February 12, 1999

David Gonzalez tells tales out of school. He tells them in school, too, and on radio and in museums and theaters and arts centers and anywhere else he can find a stage and young audience for his one-man musical storytelling epics. But ''storyteller'' is surely too static a description for the hyperkinetic Mr. Gonzalez, whose new show, ''Mytholojazz,'' featuring a be-bop and modern jazz interpretation of the Orpheus myth, opens tonight for 11 public performances at the New Victory Theater on West 42d Street near Broadway.

REMEMBER ''it's Giuliani time''? That, we were told, is what police officers snarled while allegedly torturing Abner Louima in a Brooklyn precinct house 18 months ago. The incendiary phrase shot across the city like a rocket-propelled grenade. Only problem: Mr. Louima later acknowledged that it was never said.

Defying a Federal judge's order to end their protest and return to work, more pilots called in sick at American Airlines yesterday, forcing the carrier to cancel more than half of its flights and insuring that its operations would be crippled during the Presidents' Day holiday. The disruption at American, which entered its sixth day, continued to upset the plans of tens of thousands of travelers and businesses around the world. The airline, the nation's second largest, said that it had already canceled 500 flights scheduled for today, a number that it said would most likely rise, because planes are out of position. Passengers will have fewer alternatives because most airlines are expected to be full. [Page C4.]

Pilots for American Airlines Defy a Back-to-Work Order Pilots for American Airlines defied a Federal judge's order to end their sickout. Instead 2,400 pilots called in sick, forcing the carrier to cancel more than half its 2,250 flights.

For the first time, a jury has found that gun manufacturers are liable for shootings with illegally obtained handguns because their marketing practices fostered illegal gun trafficking. In a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, which legal experts called a test case for a wave of suits that have recently been filed against the gun industry, the jury found yesterday that 15 of 25 firearms makers named in the suit had been negligent. The suit was brought on behalf of victims in seven shootings. Of the 15 manufacturers found negligent, 9 were liable in at least one of three of the shootings -- two of them fatal -- in the New York City region in recent years.