Now comes Dennis Rodman, a retiring soul, a humble practitioner of the game of basketball, and one of the soberest, most level-headed, and thriftiest men to walk the planet since Benjamin Franklin (who was also known to attract lightning). Last Oct. 3, it seems that Rodman was having a bit of supper or perhaps a soothing beverage when a $100 bill — a Ben Franklin, if you will — slipped from his grasp, sailed through the breezy Sunset Strip hotel where the hardliest working man in Hoopdom was enjoying a few moments of peace, and, with the accuracy and homing skill of a Scud missile, descended directly into the brassiere of a waitress named Susan Patterson.

Now, Rodman is a wealthy man, but he’s not so wealthy that he discards $100 bills willy-nilly. So, as anyone would, he immediately endeavored to retrieve his errant currency. Unfortunately, and much to his surprise and embarrassment, no doubt, the brassiere, or cup thereof, in which the bill had lodged itself, happened to be occupied by one of Patterson’s breasts at the exact same moment that Rodman found his hand wandering about, somewhat desperately I should think, trying to retrieve his property.

Well, as you can imagine, once he grasped the fullness of the situation, he became flustered, and of course he couldn’t really see what he was doing because it’s quite dark inside a brassiere, and, anyway hands don’t have eyes. Then, not surprisingly, in his haste and disorientation, Rodman’s hand — lost in the dark as it were — mistook Patterson’s breast for the $100 bill and seized it. At which point it became abundantly clear to Rodman that what he’d initially identified as a small, valuable slip of paper was in fact a fully developed female breast. He was, I’m sure, mortified. It was an odd and awkward chain of events, to be sure, but entirely understandable when carefully explained.

Except to the hot-headed, unreasonable Patterson, who alleges that Rodman’s actions were intentional. Patterson, who seems inordinately judgmental and hasty in forming conclusions, claims that Rodman, who was employed by the Chicago Bulls at the time, actually stuffed the $100 bill down her blouse and availed himself of a freelance fondle or two while he was at it. Fortunately, Patterson has acquired the services of attorney Gloria Allred, known to be something of a peacemaker, and I’m sure the whole confusing business will get straightened out when, with Rodman’s counsel helping out, they all get together for that very reason in a Santa Monica courtroom on Sept. 22.

Finally, some good news: The old Las Vegas is comin’ back! In recent years the town that Bugsy Siegel put on the map, and Sinatra’s Rat Pack turned into a Mecca of custom-tailored sharkskin pre-hippie hip, has been in danger of becoming a fun ‘n’ fluffy family fun park. However, in the past few months, the City That Can’t Say No has rolled over to have its dark underbelly scratched and all sorts of interesting critters have come crawling out.

Fret not, we’ll get to the details, but first a little quiz. If Charles Dickens were alive now and he were writing a novel about Vegas, what would he name the chairman of the Gaming Control Board, the state agency that regulates Nevada’s casinos? How about William Bible? Jackpot! Winner Paid! In fact, Bible is the former chairman of the Gaming Control Board — and he’s been a regular in the Las Vegas Sun newspaper lately because of what look to be mob-related hi-jinks that the GCB investigated on his watch (Bible, God bless him, is not implicated in any wrongdoing). The case is fairly run of the mill, as mob cases go — execution-style murder, drugs, lotsa bucks, blah, blah, blah — but the names are downright toothsome.

The principals’ monikers are good enough — Teddy Binion and Herbie Blitzstein — but a shadowy figure named Ivy Ong comes in second, right behind Bible, in the name-game roulette. Binion, a co-owner of the Horseshoe Club, got his gaming license yanked for allegedly loaning one hundred grand to Blitzstein, a “mob figure” and “underworld loan shark,” according to Sun writer Jeff German. Ivy Ong was an “associate” of Blitzstein’s, to whom our man Herbie handed over the one hundred large “on the street.” Both Blitzstein and Binion are shooting dice at the great crap table in the sky these days — no, they didn’t die of old age — but their good names live on, as does Ong.

Meanwhile, the Las Vegas marketing and tourism folks must be getting ulcers as the air-conditioned neon nightmare they’ve worked so hard to transform into a vast midway of wholesome family theme resorts is once again being regularly associated with the mob — albeit tangentially, even comically — in current news stories. Indeed, after a bit of a hiatus, guys whose middle names begin with “the” are once again showing up in Vegas papers. As detailed last week, it looks likely that a lawyer who defended mob figures such as that man of many vises, Tony “the Ant” Spilotro, will be the city’s new mayor. If so, we can count on Tony the Ant’s innovative use of hand tools — something they don’t teach you in Sunset magazine — frequently finding its way into reports on the mayor’s past life as a barrister.

Nor could the Vegas PR flacks have been happy to see 68-year-old Phyllis McGuire, a member of the 1950s singing trio the McGuire Sisters, in the news recently for allegedly hitting and, uh, head-butting one of the city’s police officers. McGuire, now a piledriver, I mean pillar, of Las Vegas society, was friendly with Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana in the 1960s and 1970s. Their life together was depicted in the HBO movie “Sugartime,” and not accurately, according to McGuire, who threatened to sue, but never did. But the local police apparently stepped in it big time when they tangled with McGuire after pulling over her Cadillac in March. Charges against the hard-headed songbird were dismissed last month, with a $5,000 donation from McGuire to the Injured Police Officers Fund being part of the deal, the Sun reported.

I didn’t mean to leave you hanging on the shoe tree regarding the Chuck and Marla case, but I figured, hey, it’s over, what’s the rush? Yep, Chuck Jones, who, I needn’t remind you at this point (but I will anyway), admitted to doing the horizontal hula with Marla Maples‘ Manolo Blahniks, was pronounced guilty in New York State Supreme Court of burglary and illegal gun possession last Wednesday — big surprise. His shoe fetish admission notwithstanding, Jones was cleared, the Daily News reported, of stealing “piles of her shoes and underwear to satisfy an obsession with” the estranged wife of Donald Trump. Taking the high road as always, the New York Post memorialized the decision with a cartoon titled “Visiting Day for Chuck Jones” that depicts Jones sitting behind the window of a jail visiting room speaking on the telephone to, well, what could be a Manolo Blahnik stiletto heel perched next to a phone receiver on the other side of the glass.

Get it? The shoe came to visit him! Ah, fuggedaboutit.

And remember to mark your calendar for later this month when the Butterfield & Butterfield auction house in Los Angeles will auction off an array of famous crime mementos, including music and lyrics to two original songs composed by gangster Al Capone, the John Tesh of his day. One of Scarface’s tunes, titled “Madonna Mia,” goesa somethin likea this: “In a quaint I-tal-ian gar-den, while the stars were all a-glow/Once I heard a lov-er singing, to the one that he loved so.”

Al! Why didn’t you tell us? You had a gift, dude.

C’mon Al, I was just jivin’ ya. Al! Al! Put the bat down!

Now comes Dennis Rodman, a retiring soul, a humble practitioner of the game of basketball, and one of the soberest, most level-headed, and thriftiest men to walk the planet since Benjamin Franklin (who was also known to attract lightning). Last Oct. 3, it seems that Rodman was having a bit of supper or perhaps a soothing beverage when a $100 bill — a Ben Franklin, if you will — slipped from his grasp, sailed through the breezy Sunset Strip hotel where the hardliest working man in Hoopdom was enjoying a few moments of peace, and, with the accuracy and homing skill of a Scud missile, descended directly into the brassiere of a waitress named Susan Patterson.

Now, Rodman is a wealthy man, but he’s not so wealthy that he discards $100 bills willy-nilly. So, as anyone would, he immediately endeavored to retrieve his errant currency. Unfortunately, and much to his surprise and embarrassment, no doubt, the brassiere, or cup thereof, in which the bill had lodged itself, happened to be occupied by one of Patterson’s breasts at the exact same moment that Rodman found his hand wandering about, somewhat desperately I should think, trying to retrieve his property.

Well, as you can imagine, once he grasped the fullness of the situation, he became flustered, and of course he couldn’t really see what he was doing because it’s quite dark inside a brassiere, and, anyway hands don’t have eyes. Then, not surprisingly, in his haste and disorientation, Rodman’s hand — lost in the dark as it were — mistook Patterson’s breast for the $100 bill and seized it. At which point it became abundantly clear to Rodman that what he’d initially identified as a small, valuable slip of paper was in fact a fully developed female breast. He was, I’m sure, mortified. It was an odd and awkward chain of events, to be sure, but entirely understandable when carefully explained.

Except to the hot-headed, unreasonable Patterson, who alleges that Rodman’s actions were intentional. Patterson, who seems inordinately judgmental and hasty in forming conclusions, claims that Rodman, who was employed by the Chicago Bulls at the time, actually stuffed the $100 bill down her blouse and availed himself of a freelance fondle or two while he was at it. Fortunately, Patterson has acquired the services of attorney Gloria Allred, known to be something of a peacemaker, and I’m sure the whole confusing business will get straightened out when, with Rodman’s counsel helping out, they all get together for that very reason in a Santa Monica courtroom on Sept. 22.

Finally, some good news: The old Las Vegas is comin’ back! In recent years the town that Bugsy Siegel put on the map, and Sinatra’s Rat Pack turned into a Mecca of custom-tailored sharkskin pre-hippie hip, has been in danger of becoming a fun ‘n’ fluffy family fun park. However, in the past few months, the City That Can’t Say No has rolled over to have its dark underbelly scratched and all sorts of interesting critters have come crawling out.

Fret not, we’ll get to the details, but first a little quiz. If Charles Dickens were alive now and he were writing a novel about Vegas, what would he name the chairman of the Gaming Control Board, the state agency that regulates Nevada’s casinos? How about William Bible? Jackpot! Winner Paid! In fact, Bible is the former chairman of the Gaming Control Board — and he’s been a regular in the Las Vegas Sun newspaper lately because of what look to be mob-related hi-jinks that the GCB investigated on his watch (Bible, God bless him, is not implicated in any wrongdoing). The case is fairly run of the mill, as mob cases go — execution-style murder, drugs, lotsa bucks, blah, blah, blah — but the names are downright toothsome.

The principals’ monikers are good enough — Teddy Binion and Herbie Blitzstein — but a shadowy figure named Ivy Ong comes in second, right behind Bible, in the name-game roulette. Binion, a co-owner of the Horseshoe Club, got his gaming license yanked for allegedly loaning one hundred grand to Blitzstein, a “mob figure” and “underworld loan shark,” according to Sun writer Jeff German. Ivy Ong was an “associate” of Blitzstein’s, to whom our man Herbie handed over the one hundred large “on the street.” Both Blitzstein and Binion are shooting dice at the great crap table in the sky these days — no, they didn’t die of old age — but their good names live on, as does Ong.

Meanwhile, the Las Vegas marketing and tourism folks must be getting ulcers as the air-conditioned neon nightmare they’ve worked so hard to transform into a vast midway of wholesome family theme resorts is once again being regularly associated with the mob — albeit tangentially, even comically — in current news stories. Indeed, after a bit of a hiatus, guys whose middle names begin with “the” are once again showing up in Vegas papers. As detailed last week, it looks likely that a lawyer who defended mob figures such as that man of many vises, Tony “the Ant” Spilotro, will be the city’s new mayor. If so, we can count on Tony the Ant’s innovative use of hand tools — something they don’t teach you in Sunset magazine — frequently finding its way into reports on the mayor’s past life as a barrister.

Nor could the Vegas PR flacks have been happy to see 68-year-old Phyllis McGuire, a member of the 1950s singing trio the McGuire Sisters, in the news recently for allegedly hitting and, uh, head-butting one of the city’s police officers. McGuire, now a piledriver, I mean pillar, of Las Vegas society, was friendly with Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana in the 1960s and 1970s. Their life together was depicted in the HBO movie “Sugartime,” and not accurately, according to McGuire, who threatened to sue, but never did. But the local police apparently stepped in it big time when they tangled with McGuire after pulling over her Cadillac in March. Charges against the hard-headed songbird were dismissed last month, with a $5,000 donation from McGuire to the Injured Police Officers Fund being part of the deal, the Sun reported.

I didn’t mean to leave you hanging on the shoe tree regarding the Chuck and Marla case, but I figured, hey, it’s over, what’s the rush? Yep, Chuck Jones, who, I needn’t remind you at this point (but I will anyway), admitted to doing the horizontal hula with Marla Maples‘ Manolo Blahniks, was pronounced guilty in New York State Supreme Court of burglary and illegal gun possession last Wednesday — big surprise. His shoe fetish admission notwithstanding, Jones was cleared, the Daily News reported, of stealing “piles of her shoes and underwear to satisfy an obsession with” the estranged wife of Donald Trump. Taking the high road as always, the New York Post memorialized the decision with a cartoon titled “Visiting Day for Chuck Jones” that depicts Jones sitting behind the window of a jail visiting room speaking on the telephone to, well, what could be a Manolo Blahnik stiletto heel perched next to a phone receiver on the other side of the glass.

Get it? The shoe came to visit him! Ah, fuggedaboutit.

And remember to mark your calendar for later this month when the Butterfield & Butterfield auction house in Los Angeles will auction off an array of famous crime mementos, including music and lyrics to two original songs composed by gangster Al Capone, the John Tesh of his day. One of Scarface’s tunes, titled “Madonna Mia,” goesa somethin likea this: “In a quaint I-tal-ian gar-den, while the stars were all a-glow/Once I heard a lov-er singing, to the one that he loved so.”

Al! Why didn’t you tell us? You had a gift, dude.

C’mon Al, I was just jivin’ ya. Al! Al! Put the bat down!

Or how about the Central Intelligence Agency dosing unsuspecting United States’ citizens with LSD? True, it’s an old story, but it may well be a true story, and one of its longest chapters closed last week when a New York jury, in the court of U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood (You remember Kimba. Not Simba! Kimba!), ruled against the estate of artist Stanley Glickman. Until his death in 1992, Glickman insisted that a CIA agent, who for 40 years he consistently described as having a clubfoot, had slipped him a mind-bending mickey in a glass of Chartreuse liqueur at a bar in Paris in 1952, driving Glickman mad and destroying his life.

Glickman’s sad predicament, whatever brought it on, is a long and tangled story. The New York jury didn’t buy his claim that the CIA played a part, but the spooksters’ role in widely — and wildly — experimenting with LSD, even on unaware members of the public, has long been the focus of journalistic and government inquiries. In addition to newspaper and magazine articles, and sworn testimony given at the 1977 Senate hearings on CIA abuses, chaired by Sen. Ted Kennedy, at least two books feature extensive, and colorful, coverage of the Company’s psychoactive shenanigans — “Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion,” by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain (1985) and “Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream” by Jay Stevens (1987).

According to “Acid Dreams,” and a Feb. 14 article in The Observer, in the 1950s the U.S. government began operating a covert drug-testing program called MK-ULTRA (Where did they get those names? “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” wasn’t even on the air yet.) The Observer states that the “architect” of MK-ULTRA was a man named Sidney Gottlieb, who became head of the CIA’s chemical division, and two decades later would testify at the Kennedy hearings “about spiking the drinks of unsuspecting Americans” and also “admit that MK-ULTRA tested an array of techniques and substances on dozens of unsuspecting people, and there may well have been hundreds.” The U.S. government, the Observer reported, “has over the years issued various qualified denials [of such activities] in the course of seeking to have the [Sidney Glickman] case dismissed.”

After Gottlieb’s Senate testimony was made public, the Glickman family filed suit in 1983 — for a period, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark was Glickman’s lawyer — and the case finally went to trial earlier this year, though the artist himself died in 1992. Oddly, on April 27, as the trial was wrapping up, Judge Dominick DiCarlo dropped dead while exercising in the federal court gym. Judge Kimba Wood presided at the remainder of the trial. (Coincidentally — the Glickman case is full of bizarre intersections — Wood had thrown out the suit in 1977, but the Second Circuit Court of Appeals later reinstated it.)

In any event, it’s all over now and it’s just as well, perhaps, that Stanley Glickman wasn’t around to hear what the jury thought of his story. But two Richard Kimballesque details remain: For more than four decades, Glickman’s physical description of the man who dosed him never varied. And even the CIA doesn’t deny that Gottlieb, whose activities didn’t become public knowledge for over 20 years after Glickman drank the Chartreuse, had a clubfoot.

After that tale, it’s almost a relief to move on to Osaka, where today the yakuza are going about their business in refreshingly forthright, albeit felonious, fashion. Osaka is headquarters for organized crime in Japan and home base for the 20,000 member Yamaguchi-gumi, which, as mentioned in an earlier column, seems to be having some internal problems. Things can’t be easy on the PR front for a gang of tough guys saddled with a name that sounds like a distant relative of Gummi Bears or a Saturday morning cartoon character — Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa, Po, Yamaguchi-gumi — but now the public and the economy are ganging up on the beleaguered mobsters.

In the Osaka neighborhood of Konohana, the Associated Press reports, residents recently “turned out by the hundreds for anti-mob rallies, parades and concerts” and stickers with anti-mob slogans “went up in more than 10,000 windows.” To make matters worse, Japan’s decade-long economic slowdown is forcing the gang that can’t catch a break into a costly operations upgrade. Once content with murder, theft and vice, the Yamaguchi-gumi now must move toward non-traditional income sources such as stock market manipulation and Internet porn, areas where the gang’s usual competitive advantage may be more difficult to assert.

Meanwhile, back in the States, “elder crime” — that would be crimes committed by the elderly, not against them — seems to be on the upswing. A couple of weeks ago, 90-year-old Brose Gearhart was sentenced to up to four years for dealing crack out of his home. Then, last weekend, Forest Silver Tucker, 78, who once escaped from California’s San Quentin in a prison-made kayak emblazoned with the cheerful name “Rub-a-Dub-Dub, Marin Yacht Club,” was popped on suspicion of robbing a Florida bank. Tucker, said to have been a member of Boston’s famed “Over the Hill Gang,” led the sheriff on a merry chase before crashing his car into a palm tree. “This guy had no intention of stopping,” a sheriff’s spokesman said. “This was his retirement plan, I guess.” After the arrest, Lt. James Chinn remarked, “He looked like he just came off the golf course. You’d more expect to see him go to an early-bird special than robbing banks.”

Finally, strike another match, babe, let’s start anew. Participatory democracy in Las Vegas is alive and well and running like a well-oiled machine. Last Tuesday, Oscar Goodman, a lawyer who defended mob figures such as Meyer Lansky and Tony “the Ant” Spilotro, was the top vote-getter in the City of Lightbulbs mayoral election, but fell just short of the majority he needed to avoid a June runoff with councilman Arnie Adamsen.

“This city’s going to really hum, hopefully sooner than later,” Goodman crowed. “This is the American dream.” An AP report said that the 59-year-old Goodman, who played himself in Martin Scorsese‘s “Casino,” “for years was called the mouthpiece for the mob because of his vigorous defense of people like Lansky and Spilotro, the gangster who legend has it put a rival’s head in a vise and squeezed his eyeballs out.” (Rumors that Goodman used Barry Goldwater’s “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” line as a campaign slogan are entirely false.)

Appearing in court last Thursday, where she apologized to Mary Jo Buttafuoco, Fisher was told by Judge Ira Wexner, “You are still a young woman and could be a productive member of society if you channel your energies. Based on the information I have received, I believe you can do that.” And I couldn’t be more convinced myself.

Judge Wexner, it should be noted, was not among the judges singled out in a National Law Journal story dated May 3. That
report, a roundup titled “Judges behaving badly (again),” is an annual feature highlighting “stupid judge tricks” and published in recognition of Law Day (May 1). The article, by NLJ staff reporter Gail Diane Cox, acknowledges that none of this year’s distinguished jurists “rivaled Richard ‘Deacon’ Jones of Nebraska, whom the NLJ spotlighted last Law Day for signing court orders ‘Snow White’ and urinating on a colleague’s carpet.” Nonetheless, Cox was able to pull the rug back on several notable instances of aberrant behavior by guardians of justice.

Among other misdeeds, south Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Bernard J. Avellino once referred to a female assault victim as “coyote ugly.” The wily Avellino is no longer on the bench. In the case of a 22-year-old female charged with drunk driving, Michigan’s scandalous Judge James Scandirito suggested she meet him at a bar to get to the bottom of her predicament. Scandirito is now on leave, and he invites you to meet him for a drink. Meanwhile, in West Haverstraw Village, N.Y., Judge Ralph T. Romano listened to the charges against a man accused of assaulting his wife with a telephone and responded, “What’s wrong with that? You’ve got to keep them in line once in a while.” Before Romano was relieved of his duties, his attorney explained that “his real problem was a tendency toward ‘lightheartedness.’”

And then there’s the nicely monikered Benny Swindell, circuit chancery judge in Clarksville, Ark. Judge Swindell, who ran for election on a platform that included offering judges “more options” in dealing with youthful offenders, was not just making campaign promises. “On George Washington’s birthday, 1997″ the NLJ’s Cox writes, “the judge took a boy whom he had sentenced to a youth facility [for a negligent homicide conviction] with him to an out-of-state casino and staked him to a session with the slot machines.” It was “so innocent,” the judge told the Arkansas Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission. “It was contributing to the delinquency of a minor,” the commission countered. Judge Swindell is history.

Chuck Jones and Marla Maples, the estranged wife of Donald Trump, are, however, still a happening thing in Manhattan Supreme
Court. Jones, Maples’ former publicist, who’s defending himself, and who’s admitted to committing nookie with her Nikes, now claims he cheated on her shoes and did the deed with Maples herself.

Last week, Jones told the Daily News: “She and I had an affair. I’m going to ask her about it. I can’t protect her anymore. Unfortunately, some of the truth is going to hurt both of us.” Oh boy, when her Reeboks hear about this there’s going to be no consoling, or resoling, them! And let’s not even touch on the whole itchy issue of the intimate transmission of athlete’s foot. Indeed, Jones confided to the Daily News, “I don’t want to get into the details yet. But we weren’t baking cakes.” Whoa, didn’t even know there were cakes involved.

Now, let’s take a short breather and turn to crimes of lesser gravity. The May Harper’s Index reports the following:
“Number of the 25 species seriously affected by the 1989 Exxon Valdez Alaskan oil spill that have fully recovered: 2. Amount of the $5 billion that Exxon was ordered to pay in punitive damages in 1994 that it has paid: $0.
Estimated amount that Exxon has earned by investing this money in the meantime: $5,000,000,000.” Exxcellent!

And yet, there are rays of sunshine here and there. In Pennshauken, N.J., last Wednesday, an 83-year-old woman saw an intruder entering her garage. She quickly drew her remote control garage door controller, aimed it, and slammed the door shut. Neptune Steele, 27, was still trapped inside when the cops arrived.

By now, New York’s dilemma is familiar: Under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the city’s crime rate has plunged, with homicides down 70 percent and felonies down by half since 1994. At the same time, police brutality and harassment complaints have risen alarmingly. New York registered about 5,000 complaints about its officers’ conduct in 1998, up from about 3,600 in 1993. Racial tension is peaking as minorities feel especially targeted by the department’s aggressive tactics — a concern crystallized in such high-profile incidents as the Diallo shooting and the brutal beating of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima last year. To some, the lesson is that stamping out crime means stomping on civil liberties.

Less publicized, however — as good news always is — is a happier story to the north. In Boston, not only has crime dropped even faster than in New York, but complaints about police tactics have fallen as well — by an astonishing 50 percent. Like New York, Boston has adopted new crime-fighting strategies in the 1990s, but there has been no backlash against its police force — no street protests, no cries of racism, no expletives hurled at the mayor. As people try to figure out what New York did wrong, they should look first at what Boston has done right.

Where the New York police have acted like an occupying force in the city’s neighborhoods, Boston’s police have succeeded through partnerships. Where New York has relied on an aggressive strategy that cultivates fear and intimidation, Boston’s police have worked with local clergy and community leaders to identify and target actual criminals, rather than wantonly sweeping neighborhoods. Next to New York’s archetypal “NYPD Blue” approach, Boston’s strategy might sound wimpy. But don’t snicker. President Clinton has called on “communities around the country [to] follow the example of Boston.” And New York Sen. Charles Schumer recently proclaimed: “The Boston model will work in New York, and we should move quickly to implement it here.”

So what’s Boston’s secret? “Basically, [Boston] has done it with the community,” says Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, “and not to the community.”

New Yorkers may think of Boston as a quaint, provincial New England capital. But a decade ago, the city was an urban nightmare, with drugs, guns and gangs terrorizing residents.

Bostons low point came in 1989, with the nationally publicized murder of Carol Stuart, a pregnant white woman who, her new husband said, had been stabbed by a young black man. Stuart’s murder led to a citywide manhunt in which Boston police officers shook down dozens of black males who fit her husband’s vague description. The cops proudly apprehended their man — but then released him when Stuart’s husband was revealed to be the actual killer. Minority neighborhoods seethed.

The Stuart case touched off deep soul-searching within the city. But it took another horrifying event to bring a revolutionary change to the city’s police culture: At the May 1992 funeral of a 20-year-old Boston gang member, a dozen hooded kids from a rival gang rushed into Morning Star Baptist Church in Mattapan, firing on mourners and stabbing a teenager nine times. Days later, 300 local ministers met at the church to come up with a way to address the drug and gang epidemics in the city’s minority neighborhoods. (Contrary to its shamrock image, Boston has a minority population of more than 40 percent.)

In the late 1980s, according to one Boston police superintendent, “there was a lack of trust, there was no communication” between the police and the neighborhoods. Now the traditional rivals needed one other. The police wanted to shed their reputation for racism, and the clergy wanted to stop the killing. The result was a partnership between the police department and neighborhood leaders that allowed the cops to crack down on minority offenders without being resented in minority neighborhoods.

“That is the approach of neighborhood policing,” says Boston Police Commissioner Paul Evans. “It’s the idea that the police cannot solve the problems themselves. They have to work with the communities to solve problems.”

Evans might sound like a social worker, and if his approach hadn’t paid off, he might be one now. But neighborhood policing has won converts among cops in Boston because it works.

Ironically, New York and Boston both owe their 1990s police department overhauls to the same man, William Bratton. It was Bratton who changed the Boston police force’s mission by placing an emphasis on selective crime prevention over haphazard response. Bratton left Boston for New York, where he served as that city’s acclaimed police chief from 1994 to 1996, before ego clashes with Giuliani forced him out.

Since replacing Bratton in Boston, Evans has become hailed as an innovator in his own right. A modest, low-key product of South Boston, a tightly knit Irish neighborhood, Evans has been less of a publicity hound than Bratton. He has been willing to cede his power, for instance, decentralizing the police force by breaking up the department’s five jurisdiction zones into 10 smaller districts, and is quick to share credit for his department’s successes.

Like Boston, New York also practices neighborhood (or community) policing, which gets officers out of their patrol cars and onto the streets. But Boston police have given a higher priority to building relationships with neighborhood residents than to the “zero tolerance” crime prevention strategy that prevails in New York. Better known as “broken windows” policing, the strategy is to crack down on small offenses like jaywalking or public drinking, which are often used as an excuse to “stop and frisk” thousands of people in a hunt for guns. The result is that thousands of innocents are harassed: More than 27,000 New Yorkers, largely minorities, were frisked by the NYPD’s street crimes unit last year; only about 4,600 were arrested.

In Boston, the guiding principle has been integration, not intimidation. Ministers, street workers and community leaders have made an explicit compact with the police: They will identify lawbreakers in their neighborhoods and accept decisive police action against those criminals. In return, however, the police refrain from the kind of sweeping and indiscriminate stop-and-frisk tactics that bred such anger during the 1989 Stuart manhunt.

David Kennedy, a senior researcher at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who has been intimately involved with Boston’s policing efforts, describes the police philosophy this way: “In Boston the logic is, ‘We know where the action is and we’re going to carefully act in ways that can be very meaningful indeed to those people and places. But if you’re in that neighborhood and you’re not involved, we’re gonna walk right by you.’”

Commissioner Evans cites curfews as an example of this strategy. Although youth curfews are in vogue in troubled cities like Baltimore and New Orleans, Evans says they clash with his department’s philosophy. “Instead of those types of enforcement tactics that go across the board and target everyone, we do focused intervention,” Evans says. “We put area restrictions and time curfews on young people who earn them instead of every young person in the city.”

Evans has also focused on nontraditional crime-prevention tactics. He recalls a 1994 meeting with officers in his department’s gang unit at a moment of rising violence in Boston’s low-income Roxbury neighborhood. “I asked them what we could do,” Evans says. “And I expected them to say, ‘More cops, tougher judges and more jail space.’ But what they said to a person was, ‘We need jobs and alternatives for these people. We need to provide them with hope.’” The result has been a network of programs for youths and young adults, from business-sponsored summer jobs to “midnight basketball” to whitewater rafting trips.

Evans is particularly proud of his department’s new practice of using federal block-grant money — dollars traditionally used for salaries and overtime — to award its own grants to local community groups who submit specific plans for assisting in crime-prevention. (This year the department will give out $1 million to 20 local groups.)

Leroy Stoddard, director of community services for Urban Edge, a Roxbury community development corporation that has received grant money, says the work can be as simple as shooing unwanted loiterers off building stoops and moving illegally parked cars — tasks that are “below the threshold of police attention.” As someone who works on the city streets every day, Stoddard can attest to the larger success of Boston’s cooperative approach. “It’s important to educate people and ready them for police enforcement,” he says. “It’s better for residents to be aware that the police are coming rather than be surprised by a crackdown.”

What does this all amount to? Not just a plunging crime rate — homicides are down from 152 in 1990 to 34 last year, and all violent crimes and robberies are down more than 80 percent since 1990 — but also a steady drop in complaints about officer misconduct, by more than 50 percent since 1990.

Arguably, New York was asking for its recent troubles. Police Commissioner Howard Safir has been less enthusiastic about community policing than his predecessor, Bratton. Safir has cut back the number of officers on neighborhood beats, a move criticized by Bratton.

Harvard’s Kennedy cautions against oversimplifying the NYPD’s tactics, however, saying the department boasts an array of innovative policing efforts. “The actual behavior of NYPD doesn’t match the cartoon version that got put on the street,” Kennedy says. But he acknowledges that the department’s prevailing attitude has been to clamp down on the streets “until the streets simply cry uncle.” It should also be noted that while overall police brutality complaints are way up, killings by police are down 50 percent under Giuliani, high-profile tragedies like the Diallo shooting notwithstanding.

But there is no doubt that under Giuliani, New York police have resisted cooperative efforts with the community. Shortly after the Diallo shooting, according to New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, some 100 clergy members met with the Bronx borough president to discuss response strategies. A Bronx official told Herbert, “The one thing everybody at the meeting said was: ‘We could be a resource. But they’re not using us. The police don’t even know us. They don’t come and talk to us.’”

Boston’s not perfect either, of course. In February, for instance, the city paid $900,000 to settle the case of a black plainclothes police officer who was beaten by colleagues who thought he was a criminal. Some critics say that when complaints are registered, the department doesn’t deal decisively with its problem officers. And finally, it’s not clear whether acts of harassment and brutality have actually decreased, or whether a more trusting community is less likely to report them.

Still, there’s a consensus that life on Boston’s streets — and the relationship between Boston’s police officers and its neighborhood residents — is as good as anyone can remember.

“Ten years ago you wouldn’t see young kids — 5, 6, 7 years old — out playing, riding bikes, in the parks. The parents wouldn’t let them out of the house. There was a lot of fear,” says Lt. Gary French, who runs the Boston police’s anti-gang unit. “Now we have a very good relationship with a lot of the inner-city neighborhoods. The community leaders know they can call us if there’s a problem.” Instead of alienating whole neighborhoods, he says, “we’re ticking off the right people.”

Community leaders mostly agree. “I can remember how, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it was an us-against-them mentality between the community against the police,” says Tracy Litthcut, a Boston community worker who has been a key liaison between the police department and the neighborhoods. “The police had no credibility. It was ‘stop-and-frisk,’ and that didn’t go over well.”

Litthcut says “there’s no doubt” that its better police behavior, and not just a happier relationship with the neighborhoods, that explains the city’s drop in harassment and brutality complaints. “Those complaints sometimes come through youth workers” — like himself — “because people might not feel comfortable passing them on through law enforcement.” But Litthcut says the mood on the street is good. “People in the community are very pleased with the work law enforcement is doing. Not only are the police doing the enforcement piece, but there’s also a social work component.”

Just as it took a pair of watershed tragedies to awaken Boston’s police and community leaders to the need to cooperate, perhaps some good can come of the Diallo shooting and the Louima beating. If only to soften his image for a Senate showdown with Hillary Rodham Clinton, perhaps Giuliani will heed the exhortations and try harder to adopt Boston’s cooperative model. “That’s basically the choice we’ve got at this moment in policing,” says Kennedy. “There’s one big banner out there that says, ‘zero tolerance,’ and there’s another that says, ‘exercise judgment.’ The challenge is clearly to figure out how to exercise judgment well.”