April 6, 1983

Competing scuba teams from the Police and Fire Departments have been showing up at some underwater rescue missions in a year-and-ahalf dispute over jurisdiction. The dispute had quieted after an agreement between the two forces in March 1982, but it was revived last weekend when a man posing as a police inspector issued bogus orders by telephone after a 13-year-old Bronx boy was thought to have drowned in the East River. ''This instance raises problems because someone misrepresenting himself as a police inspector could have created a very dangerous situation,'' Alice T. McGillion, deputy police commissioner for public information, said yesterday. Questions over jurisdiction date back to November 1981, shortly after the Fire Department created its own 40-diver team to fight pier fires. There have been few major pier fires, and instead the divers have sometimes been going to ordinary rescues.

France expelled 47 Soviet diplomats, journalists and others today, accusing them of espionage. The Interior Ministry said their activities had centered on high technology and the armed forces. The ministry, describing the group as ''agents of the secret services of the Soviet Union,'' said in a statement that the gravity and extent of their activities justified immediate expulsion. The size of group was unusual, and the action was comparable only to Britain's deportation of 105 Soviet citizens in 1971. Soviet-French relations, which have worsened as a result of condemnations by President Francois Mitterrand of Soviet nuclear weapons policy and the intervention in Afghanistan, were expected to enter an even colder phase.

Edward P. Wolfram Jr., formerly the managing partner of Bell & Beckwith, was indicted yesterday by a Federal grand jury in Toledo, Ohio, on charges that he had engaged in a scheme to defraud in violation of the Federal securities laws. Bell & Beckwith, an 85-year-old Toledo stockbrokerage firm, was closed by Federal investigators on Feb. 7 after they found a $36 million shortage of collateral in six margin accounts overseen by Mr. Wolfram and owned by his wife, Zula. Mr. Wolfram was accused in the indictment of siphoning money from the brokerage house to purchase or operate a casino and hotel in Las Vegas, Nev., a horse farm in Florida, an oil company in Louisiana and cattle ranches in Arkansas. The biggest item was $14.3 million for the Landmark Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

A major Connecticut toxic-waste treatment company has agreed to begin removing a contaminated sludge pile from its plant in downtown Waterbury, officials announced yesterday. Federal and state officials said the company, Environmental Waste Removal Inc., would bear the cost, estimated at between $500,000 and $1 million. In return, the Federal Environmental Protection Agency will drop a lawsuit it filed against the company last summer, according to Paul Keough, deputy regional administrator of the agency's Boston office.

President Reagan was described today as staying with his proposal for 10 percent growth in the military budget as he met with key Senate Republicans and heard warnings that his spending goal would never make it out of their budget committee. ''Clearly the President was dug in and so were most of the others, but that doesn't necessarily mean you aren't going to get an agreement,'' the Senate majority leader, Howard H. Baker Jr., said after a long White House meeting that was described as a candid exchange between the President and Republicans concerned about his budget program. ''I told him it would be very difficult to get it out of committee,'' the chairman of the Budget Committee, Pete V. Domenici said of the President's goal of a 10 percent increase after making up for inflation. ''And I think he ended up seeing that, on the basis of the various senators speaking for themselves, and they all did.''