February 7, 1992

PREYING ON THE DESPERATE Fueled by a lingering recession that has made credit tight and people desperate, consumer-protection agencies throughout the New York metropolitan area say they have been inundated with complaints about schemes that target individuals stretched to the financial limit. A1. NEW YORK CITY HOMELESS DISPUTE AT AIRPORT HOTEL As New York City struggles toward a better way of sheltering the homeless, a failed tourist hotel hard by the runways of Kennedy International Airport is at the center of a dispute that symbolizes at once the failures of past policy and how difficult it is to overcome them. A1. DIVISION, NOT CONSENSUS The commission that Mayor Dinkins appointed to help relieve pressure on his administration and build political consensus for dealing with the daunting problem of the homeless has instead wound up putting highly public pressure on the Mayor and dividing his own advisers. News analysis, B2. T.A. MONITORING CRITICIZED The Transit Authority routinely failed to administer drug and alcohol tests to employees after they were involved in subway collisions, derailments or other questionable incidents in the 20 months before last August's fatal subway crash, according to a new report. B3. GOTTI AND JUDGE BOTH ANGRY Angry at a newspaper headline, Judge I. Leo Glasser threatened to move the trial of John Gotti out of New York City. Mr. Gotti responded by calling the judge and prosecutor names. B3. SUBWAY ARTIST TRIUMPHANT It took a long letter from her lawyer, an appeal to the First Amendment, countless conversations among countless lawyers and a three-page agreement with 10 detailed conditions, but Jenny Marketou came out on top. She finally got her seven large photographs of Greek-Americans reinstalled on the walls of a subway station in Jamaica, Queens. B3. THAT MYSTERIOUS $50,000 New York City election officials said that they would consider $50,000 wired to Mayor Dinkins's re-election campaign to be an illegal contribution unless the campaign identifies its source and prove that the money was meant specifically to pay back funds taken by the campaign's former treasurer. B4. REGION POINT, COUNTERPOINT A captain in the Teaneck Police Department contradicted a significant detail in an officer's testimony about the fatal shooting of a black teen-ager as two white officers chased him on April 10, 1990. B5. SHUFFLING THE CARDS IN HARTFORD Governor Weicker succeeded last year in overhauling Connecticut's revenue system and imposing an income tax by forging a coalition of liberal Democrats and Republicans. This year, in seeking to overhaul the spending system, Mr. Weicker has shuffled the political cards: new issue, new allies, new coalition. B5. POLICE COMMISSIONER RESIGNS Three days after a bitter confrontation with county legislators, the Suffolk County Police Commissioner submitted his resignation in a letter that advised the County Executive, "Don't lose your sense of humor." B5. Neediest Cases B4 Our Towns B5

Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady today all but abandoned the Bush Administration's sweeping recommendations to overhaul the nation's banking system by throwing his support behind the more modest approach taken by several measures now before Congress. At a news conference on Capitol Hill, Mr. Brady urged lawmakers to adopt any of the competing proposals that would ease restrictions on interstate banking. He thus acknowledged that there was little chance for passage of the Administration's broader package, which was reintroduced this week. That measure would also permit commercial banks to affiliate more easily with investment banks and be owned by industrial enterprises, like General Motors and I.B.M.

Salomon Inc. yesterday reported a $29 million loss for the fourth quarter, capping a tumultuous year that began with solid profits and ended with a shift toward more conservative management following a Treasury auction scandal. While competing Wall Street firms harnessed 1991's active stock market to achieve record-breaking profits, Salomon was bogged down by the lingering effects of the scandal and by losses in its Phibro Energy oil trading and refining subsidiary.

President Bush moved today to plug a gap in his election-year domestic plans by proposing several tax incentives and other changes in the law that he said would make quality medical care affordable for every American. In making his plans public, Mr. Bush joined the Democratic Presidential candidates in proposing ways to improve the nation's health-care system, a debate from which he had been conspicuously absent.

As New York City struggles toward a better way of sheltering the homeless, a failed tourist hotel hard by the runways of Kennedy International Airport is at the center of a dispute that symbolizes at once the failures of past policy and how difficult it is to overcome them. Sometime in the coming weeks, with the arrival of 150 homeless families, the Kennedy Inn will become the largest for-profit welfare hotel in a city that not long ago had pledged it would stop using welfare hotels. That prospect has ignited a furious uproar among advocates for the homeless, as well as elected officials and residents of neighborhoods near the Queens airports, where an isolated hotel world of the homeless has grown quietly in the last few years.

Elizabeth Holtzman, the brainy and driven New York City Comptroller, has a single ambition these days: to politically destroy the man who unraveled her dream of becoming a United States Senator nearly 12 years ago. "Alfonse D'Amato has to be defeated, no ifs, ands or buts," she declared briskly at a December breakfast in Buffalo, where she was trying to woo influential women. "I can beat Alfonse D'Amato. I can take the issue of choice right to his doorstep. I can take the issue of corruption right to his doorstep."

Ira Victor, Lou Corominas and Judy Rothschild are seasoned educators in the central Bronx, but talent alone, they say, would not have been enough to win them the acting principal and acting assistant principal jobs they now hold. They also had to work in the election campaigns of members of their school board, calling voters and chauffeuring election workers. "I knew I could not get an appointment based upon competence as an educator," said Mr. Victor, the acting principal of Public School 47 in School District 12. "The process appeared to be closed to me."

Indiana Crash Kills 16 At least 16 people were killed in Evansville, Ind., when an Air National Guard transport plane lost power and crashed into a motel. Page A12. New Headache for Clinton A news account suggested that Gov. Bill Clinton had manipulated the draft process to avoid Vietnam-era service. He denied it. Page A16. Holtzman's Quest Elizabeth Holtzman has a single driving ambition: to unseat Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato of New York. And her tone is bitter. Page B1.

IN the salad days of the 1980's, the new purveyors of chic on Columbus Avenue cut a swath through the Upper West Side like Sherman in Georgia, and the street's inelegant stepsister, Amsterdam Avenue, was supposed to be next in line for spiffing up. Leaner times have made for slower progress. Amsterdam may never be Madison Avenue -- there is, as yet, no confectioner selling Belgian chocolates for $35 a pound -- but every block from 72d to 86th Street has a fashionable emporium or two squished in among the dowdy and comforting old hardware stores and coffee shops. There is plenty of stuff to drool over, perchance to buy, on a wander up the avenue. And if the businesses that thrive are a Baedeker to our times and tastes, then the defining elements of the decade will be skinless chicken and shooting pool. Starting at 72d Street, Brant Chemists (No. 267-A) still has a window full of breast pumps, trusses and tub security rails, but there is headier stuff two doors down at Star Magic Space Age Gifts (No. 275), like freeze-dried astronaut ice cream. For $7.95 at Amsterdam Restaurant (No. 283 1/2), you get two pork chops with soup, vegetable, potato and salad, which sounds like a lot more fun than soy cheese pizza ("99 percent cholesterol free") at Freddy and Pepe's (No. 303). There is no mention of soy anything at Vinnie's Pizza (No. 285), described in the current Zagat guide to New York restaurants as "the best pizza in the city" with "seriously good sauce."

After losing her job as a computer operator -- with no savings, no credit and few prospects -- a 25-year-old Morris County woman found a classified ad in a national magazine offering fast, guaranteed personal loans of as much as $25,000. Early last year she sent the Florida-based company $500, borrowed from her mother, as a fee to secure a $5,000 loan. She has not had any response.

The Chrysler Corporation's fourth-quarter financial report displayed a ray of hope yesterday, but analysts cautioned that the No. 3 auto maker faced several more obstacles, including a fickle auto market, before it was out of the woods. The company overcame huge losses last year and posted a small fourth-quarter profit, thanks to a one-time gain from the sale of its 50 percent interest in a joint car-making venture with the Mitsubishi Motors Corporation of Japan.

President Bush and Democrats both want Japan and other countries to open their markets to American goods, but in the international trade debate, the United States does not come to the table with clean hands. In comparison with Japan and America's other major trading partners, the United States is less protectionist -- but many barriers to imports remain. Quotas double the price of sugar in morning coffee and limit imports per American to no more than seven peanuts, a pound of dairy cheese and a lick of ice cream each year. Fresh cream and milk are banned; frozen cream may be purchased only from New Zealand. And the Customs Service recently turned back a shipment of buttered croissants from France because it violated a quota on French butter shipments.