July 21, 1993

New York City police detectives have flown to Reno to question two men they believe were responsible for the killings last April of an Indian prince and his wife in their Park Avenue apartment, the police said yesterday. The men, identified as George Cobo, 56, and Tony Lee Simpson, 21, are being held by the authorities in Reno on outstanding warrants in unrelated cases. The police said the men may be returned to New York this week to face charges in the deaths of Prince Chitresh Rao Khedker, a 57-year-old financier and industrialist from Khed Anjanvel, India, and his wife, Nenescha.

Ever since the Crown Heights disturbances two years ago, Mayor David N. Dinkins has been fending off critics by challenging their most extreme charges. Repeatedly he said that he did not order the police to allow angry black youths to rampage through the Brooklyn neighborhood; that he was not anti-Semitic, and that he was not responsible for the death of Yankel Rosenbaum, the Hasidic scholar killed on the first night of violence.

A chain of leadership failures by Mayor David N. Dinkins, top City Hall advisers and the city's leading police commanders allowed the disturbances in Crown Heights to escalate unabated into a four-day "riot" in which Hasidic Jews were singled out by bands of black youths, according to a state report released yesterday. In a scathing portrait of ineptitude and miscommunication that extended from police deployment on the Crown Heights streets to the upper reaches of City Hall, the report also found that serious lapses by investigators, prosecutors and the presiding judge had contributed to the acquittal of a black youth in the killing of a Hasidic scholar on the first night of violence. Analysis of Decisions The report, commissioned by Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and overseen by Richard H. Girgenti, the state's Director of Criminal Justice, determined that there was no evidence to support the most extreme charges that have dogged the Mayor since the Crown Heights violence in August 1991: that he or his Police Commissioner at the time, Lee P. Brown, had instructed the police to let marauding youths "vent" their rage after a 7-year-old black child was killed by an out-of-control car driven by a Hasidic man.

The Philip Morris Companies announced yesterday that Marlboro cigarettes have sold well enough at lower prices during its current promotion to justify making the cuts permanent, and said it would extend lower prices to the company's other premium brands. At the same time, the company said it would equalize the wholesale prices of all other Philip Morris cigarettes -- discount brands, deep-discount brands and private labels -- thus moving the front lines of cigarette price wars directly to the retailer.

Miguel Santos manages to call his wife in the Dominican Republic each day, even though he has neither a phone at home nor a credit card to use at a sidewalk pay phone. Instead, he ducks into a private cubicle at a phone parlor, a storefront business that offers discounted long-distance rates in an age of cash-and-carry communications.