November 29, 1994

USA Waste Services agreed to buy the Chambers Development Company today for about $675 million in stock, in another sign of the growing consolidation of the trash-disposal industry. With this purchase, USA Waste, based in Dallas, will have merged and acquired its way in four years to $450 million in annual sales from $3.7 million.

A Melkite Catholic priest who has been hailed as a hero for his work with runaway teen-agers in the East Village in Manhattan was convicted today of conspiring to hide some of the $7.4 million stolen by masked gunmen from a Brink's armored-car depot here almost two years ago. Another defendant was also convicted of conspiracy. But prosecutors failed to make their cases against two other men, including a Brink's guard who they said took part in the robbery and was at the center of the conspiracy. The jury in Federal District Court here acquitted him on all four charges he faced.

For illegal immigrants, getting into the United States can be as simple as climbing the gangplank of a cruise ship in the Bahamas and strolling off again in South Florida a few hours later -- without ever showing any proof of citizenship or exchanging even a word with an immigration service inspector. The Immigration and Naturalization Service's own investigators found more than a year ago that foreign criminal gangs have used day cruises to the Bahamas as a virtual underground railroad for smuggling aliens and drugs into the United States.

Three weeks ago, several Suffolk County detectives trudged up a mountain in the Catskills looking for a tree with three bullets lodged in its trunk. "We hiked five miles up the mountain," said Detective Lieut. John W. Gierasch, the commander of the Suffolk homicide squad. "The locals thought we were crazy hunting for a tree, but we found it."

Capital Cities/ABC Inc. agreed yesterday to form a television production company with the powerful Hollywood team of Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. The venture will be the television industry's first in which a broadcast network intends to share advertising income and other revenue with an outside producer.