August 11, 1995

Seven companies in Florida and North Carolina that marketed what the authorities said was a false and possibly harmful cure for impotence have paid a total of $1 million into a fund to reimburse consumers who fell for their advertisement, Faith S. Hochberg, the United States Attorney for New Jersey, said yesterday. In their settlement with the Government last January, the companies did not admit wrongdoing but agreed to never again try to market products claiming to treat sexual dysfunction. Customers were able to obtain the pills by writing to 23 addresses, 2 of them in Fair Lawn.

While animal rights advocates and other supporters sat in the courtroom wearing badges reading "Let Biggie Live," a dog who attacked a 68-year-old Weehawken woman was sentenced to death yesterday. Judge Kimberly Glatt of Municipal Court said she had no choice. As a result of an April 26 attack by Big Head, who is part pit bull, Dorothy Petrozelli's left arm was disfigured and rendered partly useless. David Gruber, the lawyer for the dog's owner, Evelyn Smith of Hoboken, said that he planned to appeal.

Another year, another birthday, and still no honor for Bloodgood H. Cutter, the Laureate of Little Neck, the one-man answer to the question, Where is the poetry in Queens? Cutter was born on Aug. 6, 1817, making him an almost exact contemporary of Walt Whitman's. But while Whitman was giving voice to the streets of Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, Cutter, a gentleman farmer, found his material in Little Neck, Flushing, Bayside and Whitestone.

It may be the latest trend in the care of human bodies, but if New Jersey's Insurance Commissioner, Drew Karpinski, gets his way, managed care will also be extended to the repair of auto bodies. Under new regulations, auto insurers would be allowed to set up networks of repair shops. Motorists who had their cars fixed by a shop that was part of their insurance company's network could save $48 to $72 a year on their premiums, Mr. Karpinski said yesterday. But the regulations, which are supposed to go into effect on Jan. 1, may run aground before then. The Assembly has already passed a resolution opposing them.

IF espionage were one-tenth as romantic an activity as it has traditionally been portrayed in the movies, lines of people eager for the chance to be spies would form around every government office in the Western world. That glamorous image runs through many of the films in the series "Spies, Moles and Double Agents," an entertaining survey of cinematic espionage presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center at the Walter Reade Theater. The series, which begins tonight and runs through Sept. 7, covers 72 years (from 1914 to 1986) but concentrates on the 1930's and 40's, when spying was often depicted as a high-stakes party game played by elegant aristocrats. In the 1943 film "Above Suspicion," for instance, the affluent newlyweds and amateur spies Joan Crawford and Fred MacMurray traipse around Europe picking up clues to the whereabouts of a missing British agent as though they were on a treasure hunt. The movie, which will be shown on Aug. 27 and 28, depicts spying as the perfect honeymoon spice.