February 22, 1985

Wall Street's ''poison pills'' appear to be deadly medicine - even though no company has actually had to swallow one yet. The poison pill is an increasingly popular defense against takeovers. Though it can take different forms, the basic strategy involves a company giving its stockholders the right to buy shares at a special price, or get other benefits, when a hostile bidder tries to take over the company - making such a takeover prohibitively expensive, or ''poisonous,'' for the would-be acquirer. The defense, and the phrase, emerged in the course of Lenox Inc.'s 1983 battle to fend off a takeover by the Brown-Forman Distillers Corporation - although Lenox ultimately decided to dissolve its pill and accept a bid from Brown-Forman. Still, most takeover experts see the poison pill as a perfectly effective preventative: No company that has adopted the pill has ever had to use it.

The Bank of Boston conceded today that it might have been unwittingly used by the city's organized crime family to launder as much as $2 million in cash. But William L. Brown, chairman of the bank, insisted that there was ''no evidence whatsoever'' that any employee of the bank had ''benefited in any way'' from its dealings with the underworld group. Mr. Brown asserted that his bank's involvement with the group, the Angiulo family, was only a result of ''poor judgment'' by bank employees, whom he refused to name. Seven leaders of the Angiulo group - including the man described by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as its head, Gennaro J. Angiulo - are scheduled to stand trial in Federal District Court here next month on racketeering charges. These charges arise from accusations of murder, obstruction of justice, gambling and loan sharking.

Six New York City transit police officers were indicted yesterday on new charges stemming from the death of Michael Stewart, a 25-year-old Brooklyn man who died after what prosecutors described as a police beating. Three of the officers were charged with criminally negligent homicide and assault. They had been indicted last year on manslaughter charges, but that indictment was dismissed last October when a judge found misconduct on the part of one of the members of the first grand jury. All six officers - among 11 who had contact with Mr. Stewart the night he was arrested and charged with scrawling graffiti on a subway station wall - were charged with perjury. They all pleaded not guilty yesterday in what has become one of the most widely publicized cases involving charges of police brutality in the city's history.

The Securities and Exchange Commission decided today that mutual funds would no longer need prior authorization from the agency to alter the fees that brokers get for selling the funds' shares. The move effectively frees the S.E.C. and the funds from a substantial burden of paperwork. But the S.E.C. stopped short of allowing the brokers themselves to cut their commissions in a bid for more business.

In nominating Beryl W. Sprinkel today to be chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, President Reagan chose a man who has emerged within the Administration as a loyalist first, and only second an economist. After seven months of uncertainty over the future of the council, the appointment suggests that, from now on, internal disputes over the President's economic policies will be kept behind closed doors. ''He's a company man,'' said Murray L. Weidenbaum, the President's first council chairman. Mr. Sprinkel, who is 61 years old, has occupied the third-highest position in the Treasury, Under Secretary for Monetary Affairs, for the last four years. A Minority of One Mr. Sprinkel is an often jolly, slightly rotund, bespectacled man and one of the country's leading proponents in the monetarist school of conservative economics, which puts him in a minority of one among the Administration's senior economists.