April 26, 2005

An hour north of Duluth, Minn., and a half-mile down, the dim tunnels of the Soudan mine open up to a bright, comfortably warm cavern roughly the size of a gymnasium, 45 feet high, 50 feet wide, 270 feet long. Well hidden from the lakes, pine forests and small towns of northern Minnesota, the mine churned out almost pure iron ore until it closed in 1962. Today, it is a state park, and it houses a $55 million particle physics experiment that is part of a worldwide effort to unravel the secrets of the neutrino, one of the least known and most common elementary particles.

American International Group, insurance giant under scrutiny for using transactions to improve its financial condition, uncovers at least $1 billion more in accounting problems; internal review is progressing as law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison completes separate investigative report on who at company is responsible for certain questionable transactions and accounting of those transactions; report reportedly concludes that senior management was able to easily skirt financial systems and controls that were in place (M)

US Atty Patrick J Fitzgerald of Chicago announces arrests of 14 men, some of them thought to be top mob leaders, in connection with 18 murders that stretch back over four decades and had gone unsolved; several of accused are in their mid-70's now; Fitzgerald claims arrests put 'hit on the mob'; rarely have so many of mob's reputed high-level leaders been charged all at once; among most notorious murders authorities say they have solved with arrests are 1986 deaths of Tony Spilotro, organization's chief enforcer in Las Vegas, and his brother Michael, who were buried in Indiana cornfield; authorities say indictment was years in the making, result of FBI's co-called 'Operation Family Secrets'; agents from FBI and Internal Revenue Service begin arresting accused in Illinois and in Florida and Arizona, where several of the accused live in retirement; photos (M)

IT was with some skepticism that Jason Kidd greeted a major Nets acquisition that was made without his passive-aggressive consent or stealthy manipulations. It was with understandable doubt that Kidd received Rod Thorn's decision to mail the point guard's overpaid pals to Toronto to obtain the services of a fragile luminary who put in cameo efforts.

US authorities are noting surge in schemes involving sophisticated counterfeiting of US postal money orders, and fleecing of victims often begins in e-mail in-box; FBI and postal inspectors say international forgers--mostly in Nigeria, but also in Ghana and Eastern Europe--appear to have turned new attention to US postal money order in last six months; postal inspectors say more than 3,700 counterfeit money oders were intercepted from October to December, exceeding total for previous 12 months; US Postal Inspection Service spokesman Paul Krenn says 160 arrests have been made in US since October in cases where people have suspected of knowingly receiving fraudulent postal money oders or trying to cash them; trend is significant, because unlike private business checks or even other money orders, postal money order is generally regarded as one of more difficult financial documents to counterfeit because of its watermarks, security threads and rainbow of inked patterns and tone; Kevin McCrary, Manhattan business consultant who is victim of money order fraud, comments; photos (M)