April 18, 1990

LEAD: BY the early 1980's, as restaurant mania began to build, chefs became celebrities. And like star baseball players, if a kitchen home-run king left one restaurant team, there was always a more lucrative contract waiting.

LEAD: AMERICANS will have to wait to sample $100 Kobe steaks, which come from hand-massaged, soybean-fed, beer-quenched cattle raised in Japan. The United States Department of Agriculture has rejected a New York restaurant's request to import Kobe beef, saying that Japanese slaughterhouses fail to meet the

LEAD: Closing one of the most difficult criminal cases the Government has brought in its pursuit of corruption on Wall Street, a Federal judge in Manhattan yesterday sentenced a former stock speculator to four months in prison and fined him $1 million for a single incident of insider trading.

LEAD: The Justice Department announced today that based on a review of bank records seized in Panama after the American invasion, as well as in other foreign countries, it had obtained a court order freezing hundreds of bank accounts in the United States suspected of having been used to hide nearly $400 million in

LEAD: AS many as 10 million dolphins have died in the nets of tuna fishermen in the last 30 years. But it seems that only in the last six months has the magnitude of the slaughter sunk into the national psyche and prompted support for a boycott of tuna. The all-American food, popular in sandwiches and casseroles, was becoming associated with needless killing.