April 9, 1996

On the surface, the argument seems unassailable: A giant dual-purpose sports stadium on Manhattan's West Side as a future home for the Yankees would make more money for the city and for local businesses than a single-function baseball park. It would create more jobs and generate more tax revenue without significantly higher costs. Squeezing every possible use from the space, according to a consultant's report, offers the best hope of paying off the stadium's $1 billion-plus price tag. But what looks like a cash cow might conceal, underneath, a clunky dinosaur, stadium experts said in assessing the report commissioned by New York City and the Yankees. The trend in major league baseball around the country is 180 degrees away from the switch-hitting megastadium with its artificial grass and multiple uses that is enthroned in the report as the city's most lucrative choice.

As part of the continuing battle to win control of television viewers in Germany, Europe's largest market, Viacom Inc. and the Kirsch Group of Germany announced yesterday a wide-ranging 10-year agreement that several executives close to Viacom said was worth $1.7 billion. The deal would give Kirsch the German television rights -- both free and pay -- to Paramount Pictures' film and television library and future production. Paramount is a unit of Viacom. Kirsch also agreed to carry Viacom's cable services like Nickelodeon and MTV on its new digital pay-TV service in Germany.

Geese are not known to be chicken when encountering humans, especially during nesting season, which is now. A Prudential employee recently fell in the company parking lot under an attack from a Canada goose. A few days later, another outraged goose refused to get off a car in the Belle Mead office complex until someone set off a wailing car alarm, Police Chief George Adelmann of Roseland said yesterday. Tomorrow, Department of Agriculture agents will relocate some of the goose nests near the Prudential parking lots, where the company has closed some sections to protect the nesting foul.

A LITTLE-discussed change is taking place in the auto world that may come as a dagger stab to those who feel the city has already endured its share of slings and arrows. With the 1996 model year soon coming to an end, Chrysler will retire the longest-running American model name: the New Yorker. Nothing personal, New York. "Don't tell New Yorkers that we dropped them -- it's not true," said Molly Schwartz, a Chrysler spokeswoman.

Thomas S. Wagner, who worked as an accountant for the former Somerset County Prosecutor, Nicholas L. Bissell, pleaded guilty in Federal court yesterday to a felony charge of helping Mr. Bissell and his wife, Barbara, to falsify business and personal tax returns. Mr. Wagner also agreed to cooperate in the prosecution against the Bissells, who are scheduled to go on trial next week on charges of evading taxes on $143,000 skimmed from cash receipts at gasoline stations they owned. Mr. Bissell is also charged with abusing his office by intimidating a vendor with a threat of planting cocaine in his car, and demanding rebates from a distributor through overstated gasoline sales. After being indicted last September, Mr. Bissell was removed as county prosecutor.