolve each day is upon him. An F.B.I. agent has a tip that an overseas telephone call between the Sicilian and American Mafias will come within eight hours. He wants a tap, but approval from the Justice Department usually takes days to process. Giuliani, a master at cutting red tape, makes calls to Washington for an emergency go-ahead. The O.K. comes through in time.All morning there are closed-door meetings with top aides. Giuliani also does three press interviews. ''You can't delegate talking to someone who only wants to talk to the U.S. Attorney,'' he explains, taking a call from a Toronto reporter asking if Mafia violence could break out because of the indictments. (Giuliani doesn't think so.) At noon, he turns on his office television, confiscated in a long-forgotten case, and watches a few minutes of his wife, Donna K. Hanover, a news anchorwoman for WPIX. A mutual friend suggested he call her for a date; at the time, he was based in Washington and she in Miami. But Giuliani visited Miami often to supervise a Federal drug task force. He had his secretary make the call and arrange a meeting - a television interview on the drug crackdown. Six weeks later, he proposed at Disney World.Parts of his days are spent on the Mafia case he will prosecute personally. Giuliani always looks for the edge. Right after a trial judge was assigned to the case earlier this year, he hustled out the courtroom, up two flights of stairs and into the newly designated judge's office to explain what he felt proper bail should be. ''I always like to go first.'' As he was leaving, the defense attorneys arrived. They had made the mistake of waiting for an elevator.By late afternoon, court is closed and things are usually quieter. At about 5 P.M., he is usually seen eating his apple a day.Twice a week, in the early evening, he meets with one of his legal units around a large table in his eighth-floor law library. A dozen or so attorneys update him on their cases. They are bright young men and women, mostly in their late 20's and early 30's, graduates of top law schools who someday will earn much more in private practice than the starting salary of $38,500 here. Each vied with 20 others for the job. They come because they get exciting trial experience at a young age and because the office is both a public service and a prestigious stepping stone. They are driven people, and Giuliani drives them harder.''There's always a certain amount of inertia,'' he explains, ''So at these meetings, I'll put a little pressure to move things along.'' As a young attorney in the same office, Giuliani would bring his thick loose-leaf trial notebook home and keep it beside his bed at night in case he woke up with a good idea. Giuliani presses his young assistants to get more indictments, and he praises them when they do. He is the first United States Attorney in years to brag about indictment totals. In 1984, his first full year, indictments were 1,038, up from 843 in 1983. For a decade, law-enforcement officials discouraged such counting, saying it fostered small, unimportant cases.Giuliani disagrees. ''Before I came, young assistants were spending too much time on long, fancy cases and not getting enough trial experience. They didn't know how to find their way to the goal line quickly. I energized this office.''Asked about morale, he responds: ''I think maybe for the first six months I may have pushed too much, but I've tried to ease up. If you get too worried about morale, you run the office to please everyone else.''I run the office based on what is best for the public first. That's a little different from some of my predecessors. My father used to say, 'The first thing that's important - you respect me. The rest you'll understand.' ''About 12 hours after Giuliani's day begins, a detective takes him home, varying the route as a security precaution.THE BEST PROSECUTORS, THEY SAY, MIX STRONG INTELLECT with good street smarts. Giuliani has plenty of both. When he was 2 years old, his father, Harold, the owner of a bar and grill in Brooklyn, started teaching his only child to box.Giuliani's friends say he idolized his father, a man of strong opinions, rough language and a curious mind. ''A major theme with Rudy's father was his hate for organized crime,'' says the Rev. Alan J. Placa, a Long Island priest and a lawyer as well as a lifelong friend. ''Harold Giuliani felt people were prejudiced against him because he was Italian. But he didn't get angriest at the prejudiced people - he hated Italians in organized crime for giving all Italians a bad name.'' Father Placa remembers the father and son looking over a list of Federal judges about 20 years ago, and the father commenting on the scarcity of Italian names, saying it was up to his son's generation to do better.In Rudolph Giuliani's home, there were at least three newspapers a day and much political talk. As a teen-ager, he loved the opera as well as the Yankees (he has an old seat from the stadium in his office). His high-school friends are still among the people he socializes with most. At least one night a week, Father Placa, a former high-school and college classmate, will stay over at Giuliani's Upper East Side apartment, and the two often will talk poetry, theology and politics deep into the night.Giuliani attended Catholic schools and, for a while, considered entering the priesthood. At Manhattan College, he served as president of several groups, including his fraternity. Peter J. Powers, now with the Manhattan law firm of Pranzo, Powers and Mullen, remembers a run for sophomore class president: ''I said, 'Rudy, how'll we win? No one knows us.' And Rudy said, 'We'll make them know us.' '' Giuliani won. He made law review at N.Y.U. and in 1970 went to work as an assistant United States Attorney in the office he now runs.''We started together,'' says John H. Gross, an attorney and close friend.''Rudy's come a long way. He was overweight, had a mustache and was living in Queens.''''That first year I tried 16 or 19 cases,'' Giuliani recalls. ''I remember waking up on my birthday, 10 months after getting there, and I couldn't remember the last Saturday morning I had off.'' Those hours, he says, contributed to the breakup of his first marriage.By 30, Giuliani was the office's third-ranking prosecutor. ''They kept giving him better cases to try, and if they didn't give them to him, he took them,'' Gross says. He recalls Giuliani engaging in battles for cases with another young star, Richard Ben-Veniste, who went on to become a special prosecutor during the Watergate scandal. ''You had two guys with immense egos.''Giuliani's role in two cases stood out. He was a key prosecutor in the police corruption case that would later form the basis for ''Prince of the City,'' the Robert Daley book later made into a film by Sidney Lumet. He also successfully prosecuted Representative Bertram L. Podell, Democrat of Brooklyn, in a dramatic bribery trial. Under Giuliani's intense cross-examination, Podell faltered, became so nervous he poked out his eyeglass lens, asked for a recess and gave up, pleading guilty.In 1975, Giuliani accepted his first of three Republican political appointments. He hadn't started as a Republican. As a registered Democrat, he had worked for Robert F. Kennedy's senatorial campaign in the 1960's and voted for George McGovern in 1972. But in 1975, after a job offer in the Ford Justice Department, he voted Republican for the first time. ''I came to think that McGovern and the Democrats had a dangerous view,'' he says, refering to global politics. ''By the time I moved to Washington, the Republicans had come to make more sense to me.'Giuliani is a Reagan supporter, although he differs on some issues. One dramatic example came last year, when Giuliani openly opposed the legal tactics the Administration was using to cut people from the Social Security disability rolls. Giuliani's view was upheld last month by a Federal magistrate.He is not active in state Republican politics, but admits to political aspirations down the road. How he would fare is hard to gauge. He has been unusually popular in New York among politicians and the news media. He was far less popular with Miami's elected officials and press in 1981, when he was chief spokesman for Reagan Administration policy denying Haitian refugees parole and keeping many of them in a Miami detention camp for more than a year.While a prosecutor wears a white hat, a politico is fair game. Traits that make Giuliani a star prosecutor - such as his combativeness - may make him a less appealing candidate.''Right now, he's got a great image,'' observes George L. Clark, Republican chairman for New York. ''I don't know him, but I've seen the Mafia stuff on TV. It's very impressive.'' GIULIANI HAS LONG been a man in search of opportunity. After he and Donna Hanover became engaged, they talked about where to live. ''We figured it would have to be in the Washington-New York power axis,'' she says. ''That way we could both get to the top of our careers.''Money has never been his driving force, says Gross, a friend. ''Rudy just wants to be where the action is.'' As United States Attorney, Giuliani earns $72,300, a fraction of what he might make in private practice.Giuliani's upward climb has been aided by a series of influential mentors, who rewarded him because he put in long hours, showed strong loyalty and made them look good. Federal District Judge Lloyd F. MacMahon was the first. Giuliani was his clerk. ''Judge MacMahon calls us all his sons,'' says Patrick D. Daugherty, another former clerk, ''but Rudy is his favorite son.''In 1975, Judge MacMahon urged his good friend, Harold Tyler, to take on Giuliani as an assistant when President Ford appointed Tyler Deputy Attorney General. Tyler remembers the first time he saw Giuliani: ''I was giving a talk at the U.S. Attorney's office. All the guys and girls were there, and I see this very eager-looking guy in the front row eating up every word I was saying. And I said, that's got to be Rudy Giuliani.''Tyler, with the Republicans out of power, brought Giuliani back to New York in 1977, making him a partner at the corporate firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler. Giuliani was only 32. More recently, Giuliani has benefited by a personal friendship with Attorney General Smith, formed while Giuliani was the No. 3 man in the Justice Department. ''Rudy always realized you need to make the No. 1 person look good,'' says Powers. ''He understood that his glory would come in time.''Giuliani's time came when he was named United States Attorney. Very quickly, his service to the Reagan Justice Department had paid off. Giuliani has clout that his predecessor, John S. Martin Jr., a Democratic holdover during the Reagan Administration, never had. ''I was not perceived as a force,'' Martin says. Indeed, Martin was excluded from the advisory committee of United States Attorneys that meets with the Attorney General. Giuliani is a member.As Associate Attorney General in 1981, Giuliani ordered a cut in Martin's prosecuting staff. ''Statistically, you couldn't make the case'' for the Manhattan office, Giuliani says; the big Federal cases were being brought elsewhere.Yet Giuliani was able to make the case for a staff increase after taking office in New York. ''From my experience in Washington, I knew how to get more manpower,'' says Giuliani. Shortly after he took over, he invited a Justice inspection team to his office. ''I knew what they were looking for. I used to lead those teams.'' He was later given eight extra slots.Clout in Washington is probably more important for a Federal prosecutor in New York than anywhere else. Just three miles away from the Southern District office is the Eastern District in Brooklyn, headed by United States Attorney Raymond J. Dearie. The two often compete for cases. Theoretically, the Eastern District is responsible for Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and Long Island; the Southern District covers Manhattan, the Bronx and several upstate counties. In practice, crimes overlap and such Federal agencies as the F.B.I. and I.R.S. can bring many cases to either office for prosecution. Eastern District prosecutors claim Giuliani's superior contacts get him cases that by rights should be theirs. ''Rudy has the ability to engineer decisions in the Justice Department,'' says Edward A. McDonald, chief of the Eastern District's Organized Crime Strike Force.Any battles that occur, Giuliani maintains, are not his doing. ''I have never gone to Washington to complain about them,'' he says. ''They complain about me constantly.'Probably the most important of the battles won by Giuliani's office was over the Colombo case. Last October, 11 Colombo family leaders were charged with extorting money from construction and restaurant businesses. Giuliani calls the indictment one of his 10 best.When the F.B.I.'s Colombo investigation began in 1981, the two Federal offices had agreed to prosecute it together. But when it was time for indictments, one office had to have control.''I feel very strongly that case belonged in my office,'' says McDonald. ''Virtually every act was in the Eastern District, almost all the defendants lived in the Eastern District and we did at least half the work.''Giuliani counters, saying where the crimes occurred was less important than who did the work and ''we did almost everything.'' According to prosecutors in both offices, the Eastern District was recommended for initial jurisdiction by middle-level Justice Department officials. Then Giuliani made a personal visit to top Justice officials in Washington and won the case for his office.Dearie, the Eastern District prosecutor, says because Giuliani has won such political battles, investigators tend to take big cases to Giuliani. ''I can't fault the agencies for seeing in Rudy a power base and a source of influence they don't see in me,'' he says.NEARLY 20 YEARS ago, Blakey of NotrDame wrote the laws that Giuliani relied upon to bring his biggest case, ''the commission of La Cosa Nostra.'' Most of these suspected leaders were identified in Senate hearings more than 15 years ago.''One of the things this has taught me is how incredibly slow change is,'' says BlakeyIn the mid-1960's, Presidential and Congressional committees were formed to examine why Attorney General Robert Kennedy's drive against organized crime hadn't lived up to expectations. Two new, tougher Federal laws resulted: A 1968 electronic surveillance act permitted the first Federal wiretaps in criminal cases in decades; and a 1970 antiracketeering law assisted prosecutors in going after the leaders and the wealth of a crime enterprise, rather than settling for low-level individuals. Despite these new laws, the F.B.I. took nearly a decade to build the big cases that are just now surfacing in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Cleveland and Denver. Not until F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover's death in 1972 did the agency begin switching its priorities from bank robberies and auto thefts to more sophisticated crime.Starting in 1981, the F.B.I. in New York City devised a strategy to attack top Mafia leaders family by family. Just as this wave crested, Giuliani became Federal prosecutor in 1983. Thanks to the work of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, in the last two years, important ''family'' cases, involving most New York Mafia leaders, have been taken on by either Giuliani's office or the Brooklyn Federal prosecutor. Even if it had stopped right there with these family cases - if Giuliani had never brought the Mafia commision case - much of the reputed Mafia leadership would be in court for years.Yet, legal experts agree Giuliani's fashioning of the Mafia commission case has importance beyond the individual leaders indicted. It sent a symbolic message to the public: Law enforcement is sophisticated enough to go after the top people all at once - the board of directors. ''If we can prove the existence of the Mafia commission in court beyond a reasonable doubt,'' Giuliani says, ''we can end this debate about whether the Mafia exists. We can prove that the Mafia is as touchable and convictable as anyone. And without their mystery, they will lose power.''Giuliani's vision began taking shape, he says, after reading Joseph Bonanno Sr.'s 1983 autobiography, ''A Man of Honor,'' which described the workings of the commission in an earlier era. It crystalized when Ronald Goldstock, head of the Organized Crime Task Force for the state, met with Giuliani in August 1983 and described tapes made from a bugging device planted in the Jaguar of a reputed mob leader who discussed the ''commission'' at length.Giuliani and assistants then culled hundreds of hours of already existent F.B.I. surveillance transcripts for more Mafia commission references. They reviewed old Senate hearings, and Giuliani made a chart of everything available.In September, a month after talking to Goldstock, Giuliani flew to Washington for a secret meeting with Attorney General Smith and F.B.I. Director William H. Webster, both friends. He showed them the chart and explained he needed backing to cut into other Federal jurisdictions. He wanted to ''borrow'' agents in 14 cities to pull together any data on a Mafia commissionBoth Smith and Webster approved. Giuliani next sat down with the agents, explaining the gaps that needed to be filled to bring a commission indictment. New investigations were started. Sixteen months later, he felt they had enough evidence to indict Anthony Salerno, Paul Castellano, Antonio Corallo, Gennaro Langella and Phillip Rastelli. THERE IS AN ADDED dimension to all this, a personal drama. Rudolph Giuliani is an Italian-American in hot pursuit of the Mafia. Prosecutors occasionally get threats - dismissing them as the work of cranks -but few talk about them publicly. Giuliani does. ''I believe it helps discourage the mob. It tells them that we can't be intimidated. I can't talk to the mob directly, but I assume they read newspapers and watch television. It gives me the opportunity to say to them: We know that you're making threats, and it won't deter us.'' One news account was accompanied by Giuliani's photo and a two-word caption: ''Not Jittery.''He talks tough, and police like it. ''I think he and I share an identical philosophy on organized crime, that it's beatable,'' says Thomas L. Sheer, F.B.I. director in New York City.Giuliani's combative approach was clear in late March, during a hearing at the New York City bar association. A committee composed mainly of defense attorneys and civil libertarians was questioning whether new Federal anticrime laws could lead to abuses by overzealous prosecutors - particularly in organized-crime cases.Several prosectors testified, but plainly Giuliani made the committee angriest. He called them ''provincial'' and told them they were acting like a ''trade association.'' The other prosecutors who spoke took a low-key tone, agreeing that serious constitutional questions were raised and promising to show restraint.Why had the bar committee been more hostile to him than other prosecutors? ''I'm a more aggressive prosecutor,'' Giuliani replies. He also mentions that one of the prosecutors had a brother who represented a Mafia client and that many committee members had Mafia clients, too.''I don't socialize with mob lawyers,'' Giuliani says. ''When I was in private practice, I wouldn't represent mob people. I didn't mind representing businessmen who might be charged with something. That's someone who has a large legitimate aspect to their lives, and if they get in trouble, whether innocent or guilty, there's still some good to them.''Organized crime figures are illegitimate people who would go on being illegitimate people if I got them off. I would not want to spend a lot of time with them, shake hands with them, have sidebar conferences with them and become involved with people who are close to totally evil.'' DIFFERENT PROSECUTORS are troubled by different crimes. In 1980, in his final report as United States Attorney for the Southern District, Robert B. Fiske Jr. emphasized ''rampant white-collar crime.'' Under his leadership, the business-fraud unit was ''the'' place to work for the brightest prosecutorsUnder Giuliani, ''the'' place is organized crime and narcotics. At its high point, 14 of 106 attorneys under Fiske worked in the fraud unit. Giuliani said in an April interview that 7 of his 130 attorneys worked the fraud unit, while the equivalent of 10 full-time attorneys prosecuted small-time drug dealers. He said important business-fraud work is being done in other office units, including the major crime section. Others say that has always been so. Giuliani pointed to the record $200 million settlement in the Marc Rich tax-fraud case, and the breaking of the $130 million Sentinel tax-shelter scheme to show his office is doing as much white-collar crime as ever. Other current and former attorneys in the office have pointed out that those cases started under Giuliani's predecessor and are not a true indication of Giuliani's main crime-fighting prioritesIn April, Giuliani said the size of his fraud unit was adequate. Last month, he telephoned to say he had shifted three extra attorneys to the unit.It all serves to show how hard it is to assess a United States Attorney's priorities and impact, especially only halfway through his term. At any one time, hundreds of cases are being developed on everything from insider trading to civil rights; none is public until the indictment stage.The Mafia commission case is one of the few instances in which the United States Attorney himself will have an enormous impact from conception to investigation to trial. In a larger percentage of cases, one of 130 assistants will play that dominant role. In the majority of cases, investigative agencies such as the I.R.S. and F.B.I. will bring in open-and-shut cases. Giuliani, like most Federal prosecutors, has a conviction rate of better than 90 percent.Shifts in law-enforcement priorities are more obvious nationally than locally. As Associate Attorney General, Giuliani helped engineer changes for President Reagan. This was an Administration elected in part by a conservative, pro-business constituency outwardly more worried about narcotics abuse than business fraud. While the recession was at its worst, Smith and Giuliani's personally convinced President Reagan to allocate $130 million more for drug enforcement. In five years, the F.B.I. has gone from no narcotics agents to about 1,000. Until then, the Drug Enforcement Agency handled Federal cases alone.''The Carter Administration was a disaster on narcotics,'' Giuliani claims. ''Carter wasn't even speaking out against drug use by certain Administration people. He didn't even take a moral position. The international drug problem should be right at the very top of our foreign-policy priorities. It has as much to do with our future as East-West alignment.''Carter officials deny they were soft on narcotics. How good a job the Reagan Administration is doing, even with its expanded resources, is debatable. Recently, Senator Alfonse D'Amato, conservative Republican of New York, criticized the Administration's antidrug war, calling it ''totally inept.''
To bolster narcotics enforcement, Reagan officials cut by 15 percent the number of F.B.I. agents assigned to such white-collar crime as business fraud and public corruption. Also, Susan Phillips, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which polices commodity market fraud, recently announced a 15 percent reduction in enforcement staff because of budget cuts and suggested more self-regulation by business.

Dearie and other Federal prosecutors say many of the most experienced F.B.I. agents have been shifted from white-collar to narcotics work. Giuliani played a major role in that shifIn his Justice Department position, Giuliani also aborted what Carter Administration officials felt was one of their best business-fraud cases, the indictment of several McDonnell Douglas Corporation executives for overseas bribes. For the first time in such a case, individuals - rather than the corporate entity - were charged. The decision to go after the executives had been unanimously endorsed by an indictment review committee of nine Justice Department attorneys. In November 1979, four aircraft executives were indicted. Just as the case was ready for trial in 1981, the Reagan team took over, and Giuliani decided against prosecuting the executives, despite protests from five of the attorneys involved.

''It reflected their prejudice against business,'' Giuliani says. ''A professional prosecutor wouldn't have brought that case.'' Giuliani accepted a guilty plea, and a fine of $55,000 from McDonnell Douglas. In addition, the corporation paid $1.2 million in a related civil action. The Reagan Justice Department followed the same tack recently, permitting the E.F. Hutton Corporation to plead guilty to 2,000 mail and fraud counts, deciding not to bring charges against executives.

WHEN GIULIANI CAME to New York, he felt better use should be made of the press. He assigned two people to spend considerable time on press matters. Martin, his predecessor, had one person, Jo Ann Harris, assistant United States Attorney, and she estimates the press took no more than 5 percent of her time.

Giuliani says he is open with reporters about his office's successes and failures. When an assistant prosecutor was charged recently with stealing $500,000 worth of drugs from an office safe, a somber Giuliani made the announcement himself.
Veteran attorneys in the office say if former United States Attorney Fiske had a free moment, he spent it with an assistant; if Giuliani has a free moment, he spends it with a reporter.''He must be running for something,,'' says WMCA's Brennan. ''He goes for every lick of publicity.''
The criticism of Giuliani grew louder after his February press conference announcing the Mafia indictments. Stern, of the state's Commission on Judicial Conduct, went so far as to characterize Giuliani's behavior as ''unethical,'' ''prejudicial'' and ''unbelievable.'' Giuliani's increased use of press conferences, he says, is creating an unhealthy atmosphere in the New York legal community. ''Prosecutors are competitive with each other, and Giuliani is causing an escalation of press conferences. Everyone's grabbing for attention.''Giuliani replies: ''I have never talked about a single thing that I shouldn't have, legally or ethically. People assume I must be doing this because I want to run for office. It's very hard to convince them that I do it because I feel a Government office should be open, and I have an obligation to maximize public education and public knowledge.''His wife later called this reporter to volunteer: ''He gets a bad rap for talking in length with the press, but he's like that with everybody. He'll stay up talking for hours with friends; he's interested in everything. That's what I like about him. I like smart men. I've always found that very sexy.''The day he announced the Mafia indictments, Giuliani seemed to be everywhere at once. He had lived with the case so long, working the last 27 days straight. Friends worried that he looked pale. He was so nervous that he might miss some crucial detail, he had trouble sleeping.Finally, he was having a ball. A MacNeil-Lehrer reporter was trying to get him to an uptown studio. Giuliani apologized, but he just couldn't do it. He had a live interview scheduled with ABC Network News in his office that evening, and he was going on its ''Nightline'' later, at 11:30 P.M. The next morning, at 6:15, he had a tape session for ''Good Morning America,'' and at 7 there was the CBS Morning News. ''I could do it tomorrow night,'' Giuliani suggested.
By the time his press conference began at 11:40 A.M., more than 100 reporters, photographers, cameramen and technicians filled the room. Every seat on stage was taken by an important law-enforcement person, including the F.B.I.'s Webster, New York City Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward, Brooklyn District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman and New York Attorney General Robert Abrams. Giuliani praised them all for helping, and they praised him.
''This is a great day for law enforcement, but a bad day, probably the worst ever, for the Mafia,'' he announced. He had helpful charts made for reporters showing how the Mafia ruling council worked.
Afterward, reporters crowded around the stage, looking for quotes. A reporter from a Spanish-language station asked Giuliani if he spoke Spanish. ''Very little,'' Giuliani answered, ''but if you write something out for me, I could read it.'' Some photographers preferred having Giuliani pose in front of the flag, others in front of his La Cosa Nostra chart. One by one, the other big names left. Soon, most reporters were gone, too. A few minutes before 1 P.M., when a worker peeled the Federal seal off the front of the podium to store it away, Giuliani was the only one left to answer the last few reporters' final questions.
Could this be the end of the mob? Legal experts say nobody knows. How effective this latest national drive will be, they say, depends on whether indictments become convictions - whether convictions are upheld on appeal - and whether new forfeiture provisions can be used to drain racketeers' wealth so it is unavailable to a new generation.
And even if the ''traditional'' Mafia can be put out of business, they say, there will always be organized crime. Law-enforcement officals have only recently identified Asian, South American and Sicilian crime groups that had been operating undetected here for years.
''So, who is Giuliani?'' says Blakey of Notre Dame. ''A bright and articulate young prosecutor who has ambitions. If he does his work well, we should be glad. In terms of craftsmanship, is he doing his work well? The answer is, the jury is still out.'' Stay tuned.
Michael Winerip is a reporter on the metropolitan staff of The Times