April 4, 1996

Lobbyists in New Jersey are spending more, but not for the wining and dining of legislators, the state's Election Law Enforcement Commission said yesterday. Last year, lobbyists reported spending $76,083 on government officials and their staffs, or one-half of 1 percent of their total spending. In 1993 and 1994, they spent 1 percent, the commission said. Frederick M. Herrmann, the commission's executive director, could not explain the decline. But other spending by lobbyists did increase last year. One of the largest single expenditures by lobbying firms was lobbyists' salaries, which increased from $9 million in 1994 to $10 million last year.

Defying the conventional wisdom that drug dealing is an ineradicable plague, the New York City Police Department next week will put up to 3,000 officers and weapons ranging from new computer software to hydraulic battering rams into its biggest assault ever on neighborhood pushers. While skeptical criminologists cite a history of failed antidrug strategies in New York and elsewhere, top Police Department officials insist that the new approach will yield concrete results, and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has declared that the goal is to "come as close as we can come to crushing drug trafficking and the drug business" in the affected neighborhoods.

Lazard Freres & Company, the New York investment bank, and its sister firms in Paris and London said yesterday that they would create a new system for sharing profits among their partners and managing directors aimed at promoting greater cooperation among the three firms. Using a pooling system, the managing directors and partners of each of the three firms will now have an interest in the profits of the other Lazard houses. Partners and managing directors will receive about a third of their compensation from this pool based on the performance of all three Lazard firms: Lazard Freres & Company of New York, Lazard Freres & Cie of Paris and Lazard Brothers & Company of London.

Federal agents today raided a remote Montana cabin where they seized a onetime university professor suspected of being the Unabomber, the elusive terrorist who has left a 17-year nationwide trail of mail bombs that have killed 3 people and maimed 23 others. Law-enforcement officials said tonight that the agents had found explosive chemicals and other bomb-making material at the wilderness cabin belonging to the suspect, Theodore J. Kaczynski. They said they planned to charge Mr. Kaczynski on Thursday with the series of deadly attacks, which had long baffled the authorities.

THAT flamboyant display of euphoria the other day, when politicians finally broke ground for a renovated roadway on the western edge of Manhattan, is understandable. New York is a place that is letting one of its most valuable sites (Columbus Circle) go to ruin, that cannot keep its schools or subway stations from crumbling, and that gets hauled into court on almost every move it makes. So there is reason to celebrate when something actually stands a chance of being accomplished in New York. However, anyone tempted to join the cheers for what is variously called Route 9A, Westway Too and the Hudson River Boulevard might want to look a little closer at what it is and is not: