September 24, 1993

Robert A. Solimine Jr. became the target of a murder plot after he quit drinking alcohol and began pestering a group of youths to do the same, said one of the three teen-agers who have pleaded guilty in the case. All three youths have testified this week in the trial of James P. Wanger, who is charged with garroting Mr. Solimine with an electrical cord on Feb. 16, 1992. But the witness today was the first to offer a specific reason why five Clifton, N.J., youths plotted to kill Mr. Solimine.

If any legislative district could stand for all New Jersey, the capital region's 15th is it. Here, the Trenton poor and the Princeton Ivy Leaguers vote Democratic, the prosperous business suburbanites favor Republicans, and Gerald R. Stockman and Richard J. LaRossa are struggling in a Senate race for the same shifting middle that will probably decide the race for governor as well. For Democrats like Mr. Stockman and Gov. Jim Florio, the 15th was once considered so safe a seat that Mr. Stockman, then a 10-year incumbent State Senator, was chosen to sponsor Mr. Florio's $2.8 billion tax increase in 1990. The next year, Mr. La Rossa harnessed anger over the taxes to his fame as the man who called the state lottery results on television and won a humbling upset over Mr. Stockman. It was a defeat that the state Democrats ardently want to reverse. 'Not Something I Brag About' "This was the most Democratic district in the state until I lost," Mr. Stockman, a 57-year-old trial lawyer, said recently as he doggedly worked the sidewalks and front porches of Trenton's West Ward. "It's not something I brag about." Indeed, Mr. La Rossa is the first Republican to represent the city of Trenton in the Senate since 1946, the year, he likes to point out, when he was born.

As President Clinton's top national security advisers traveled to Capitol Hill to test Congressional support for sending American troops to enforce a cease-fire in Bosnia, a leading Senate Democrat said today that the Administration would have to prove that it had an exit strategy before deploying troops. Reflecting deep anxiety among lawmakers over American involvement in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Senator Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said, "My big question will be not how do we go about it, what our goals are, but how do we get out if the parties begin fighting again?"

The Travelers Corporation accepted the Primerica Corporation's $4 billion merger offer yesterday, which will create one of the nation's largest and most diverse financial services companies. The merger would give the Primerica financial empire not only a profitable insurance company but also some valuable intangibles, starting with a new name: Travelers.

"NEW YORK," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in "The Crack-Up," "had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world." Though it would eventually disappoint him, though it would later become linked in his memory with "Bacchic diversions" and "frayed nerves," the "tall white city" whispered to him on first meeting -- not unlike Daisy Buchanan in "The Great Gatsby" -- "of fantastic success and eternal youth." In 1920, the city was still wrapped in its cloak of "mystery and promise," and it promised him everything he had ever wanted: success and glory and the realization that all his dreams, however evanescent, were within a fingertip's reach. Since then, in each generation, similar dreams have drawn writers to New York City, among them Willie Morris and Dan Wakefield, the authors of two recent memoirs about the city. Like Fitzgerald, both Mr. Morris and Mr. Wakefield migrated to Manhattan from the provinces: Mr. Morris from Mississippi via Texas, Mr. Wakefield from Indianapolis. Like Fitzgerald, both men joined the literary racket: Mr. Morris as the editor in chief of Harper's Magazine; Mr. Wakefield as a freelance journalist. And like Fitzgerald, both of them discovered in Manhattan an impossibly exciting world of art and society and adventure.