Barton Silverman/The New York Times

Bikers passing the New York State Pavilion in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens. The 1939-40 and the 1964 World’s Fairs were held at Flushing Meadows.

Sports and the Wide World of Tomorrow
By SAM ROBERTS

In debating what the Olympics might deliver to New York, it might be worth recalling the forgotten legacy of Fishhooks McCarthy.

The line connecting Mr. McCarthy with the Summer Games is crooked or, at best, circuitous. But it offers a timely reminder that well before the current debate over whether New York needs the Olympic Games or a new stadium to accommodate them, two ambitious World’s Fairs were also touted as cost-effective vehicles to expand the city’s parks and public works. The analogy is not precise, but the question it raises is instructive: Did those fairs deliver on their promise of civic improvement?

Both fairs were held in Flushing Meadows, Queens, a site immortalized by F. Scott Fitzgerald as the fiery “valley of ashes” through which Jay Gatsby commuted in the 1920′s between Manhattan and Long Island’s gold coast. The valley was manmade, flanked by mounds of ashes up to 90 feet high that John A. McCarthy’s company, under a sweetheart deal with his fellow Democrats in Tammany Hall, removed from Brooklyn’s coal-burning furnaces and dumped at the rate of 100 or so railroad carloads a day.

Legend has it that Mr. McCarthy’s moniker was inspired by his habit of thrusting his fists immutably into his pockets at the first sighting of any due bill. But when the city finally bowed to reformers and canceled its contract with Mr. McCarthy’s company, Brooklyn Ash Removal, in 1934, a door was opened to transform the befouled meadows into New York’s second-largest park and Robert Moses bullied his way through.

“Then the miracle happened – the idea of a World’s Fair,” Moses later wrote.

He, in effect, seized control of the 1939-40 World’s Fair site to begin the meadows’s transformation and organized the 1964-65 World’s Fair to help finish it. “I think they were successful probably beyond anybody’s expectations,” said Adrian Benepe, who now holds Moses’ old job as city parks commissioner.

A 17-day Olympics is not the same as a much-longer-lasting World’s Fair, of course. And unlike a fair, the Olympics are typically not concentrated in one venue.

New York City’s bid for the 2012 Olympics promises what its organizers say would be “the largest single investment” in parks and recreational facilities in the city’s history and a legacy of other public works, including permanent housing in an Olympic Village in western Queens and transportation improvements in the metropolitan area, including the extension westward of the No. 7 subway line. (One legacy of the 1939 fair, in particular, was to shift New York’s focus eastward to the Long Island suburbs.)

Beyond the potential economic benefits, the two fairs also had a cultural impact. The 1939 fair introduced television, plastics and the freeways of the future.

“It was influential,” said Robert A. Caro, Moses’ biographer. “It had a real impact, particularly on the vision of broad sweeping highways.”

The 1964 fair paled in comparison but did expose Michelangelo’s “Pietà” to millions and popularized the Belgian waffle.

“Fairs are a lot more successful economically than they seem, because we set our sights too narrow,” said David Gelernter, a professor at Yale and the author of “1939: The Lost World of the Fair.” The 1939 fair helped make Flushing Meadows-Corona Park possible, in part, because “a stupefyingly huge dump got cleaned up,” Mr. Gelernter said.

It also helped improve the city’s image. “The fair brought huge crowds to New York; they didn’t spend enough money, but left with the impression that New York was the most exciting place on earth,” Mr. Gelernter said. “And the years following the park and the war – 1945 through the mid-’50′s – were boom years for the city, years in which the city became the art capital of the world and the most glamorous place on earth. Many things helped, but the fair was a huge factor.”

Each of New York’s 20th-century World’s Fairs drew tens of millions of visitors, provided jobs and generated tax revenue. The first led to the linking of the Grand Central Parkway to the new Triborough Bridge and spurred the completion of the airport that would later be named after Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia.

And, in the nation’s biggest reclamation project of its time, the meadows’s ash heaps were leveled and covered with topsoil. The scooped-out areas were used to create two artificial lakes, including the 84-acre Meadow Lake, now the city’s largest.

Both fairs failed to generate a projected profit. But to the degree that they were deemed financial failures, they were, in part, victims of unrealistic expectations. Invoking Isaiah, Moses said the two fairs had given the city “beauty for ashes” and that the 1964-65 fair did “more for New York than any other comparable event in three centuries.”

Besides, he maintained, “a fair is not a business in the ordinary sense” because corporate lenders profit in other ways, visitors experience a voyage of discovery and the community is left with permanent improvements. “As to the small minority of acid skeptics, grouches and jaundiced-eyed grumblers,” he said, “the public pays them no mind. Critics build nothing.”

The site of the second fair still includes the New York City building, which now houses the Queens Museum, the Unisphere, the heliport (now Terrace on the Park, one of the city’s highest-grossing concessions), the Hall of Science, the old Singer Bowl (now part of the National Tennis Center) and the derelict New York State Pavilion.

When the second fair relinquished the site after seven years, officials entertained grand plans for, among other things, a great sports park. “Hopefully,” Thomas P.F. Hoving, the parks commissioner, said in 1967, “someday maybe we’ll have a world Olympics there.”

Moses compared the fair to the Olympics he had witnessed in Rome and Tokyo. “The Olympics furnish common ground,” he wrote. “The Olympics are a call to action, not a monument to the futility of words.”

Jay L. Kriegel, the executive director of NYC2012, the Olympic organizing committee, said that in the last few decades, “the Olympics have replaced the worlds fairs as the single biggest event in the world, as the world’s gathering place.”

If the city wins the Olympics in 2012, the 1939 Fountain of the Planets in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park would be reconfigured for whitewater events and the lakes would be adapted for flat-water rowing.

“The 1939 fair did the heavy lifting, reshaping the landscape, and the ’64 fair left behind edifices that have been adaptively used,” Mr. Benepe said. “Without them, the dump probably would have been closed down, but there would still be a heavily polluted Flushing River and borderline businesses. All in all, it created the city’s second-largest park, left a legacy of cultural facilities and a festival grounds that on an average weekend is more of a World’s Fair than ever.”

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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

April 22, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Passing the Buck
By PAUL KRUGMAN

The United States spends far more on health care than other advanced countries. Yet we don’t appear to receive more medical services. And we have lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality rates than countries that spend less than half as much per person. How do we do it?

An important part of the answer is that much of our health care spending is devoted to passing the buck: trying to get someone else to pay the bills.

According to the World Health Organization, in the United States administrative expenses eat up about 15 percent of the money paid in premiums to private health insurance companies, but only 4 percent of the budgets of public insurance programs, which consist mainly of Medicare and Medicaid. The numbers for both public and private insurance are similar in other countries – but because we rely much more heavily than anyone else on private insurance, our total administrative costs are much higher.

According to the health organization, the higher costs of private insurers are “mainly due to the extensive bureaucracy required to assess risk, rate premiums, design benefit packages and review, pay or refuse claims.” Public insurance plans have far less bureaucracy because they don’t try to screen out high-risk clients or charge them higher fees.

And the costs directly incurred by insurers are only half the story. Doctors “must hire office personnel just to deal with the insurance companies,” Dr. Atul Gawande, a practicing physician, wrote in The New Yorker. “A well-run office can get the insurer’s rejection rate down from 30 percent to, say, 15 percent. That’s how a doctor makes money. … It’s a war with insurance, every step of the way.”

Isn’t competition supposed to make the private sector more efficient than the public sector? Well, as the World Health Organization put it in a discussion of Western Europe, private insurers generally don’t compete by delivering care at lower cost. Instead, they “compete on the basis of risk selection” – that is, by turning away people who are likely to have high medical bills and by refusing or delaying any payment they can.

Yet the cost of providing medical care to those denied private insurance doesn’t go away. If individuals are poor, or if medical expenses impoverish them, they are covered by Medicaid. Otherwise, they pay out of pocket or rely on the charity of public hospitals.

So we’ve created a vast and hugely expensive insurance bureaucracy that accomplishes nothing. The resources spent by private insurers don’t reduce overall costs; they simply shift those costs to other people and institutions. It’s perverse but true that this system, which insures only 85 percent of the population, costs much more than we would pay for a system that covered everyone.

And the costs go beyond wasted money.

First, in the U.S. system, medical costs act as a tax on employment. For example, General Motors is losing money on every car it makes because of the burden of health care costs. As a result, it may be forced to lay off thousands of workers, or may even go out of business. Yet the insurance premiums saved by firing workers are no saving at all to society as a whole: somebody still ends up paying the bills.

Second, Americans without insurance eventually receive medical care – but the operative word is “eventually.” According to Kaiser Family Foundation data, the uninsured are about three times as likely as the insured to postpone seeking care, fail to get needed care, leave prescriptions unfilled or skip recommended treatment. And many end up disabled – or die – because of these delays.

Think about how crazy all of this is. At a rough guess, between two million and three million Americans are employed by insurers and health care providers not to deliver health care, but to pass the buck for that care to someone else. And the result of all their exertions is to make the nation poorer and sicker.

Why do we put up with such an expensive, counterproductive health care system? Vested interests play an important role. But we also suffer from ideological blinders: decades of indoctrination in the virtues of market competition and the evils of big government have left many Americans unable to comprehend the idea that sometimes competition is the problem, not the solution.

In the next column in this series, I’ll talk about how ideology leads to “reforms” that make things worse.


E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

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G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times

Alex Rodriguez after hitting his third home run of the game, a grand slam in the fourth inning. Rodriguez became the first player to drive in 10 runs at Yankee Stadium.

YANKEES 12, ANGELS 4
A Magic Number by Rodriguez: 10 R.B.I.
By TYLER KEPNER

They have played baseball on 161st Street in the Bronx since 1923. In all that time, with so many legends having roamed the grounds, no player has ever been responsible for 10 of his team’s runs in a game. Not Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig. Not Joe DiMaggio or Mickey Mantle. Not Derek Jeter.

All of those players are known as true Yankees, a title that has eluded Alex Rodriguez. While he waits for another chance at October, Rodriguez added to his legacy by doing something never seen on baseball’s grandest stage.

He blasted three home runs in the Yankees’ 12-4 victory over the Los Angeles Angels and became the first player to drive in 10 runs in a game at Yankee Stadium, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.

He homered in the first, third and fourth innings off the Angels’ Bartolo Colón. The first shot drove in three runs, the second drove in two, and the third was a grand slam. Rodriguez later added a run-scoring single, and he said that as he stood on first base, he took a moment to savor what he had done.

“After the last base hit up the middle, it just felt like you’re on top of a cloud,” Rodriguez said. “You don’t want the moment to end.”

A crowd of 36,328 would have swelled exponentially, in legend, had Rodriguez belted a fourth home run, a feat accomplished just 15 times since 1894. Leading off the ninth against a soft-throwing rookie left-hander, Jake Woods, Rodriguez lined out to center.

As it was, the performance was historic enough. Only one Yankee had ever had more runs batted in during one game than Rodriguez: Tony Lazzeri, the Hall of Fame second baseman, drove in 11 on May 24, 1936, at Philadelphia, which is still the American League record. Only one other Yankee, Lou Gehrig, had more homers in a game. Gehrig hit four on June 3, 1932, also in Philadelphia.

“You don’t see too many days like that,” Jeter said of Rodriguez’s night. “That’s once in a lifetime.”

With the wind blowing out to right field during batting practice, Jeter had told Rodriguez, “No human alive can hit a ball out to left tonight.”

But Rodriguez hit two to left, and another to center. “I think I called Jeet every name in the book,” he said.

Jeter might not have considered the pitching matchup when he made his batting-practice remark. Colón is a former 20-game winner, but he is direct in his approach. He throws one of the hardest fastballs of any starter, and he is proud of it. Hitters expect to be challenged.

Rodriguez had seen Colón more than any other Yankee, with 37 at-bats off him coming into the game. Rodriguez had three homers this season among his 14 hits, for a .378 average, but Colón seemed to invite confrontation last night.

In the first inning, he walked the leadoff man, Jeter, and walked Hideki Matsui on a full count with two out. With a 2-2 count on Rodriguez, catcher Jose Molina set up outside, and Colón’s pitch drifted over the middle of the plate. Rodriguez crushed it over the fence in left-center.

Until then, Rodriguez had just two hits this season in 13 at-bats with runners in scoring position and two outs, furthering the theory that he withers in the clutch. Last night, though, all of his homers came with two out.

“Those were important at-bats,” Manager Joe Torre said. “They weren’t add-on runs.”

The Angels scored twice off Carl Pavano in the third, cutting the Yankees’ lead to 3-2. When Rodriguez batted in the bottom of the inning, there were two outs again, with Gary Sheffield on first after another walk. After taking a ball, Rodriguez destroyed the next pitch, lashing it just to the right of the seats in the left-field corner.

Almost as quickly as the ball had vanished, Rodriguez dashed around the bases. He got to the plate just three seconds after Sheffield crossed it, and bounded up the dugout steps to take a curtain call.

The Yankees led by 5-2, and Rodriguez should not have had the chance to hurt Colón in the next inning. But second baseman Chone Figgins made two errors, and with two out and a run in, Colón walked Matsui to load the bases for Rodriguez.

The fans let out a roar, sensing the drama. Angels Manager Mike Scioscia helped by leaving Colón in the game, though he had thrown 94 pitches.

“I thought Bart had enough in his tank, and if he gets that out, he could have pitched the fifth inning for us, which would have been big,” Scioscia said. “We were confident with him getting through that inning.”

For seven pitches, it was power versus power. On a 3-1 count, Colón blew a fastball past Rodriguez; the scoreboard clocked it at 97 miles an hour. After a foul ball, Molina set his target on the outside corner, low to the ground.

But Colón’s fastball sailed up and in, and Rodriguez launched it over Steve Finley’s head in center field.

“Your mouth has to drop open when you see something like that,” Torre said.

Finely gave chase, but it was futile. It was a wonder that the blast did not short the circuit on the billboard that lights up between innings just below the black seats. The ball caromed hard off the sign for Rodriguez’s first grand slam as a Yankee, the 11th of his career. At Torre’s urging, Rodriguez waved to the fans again during a pitching change.

“It’s funny, because if I would have thought grand slam for one minute, it probably would have never happened,” Rodriguez said. “My complete goal there was to hit the ball hard up the middle like I did my last two at-bats.”

As he spoke, Rodriguez held the grand-slam ball, retrieved by a bullpen catcher. It will be a reminder of an unforgettable night, and proof of what overwhelming talent can do.

Inside Pitch

After the game, the Yankees optioned reliever Colter Bean to Class AAA Columbus and promoted Chien Ming Wang, who will start Saturday … the last time a major leaguer drove in 10 runs in a game was in 1999, when Nomar Garciaparra did it against the Seattle Mariners.

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Ted S. Warren/Associated Press

Bill Gates spoke on Monday at a Microsoft engineering conference

Microsoft Releases Software for 64-Bit Computer Systems
By LAURIE J. FLYNN

Microsoft announced yesterday that it would begin selling new versions of its Windows operating system that take full advantage of high-performance computers that run 64-bit processors.

The new programs, called Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition, are available for servers that use 64-bit chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, and offer higher performance than systems based on the widely used 32-bit chips.

Separately, Microsoft announced that it had hired Chris Liddell to be its chief financial officer, replacing John Connors, who left the position in late March to join Ignition Partners, a venture capital firm.

Mr. Liddell was previously chief finance officer at International Paper, and before that chief executive of the forest products business Carter Holt Harvey, one of the largest public companies in New Zealand.

Microsoft’s chairman, Bill Gates, told Reuters that Mr. Liddell would bring a “new perspective” to the company. “We’ve done a number of acquisitions and Chris can help us execute on those,” Mr. Gates said.

Yesterday, Mr. Gates was at an annual Microsoft conference for computer hardware engineers to announce the new software for 64-bit processors. “It’s a very big deal for us,” he said at the conference, calling the program “part of the foundation for a new generation of faster, more powerful hardware and software.”

Work stations and servers based on 64-bit processors represent only a fraction of systems in use in corporations today, and those run either Linux, Unix or a version of Windows that Microsoft released last year for Intel’s Itanium chip. With the arrival of the 64-bit Windows systems, business customers now have another option. “We haven’t had a mainstream operating system until now,” Rob Enderle, a software consultant at the Enderle Group, said.

Sixty-four-bit computing, which is able to use more memory, speeds up tasks like database searching and number-crunching, and allows more users to be attached to a server.

Business customers are expected to benefit first from the new Microsoft programs because software applications have already been written that exploit the new functions. Ultimately, other customers will benefit as well, as video software and graphics-oriented programs using the new systems become widely available.

Mr. Enderle said consumers would see huge performance improvements when running games on the new operating systems. Software developers, he said, would be able to “provide a more realistic virtual reality” than ever before.

In conjunction with Microsoft’s news, Dell and Hewlett-Packard both announced 64-bit business computers that exploit the new software.

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Katherine Streeter

Far From the Medical Trenches, It’s O.K. to Laugh
By LARRY ZAROFF, M.D.

The thing about surgery – as in the verb form, doing surgery – is that it is so serious.

But after surgeons retire, it becomes a noun, a memory, selective. And what surgeons like to remember about their surgical adventures is how funny they could be.

Long ago, at 2 a.m., I was helping a resident close an emergency heart valve replacement at the general hospital where we had our cardiac surgical practice. I had missed dinner and was thinking of an early breakfast when my hunger pangs were eliminated by a phone call from the Park Avenue Hospital, a 50-bed neighborly institution, mostly a place for minor surgery, never heart operations.

The caller, a resident in hematology covering the indigent population to supplement his house officer’s pay, sounded concerned when he said the patient’s blood pressure was a bit low. It was not from natural causes that Bobby was a patient. Rather, he was a victim of his lady friend. The lady had left the young man on the doorstep with a stab wound to the left chest. Not only had she delivered the patient but, as we learned later, she had delivered the stab wound.

Suspecting the worst, at the worst of times – 3 a.m., operating on a stab wound of the heart, where no heart surgery was done – I drove to the hospital. The weather, a storm, matched my expectations.

When I arrived, the patient’s blood pressure was teetering at 70 over 40, and his pulse was ephemeral. It was too late to move him to our well-staffed and equipped cardiac surgical center.

He smelled awful, like a pericardial tamponade – a collection of blood between the fibrous sac enclosing the heart and the heart muscle. The blood leaking from the heart, having no place to go, was accumulating and compressing the heart so that it could not pump. Like a vise squeezing the heart.

Ordinarily, repairing a stab wound of the heart is a simple procedure, but at the Park Avenue, it was going to be like climbing out of a crevasse without a rope.

Two anesthesiologists worked at the Park Avenue. One, Izzy Cohen, lived two blocks away, and I called him to hustle over.

Now Izzy was not a hustler; he was well into his 70′s, and anesthesia was a part-time job for him – he earned his living at general practice. Izzy arrived at one of the two small operating rooms, rarely used for more than hernia repairs and extractions of wisdom teeth, just as the resident and I were hurrying the gurney into the room.

The resident had been through medical training and was in his second year of a hematology fellowship. As for surgical experience, he told me later he had not been in the operating room since his third year of medical school, and the only blood he had seen recently was under a microscope.

Given these circumstances, it was appropriate for the patient to crash. Doctors hate blue – thus the hospital loudspeaker’s arcane refrain, “Code blue, code blue,” signifying a cardiac arrest. Bobby was blue.

Simultaneously rolling the patient onto the operating table, asking for a knife and urging my resident to help was a bit overwhelming for Izzy. I heard a small groan from his end of the table.

The lack of anesthesia, the absence of gloves or any other aspect of sterility may not have bothered the patient – he was unconscious – but it seemed to be having an adverse effect on my anesthesiologist and my hematologist, who were numbed by the events.

I couldn’t come to their aid. One slash opened Bobby’s chest. I found a tense pericardium containing dark blood, which when opened to the reward of a waking patient and a returning blood pressure, revealed a one-inch gash of the right ventricle, the heart chamber that pumps blood to the lungs. Now the patient, awake, tried to leave the operating room with his heart poking out of his chest.

This locomotion inspired Izzy to anesthetize him and insert a breathing tube.

In this moment of leisure, I spied my hematologist hunkered in the corner, eyes closed.

Red blood cells moving on their own out of the heart under pressure was a situation not entirely familiar to him.

The rest of the procedure was uneventful; a few silk sutures repaired the damage.

As the resident returned to consciousness, I was able to initiate the surgical routine of sterility, don gloves and gown, and close the chest.

The emergency over, I asked Izzy how things were. His response, unmasked, remains noteworthy: “And there he was, no respirations, no blood pressure, no pulse and no insurance.”

It turned out that old Izzy was right. The patient, who recovered uneventfully, had no insurance. After his stabber spurned him a second time, he appeared once more at the hospital, with two broken legs, the culmination of a suicide jump from a two-story window.

I heard that he still had no insurance, but that Izzy did the anesthesia for his fractures.

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Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press

In Chicago, the United States attorney, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, announced at a news conference the indictment of 14 reputed mob members and associates on charges of plotting at least 18 murders as far back as 1970.

In Mob Sweep, Feds Hope to Send Up the Clown
By MONICA DAVEY

CHICAGO, April 25 – The names read like a who’s who from some faded blotter left behind at the Chicago Police Department’s old State Street headquarters: Joseph (the Clown) Lombardo, Frank (the German) Schweihs, Frank (Gumba) Saladino, and on and on.

But on Monday, 14 men, including several who have for years been reputed to be in the city’s top level of organized crime leaders, were being rounded up in connection with 18 murders that stretch back over four decades and had gone unsolved and, in some cases, been nearly forgotten.

Several of the accused are in their mid-70′s now, and one, though only 59, was found dead, apparently of natural causes, when the authorities arrived on Monday to arrest him in the hotel room where he lived. A few of the others accused, meanwhile, had moved away to places like Florida and Arizona, better known for retirement.

Describing the 9-count, 41-page racketeering conspiracy indictment as putting a “hit on the mob,” Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney here, said in a written statement, “After so many years, it lifts the veil of secrecy and exposes the violent underworld of organized crime.”

While arrests of organized crime figures are hardly unique in a city where Al Capone once worked, rarely have so many of its reputed high-level leaders been charged all at once. Nor, federal authorities said, has the entire “Chicago Outfit” before been deemed a criminal enterprise under federal racketeering laws.

“This really lays out the whole continuing criminal enterprise that is still going on,” said Thomas Kirkpatrick, president of the Chicago Crime Commission, an anticrime group created in 1919 by Chicago business leaders who were increasingly worried that it could become too dangerous to conduct legitimate commerce in this town.

“People tend to forget what these guys are about,” Mr. Kirkpatrick said. “They watch ‘The Sopranos’ or some of these movies about the mob, and they think it’s just some colorful characters. The thing is, they’re still doing this. These characters are still doing this.”

Among the most notorious murders the authorities say they have solved with Monday’s announcement: the 1986 death of Tony (the Ant) Spilotro, the organization’s chief enforcer in Las Vegas, and his brother, Michael, who were buried in an Indiana cornfield. (Joe Pesci portrayed a character based on Tony Spilotro in the 1995 movie “Casino.”)

The authorities here say the indictment, which was returned by a federal grand jury on Thursday and unsealed on Monday, was years in the making. The Federal Bureau of Investigation dubbed their probe “Operation Family Secrets,” and agents from the F.B.I. and the Internal Revenue Service began arresting the accused in Illinois, Florida and Arizona on Monday morning.

The indictment reads like a grade school textbook on Chicago’s organized crime web, laying out its command structure (a boss, an under boss and crew bosses), its business endeavors (absurdly high-interest loans, sports bookmaking and video gambling enterprises), and its methods of avoiding the police (listening to police radios, talking on pay phones and using remote control devices to keep away from actual murder scenes).

Among those indicted were men the authorities say guided three of the city’s most powerful neighborhood crews: James Marcello, 63, of the Melrose Park crew; Frank Calabrese Sr., 68, of the South Side/26th Street crew; and Mr. Lombardo, 75, of the Grand Avenue crew.

Mr. Calabrese “absolutely” denies the allegations against him and will plead innocent to the charges at trial, Joseph Lopez, his lawyer, said late Monday. “His reaction is that he’s going to put this case in the hands of God and justice will prevail,” Mr. Lopez said.

Mr. Lombardo, who lives in Chicago, was one of two accused whom the authorities were still seeking on Monday evening. On Monday afternoon, Rick Halprin, an attorney for Mr. Lombardo, said he did not know where Mr. Lombardo was and was uncertain whether Mr. Lombardo was even aware of the charges against him.

Four lawyers who represent some of the others named in the indictment did not return telephone calls from a reporter late Monday.

Eleven of the men are charged with racketeering conspiracy, including planning or agreeing to commit murder on behalf of the outfit or taking part in other illegal activities such as collecting “street tax,” running gambling operations or obstructing justice on behalf of the organization. The three others were charged with illegal gambling or tax conspiracy.

Two retired Chicago police officers were among those arrested. The indictment says that when Anthony Doyle, now 60, was on the Chicago police force, he helped a mob leader by keeping him informed on an investigation of one of the unsolved killings. When that leader went to jail at one point, Mr. Doyle passed his messages to other members of the Chicago Outfit, according to the document.

The indictment also accuses Michael Ricci, 75, who retired from the police department and the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, of helping pass messages from a jailed mob leader to others and of collecting money the leader was extorting.

The federal authorities declined to say how they had now solved 18 murder cases dating from 1970 to 1986, but Mr. Kirkpatrick, of the crime commission, said he understood that the authorities had been helped, in part, by analyzing DNA evidence.

On Monday, the authorities said their investigation would continue and that more arrests were possible.

The indictment itself has already spurred at least one new mystery. When agents on Monday arrived to arrest Mr. Saladino, they found him dead in the hotel room in Kane County, west of Chicago, where he had been living. Beside his body was tens of thousands of dollars in checks and cash. The authorities would not say where the money had come from.


Gretchen Ruethling contributed reporting for this article.

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Fernando Alonso and Michael Schumacher battle
F1 > San Marino GP, 2005-04-24 (Imola): Sunday race

Fernando Alonso and Michael Schumacher battle
F1 > San Marino GP, 2005-04-24 (Imola): Sunday race