February 10, 1988

LEAD: On Robin Hood Lane today, residents anxiously traded news about an 800,000-gallon gasoline leak oozing underground toward their homes.

LEAD: Like guests arriving late for a dinner party, most taxpayers will find the pickings meager when they look over the list of personal deductions that remain in the wake of the Tax Reform Act of 1986.

LEAD: Some regional Bell telephone companies had access to the American Telephone and Telegraph Company's secret bid price for Government telephone switch contracts and may have shared the information and used it to calculate competing bids, an official of one regional phone company said yesterday.

LEAD: In what experts were calling the largest single art theft ever reported in New York City, 18 paintings and 10 drawings valued at $6 million, mostly small works by old Dutch and Italian masters, were stolen overnight from a commercial gallery on the Upper East Side, the police reported yesterday.

LEAD: Companies