‘d like to apologize to the American people,” said Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York police commissioner, after his sentencing Thursday.

WHITE PLAINS — Bernard B. Kerik, a former New York police commissioner who rose to national prominence, was sentenced to four years in prison on Thursday after pleading guilty to eight felony charges, including tax fraud and lying to White House officials.

Under the terms of a plea agreement, the prosecution and the defense recommended that Judge Stephen C. Robinson sentence Mr. Kerik to 27 to 33 months in prison. But the judge departed from the sentencing recommendations, giving Mr. Kerik a longer sentence because he said he had betrayed the public’s trust.

“I think it’s fair to say that with great power comes great responsibility and great consequences,” Judge Robinson said. “I think the damage caused by Mr. Kerik is in some ways immeasurable.”

Federal prosecutors had denounced Mr. Kerik, a former police detective who rose to the upper echelons of power, as a corrupt official who sought to trade his authority for lavish benefits. He pleaded guilty on the eve of his trial in November.

Wearing a pinstriped navy-blue suit, Mr. Kerik was thinner and clean-shaven — without the mustache he was long identified with — as he entered the courtroom in United States District Court here. He surveyed the gallery, packed with friends and supporters, embracing some, nodding to others.

When Judge Robinson offered him a chance to speak before sentencing, Mr. Kerik rose from the defense table and spoke in a low and gravelly voice.

“I make no excuses,” he said. “I take full responsibility for the grave mistakes I’ve made. Believe me when I say I have learned from this and I have become and will continue to become a better person. I know I must be punished. I only ask that you allow me to return to my wife and two little girls as soon as possible.”

As the judge delivered the sentence, Mr. Kerik sat impassively at the defense table, flanked by his lawyers. Behind him, his supporters — including Geraldo Rivera and Steven McDonald, a former New York City police officer who was paralyzed from the neck down in 1986 — sat silently.

Mr. Kerik will begin serving his sentence on May 17. Prosecutors had requested that Mr. Kerik be sent to prison immediately, but Judge Robinson allowed him to surrender later to get his affairs in order in light of the length of the sentence. Mr. Kerik has awaited sentencing under strict house arrest at his home in Franklin Lakes, N.J.

The sentence follows a fall from a rarefied perch where he wielded power with a signature mix of brash confidence and tough-guy charm.

He was a close ally of former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, whom he served as a bodyguard and driver. Mr. Giuliani then tapped him for a senior position in the Correction Department, and he went on to become the agency’s commissioner. As testament to his clout, Mr. Kerik had a jail named after him in downtown Manhattan. (The name has since been changed.)

Mr. Kerik later served as police commissioner, and his performance after the 9/11 attacks turned him into a national figure, earning him the respect of President George W. Bush, who nominated him to lead the Department of Homeland Security. That bid quickly collapsed in scandal, marking the beginning of the end of Mr. Kerik’s career.

The case against Mr. Kerik centered on charges that a New Jersey construction company, the Interstate Industrial Corporation, which was suspected of ties to organized crime, had paid for renovations at his home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Prosecutors said company officials had hoped Mr. Kerik would help them obtain a city license.

In June 2006, Mr. Kerik pleaded guilty in State Supreme Court in the Bronx to two misdemeanors tied to the renovation of his apartment. He paid $221,000 in fines and penalties but avoided any jail time.

In the more recent federal case, Mr. Kerik pleaded guilty to two counts of tax fraud, one count of making a false statement on a loan application and five counts of making false statements to the federal government while being vetted for senior posts. Judge Robinson ordered him to pay restitution of $187,931 to the Internal Revenue Service.

Prosecutors had called for Judge Robinson to make an example out of Mr. Kerik, and to punish him for his “egotism and hubris.”

During the hearing, Judge Robinson said he admired much about Mr. Kerik, particularly his leadership in the 9/11 aftermath. But, he said, “the fact that Mr. Kerik would use that event for personal gain and aggrandizement is a dark place in the soul for me.”

Mr. Kerik’s lawyer, Michael F. Bachner, asked the judge for leniency, citing his years of public service, and the dozens of letters of support written by family members, former colleagues in the Police Department and even strangers who said they admired Mr. Kerik’s bravery.

When asked if Mr. Kerik intended to appeal the sentence, Mr. Bachner said, “No comment.”

After the sentencing, Mr. Kerik paused outside the courthouse, where he read a statement before being driven off in a black sport utility vehicle.

“I’d like to apologize to the American people for the mistakes I’ve made and for which I have just accepted responsibility,” he said. “As history is written, I can only hope that I will be judged for the 30 years of service I have given to this country and the city of New York.”

Copyright.2010 New York Times

WHISTLER, British Columbia — Standing next to the start house, Lindsey Vonn heard the radio crackle. She lifted it to her ear.

“Jules just had a great run; she’s in first by almost a second,” her husband, Thomas, said, using the nickname of Vonn’s longtime rival and teammate Julia Mancuso. It is Thomas Vonn’s job, as coach and adviser, to provide race updates. Watching on a television monitor as Mancuso rocketed to the front of the pack in Wednesday’s women’s Olympic downhill, he radioed a report of where Lindsey stood.

“You now have to attack from start to finish or you’re not going to win,” Thomas said. “Somebody else is going to win the gold medal.”

Not just somebody else. Mancuso and Vonn have been dueling for ski championships since they were 12 years old, when they first were among the world’s top-ranked juniors.

So this is what it has come to, Vonn thought to herself. After several days of weather postponements, after a week of speculation about an injured right shin, after a year’s buildup to her quest for a medal, it would come down to one bold charge after an old familiar foe.

“One all-out run,” Vonn would later say, “with nothing left behind.”

In one of the most stirring descents in Olympic downhill skiing history, Vonn ignored the pain in her injured shin, chased down Mancuso and caught up to nearly a lifetime of expectations to become the first American woman to win an Olympic downhill gold medal. With an aggressive style and stance she held throughout her run — jaw, hands, knees and hips always angling forward for more speed — Vonn’s time of 1 minute 44.19 seconds on the bumpy, treacherous Whistler race course was 0.56 of a second ahead of Mancuso. Elisabeth Görgl of Austria won the bronze medal.

“It was a fight all the way down but I told myself to keep pushing regardless of the consequences,” said Vonn, who remains a favorite to win additional gold medals. “I had to go for it every second.”

While Mancuso’s thrilling run seemed smooth, elegant and efficient, Vonn’s seemed tinged with elements of force and desperation. The bruised shin sustained more than two weeks ago was painful, she said, but pain-killers and adrenaline masked the debilitating effects. From the start, Vonn built her lead over Mancuso, increasing it at nearly every timed interval down the race course. Still, she had one nearly disastrous bobble about two-thirds of the way down at the sharp right turn known as Frog Bank, and then, she almost lost it all 10 seconds from the end.

Coming off the dramatic Hot Air jump within sight of the huge finish line grandstand, Vonn flew about 50 yards in the air and wobbled as she landed. Her skis continued to tremble and wander as she dropped into a high-speed tuck through the final 150 yards.

Watching on television, Thomas Vonn yelled at the screen: “Just get to the finish!”

When Vonn crossed the finish line, she looked to the scoreboard.

“Seeing my name and the number one next to it was the best feeling I’ve had in my life,” she said.

Coming to a stop, Vonn fell backward in the snow and raised her arms.

“Then I spent the next 20 minutes just bawling,” she said. “I couldn’t stop crying.”

Mancuso, who won an Olympic gold medal in giant slalom in 2006, had skied the downhill of her life, and though defeated by Vonn, she seemed ebullient afterward.

“I skied well from the start and I am on the podium again,” said Mancuso, who has not been in the top three in a major international race since she placed third in a downhill at Whistler two years ago. “I thought it was really cool that Lindsey had all this pressure, and for her to come through with a great race with all the expectations is really inspiring.

“For all our ups and downs through all the years, we’re two different stories on the podium and we’re proud to be here together.”

Mancuso was nearly bumped into the bronze medal spot by Sweden’s Anja Paerson, who, skiing after Mancuso and Vonn, appeared to be headed for a second-place finish when she flew too high and too far off the Hot Air jump, landed off balance, crashed through a gate and tumbled out of control. Six of the 45 skiers did not finish the course.

Vonn said she knew when her husband told her it was Mancuso who was in first place that it would take a spectacular run to come out on top.

“She always seems to be a big-game racer,” Vonn said.

By contrast, for many years, it was Vonn who struggled to have her best races at the most important times. A year ago, at the world ski championships, Thomas had to come to the start to ease Lindsey’s nerves, which worked as Vonn won. They had expected to follow the same routine Wednesday, but Lindsey surprised Thomas about 15 minutes before her start when she told him he could go watch the race on television instead.

“What?” Thomas said.

“I’m good,” Lindsey answered. “I’ve got this. Go ahead.”

As Thomas said later, “I knew she was really ready now, it was a turning point.” The shin injury that had been talked about so often in the last week was not much discussed in the final minutes before the race.

“It hurt and she knew it would hurt,” Thomas said. “But when you’re getting ready to race in the Olympics, you can’t feel anything. The Olympics are the ultimate numbing cream.”

Vonn would not predict how her shin would hold up in Thursday’s women’s super combined, an all-day event that is one run of downhill followed by one run of slalom. She has skied on consecutive days only once since the injury.

“I’m sure it will be very sore, but I’m not worrying about that now,” Vonn said, standing next to the finish area, where a gaggle of American fans, including many from her family, chanted her name. “I came here to win a gold medal. I stood up to the pressure. I went for it with no fear. I will attack in all the next events; I’ll keep that promise. But I simply can’t feel any happier. And I know I will always have today.”

WASHINGTON — One of the largest winter storms the Mid-Atlantic region has seen in decades swept into Washington and Baltimore on Friday, grounding flights, closing schools and government offices, and sending residents racing to stock up on groceries and rock salt before the snow accumulated to what are expected to be record-setting depths.

“Tonight into Saturday morning will be about as dangerous as winter weather can get around here,” said Christopher Strong of the National Weather Service’s Baltimore-Washington office.

He added in an e-mail alert that travel conditions would be “extremely dangerous and life-threatening,” and recommended that people in the region stay off the roads and out of the way of plowing crews and emergency vehicles.

Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, parent agency of the weather service, called the blizzard “a potentially epic snowstorm” that could rival the 28 inches of snow that a January 1922 storm dropped on the capital.

“The National Weather Service has been very clear that this is a storm to take very seriously,” she said. The halls of the Capitol building were quiet, and the federal government sent many workers home four hours early on Friday. Dr. Lubchenco said she was making contingency plans for all government offices in and near the capital to be closed through Tuesday.

“If it is as much and as heavy as they are forecasting, it may be a number of days before people are actually moving around again,” she said. “This is a serious storm.”

As snow began to accumulate on the White House grounds and the National Mall in the afternoon, much of Washington was hunkered down, bracing for what newspapers and bloggers have been calling the “snowpocalypse,” or “snowmageddon,” and the streets in the center of the city were unusually quiet. Schools in suburban Virginia were closed for the day, and students in Maryland and the District of Columbia had shortened school days.

As the sun set and temperatures began to drop below freezing, accumulations in Washington quickly reached about 2 inches of wet, heavy snow, precisely as had been predicted all day long. As of 5 p.m. Friday, all operations had ceased at Ronald Reagan National Airport and only a few international flights were scheduled to take off from Dulles International Airport. Domestic flights into and out of both airports on Saturday had been canceled. There was no final word on the fate of incoming or outgoing international flights at Dulles.

As the snow intensified, temperatures dropped, and the weather service warned of blizzard-level winds gusting to 35 miles per hour in the nation’s capital, Washington’s transit system said it would shut down the above-ground rail tracks just outside of town at 11 p.m. Friday, and that there would be no bus service on Saturday.

Shelves at some supermarkets in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs resembled something out of the old Soviet bloc, stripped nearly bare of eggs, milk, meat and chicken by shoppers who carried fresh memories of the icy roads and deep drifts of a December storm that buried Washington in more than 18 inches of snow.

The weather service issued a blizzard warning on Friday afternoon for Annapolis, Md., saying that by late Friday night northeasterly winds would start to whip through with gusts of 35 to 40 miles an hour. A blizzard warning for Atlantic City, N.J., was posted earlier in the day. Late Friday, the weather service also issued an overnight tornado watch along the coast of North Carolina.

In Pittsburgh, snow started falling just after midday. Dozens of school districts and local colleges in and around the city closed early on Friday. and the state’s health department canceled H1N1 vaccine clinics that were scheduled for Saturday.

Officials closed some lanes on the Parkway North, a freeway that runs from downtown into the northern suburbs, to free road crews to spend more time keeping other roads clear. Travel was already snarled up and down the East Coast by the time the first flakes fell. Numerous Amtrak trains in the storm track along the Eastern seaboard from Savannah, Ga., to Boston were canceled on Friday and Saturday, although alternate service was available for some routes. Amtrak was posting schedule changes and cancellations on its Web site. A number of airlines were canceling flights out of major cities in the affected areas.

In Virginia, which was expected to take the brunt of the storm, Gov. Robert F. McDonnell declared a state of emergency and warned residents in the storm’s path to prepare emergency kits, stay off roads and brace for outages. The state’s General Assembly called off all floor sessions and committee meetings scheduled for Friday, the first time in recent memory that the Legislature was shut down because of snow, The Associated Press reported.

The National Weather Service predicted “near-blizzard conditions” and issued a winter storm warning extending from Friday to late Saturday that covered a broad stretch of the Mid-Atlantic region. Snow was expected to spread northward late on Friday to the New York City area and possibly the southern edge of New England.

Accumulations of two feet or more were expected in the heart of the storm, with southern New Jersey getting up to 18 inches. But New York may escape with just a few inches of snow as the system spirals out to sea, said Carl Erickson, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather.com.

“The further south you go, the more snow you’re going to see,” he said. “But 50 or 60 miles north of New York City there may not be a flake.”

President Obama did not cancel any of his events on Friday, and he was scheduled to deliver a speech at a meeting of the Democratic National Committee on Saturday. But he did not make any public comments about the snow. That contrasted with last year, when he playfully mocked the reaction of his new city to an approaching snowstorm, saying Washington would do well to emulate “flinty Chicago toughness.”

“Even a transplanted Hawaiian-to-Chicagoan has sufficient respect for a forecast of nearly two feet of snow,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Friday. He added that the snowstorm would not affect the president’s weekend schedule: “He doesn’t even have to shovel the walk.”

With a firm trial date looming for thousands of lawsuits brought by workers at ground zero against the city, lawyers for both sides are engaged in intensive talks aimed at settling some or all the cases.

The first 12 cases are scheduled for trial on May 16 in Manhattan. But Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, who is overseeing the litigation, said at a recent hearing that a detailed settlement plan about 70 pages long had been drafted.

“There have been intensive discussions going on looking to settlements of individual cases and globally of all cases,” he said.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs and the city declined to comment on the negotiations.

“The parties have been working very hard,” said Judge Hellerstein, of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. “The settlement is complicated.”

The lawsuits against 90 government agencies and private companies were filed beginning in 2004 by more than 9,000 rescue and cleanup workers who sued over illnesses and injuries they say stemmed from working at the World Trade Center site in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.

Several hundred lawyers are working on the cases, and the court documents run to tens of millions of pages.

The plaintiffs claim that the city, along with its contractors and other major defendants like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, offered inadequate safety procedures and supervision to shield them from exposure to contaminants while working amid the debris in a 16-acre area at the site.

Plaintiffs are seeking compensatory damages for pain and suffering and economic loss, as well as, in certain cases, medical monitoring. They may also seek punitive damages in appropriate cases, said Paul J. Napoli, one of the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs.

James E. Tyrrell Jr., the lead lawyer for the defendants, contends that no link can be proven between the illnesses of plaintiffs and exposure at ground zero, and that some are making false claims. If the cases come to trial, juries will have to decide whether the defendants are at fault, whether the plaintiffs are actually sick and whether their conditions were caused by their work at the disaster site, Mr. Tyrrell said.

The litigation is complex and politically charged. Among those suing are firefighters, police officers, construction workers and other responders who draw public sympathy. Many elected officials and advocacy groups are demanding compensation, long-term medical treatment and monitoring for the workers from the federal government.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg supports a bill pending in Congress that would offer federal relief to people harmed by work at the site. But the city has, at the same time, been fighting the workers in court, arguing, among other things, that it is immune from damages in cases involving a civil defense disaster or a national emergency. At issue is how great the city’s liability would be if it lost the cases.

“We would rather stand with the responders before Congress than fight them in the courtroom,” said Jason Post, a spokesman for the mayor. “Responders and workers should not have to prove that the city or the contractors are somehow responsible for their harms — which plaintiffs are obligated to prove and which the city thinks is not the case.”

Still, in 2007, Mr. Bloomberg said the city was willing to explore settling the cases.

Although the cases have been consolidated, they are being considered separately and not as a class-action lawsuit. The court, lawyers for the plaintiffs and the city are selecting a small group of sample cases to bring to trial in the hope that the verdicts will guide settlement of the remaining lawsuits.

“No one seriously thinks that all of these cases would ever be tried,” said Richard A. Nagareda, a law professor who teaches complex civil litigation at Vanderbilt University Law School. “Ultimately, everybody understands there’s going to be some sort of comprehensive settlement. The question is, what is the price?”

The city is arguing that its liability is capped at $350 million under federal law, but lawyers for the plaintiffs are disputing that figure. If they prevail, the city could face an enormous cost for its share of the compensation. The city and its contractors are covered by an insurance fund of almost $1 billion financed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The private contractors named as defendants have their own insurance, although the coverage available has not been determined.

“We believe there’s sufficient coverage to pay all claims with money to spare,” Mr. Napoli said.

As in other cases involving exposure to environmental hazards, establishing cause and effect is likely to be difficult. The plaintiffs have been asked to fill out lengthy questionnaires that ask about pre-existing diseases, their medical history as far back as 1995 and other exposures that could have caused the illnesses, like the use of tobacco products.

But what makes the 9/11 cases even more daunting, some legal experts note, is that the collapse and conflagration of the two towers in 2001 created an unfamiliar toxic soup from the dust and fumes.

“There’s not a lot of experience with this kind of risk,” said Anthony J. Sebok, a professor who specializes in mass torts at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. “It may be very difficult from a technical point of view to get testimony from experts.”

The cases also involve thousands of people claiming hundreds of different ailments of varying severity. Many of them were subject to different types of exposure over different periods. To make the litigation more manageable, a severity chart has been created to classify injuries in six major disease categories by type and seriousness, a classification scheme that will help the court pick a sample of cases.

The trials could still be delayed as lawyers continue to request documents, file motions and work their way through hearings to decide which expert testimony will be allowed. No decision has been made on whether to try the first cases separately or together, but Judge Hellerstein has said that he is not “enamored of the idea” of grouping the cases and that he may bring in other judges to conduct simultaneous trials.

Some of the plaintiffs said they hoped for a fair resolution. Glen Klein, 51, a former police officer from Centereach on Long Island who blames his respiratory and gastrointestinal problems on the hundreds of hours he spent on recovery work at ground zero, said that any money would go to pay about $30,000 in credit-card debt he had acquired since his ailments forced him to stop working in 2005.

Anything else he would invest, he said.

“If I woke up one day with a rare cancer, I’d like to take care of my family,” said Mr. Klein, who is married and has three children. “I feel I’m just waiting for the hammer to drop on me.”

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company