When Genaro García Luna, Mexico's top police official, arrived in Tijuana in January, the city was in the middle of a storm of violence that he found, as he put it to me with clipped understatement soon after his visit, "surprising." First, three local police officers were murdered in a single night, apparently in retaliation for a bust that a drug-cartel boss warned them not to carry out. A few days later, federal police officers tried to storm a trafficker safe house in a quiet Tijuana neighborhood and ended up in a shootout. Five gunmen held off dozens of police officers and soldiers for more than three hours. By the time the police made it inside the house, six kidnap victims from a rival cartel being held there had been executed. The traffickers had skinned off some of the victims' faces to conceal their identities.

The attacks on the police officers were particularly worrying for García Luna, who as secretary of public security is one of the officials in charge of implementing President Felipe Calderón's decision to aggressively wage war on drug trafficking. Just before García Luna's visit to Tijuana, a police officer's wife and 12-year-old daughter were murdered in their home there, in violation of a longstanding code of combat that is supposed to safeguard the families of cops and traffickers alike. In a further gesture of defiance, cartel assassins were issuing death threats over the police force's own radio frequency, and the cartel seemed to be getting inside information about police operations. The gunmen in the Tijuana shootout had a cache of automatic weapons, including AK-47's, the traditional weapon of choice for the cartels. During the shootout, the police, unsure of their ability to control the crossfire, evacuated hundreds of children from an adjacent preschool. "People are saying, 'There are children fleeing here, like it's Iraq,' " García Luna told me later.

What was "surprising" to him, however, was not the firepower or brutality of the traffickers; the surprising thing was that in Tijuana, the government was supposed to be winning. Over the previous few years, the city's dominant drug cartel, known as the Arellano Félix cartel, after the family that runs it, had been, as many of García Luna's top aides told me, practically dismantled. One of the Arellano Félix brothers was shot, another arrested by Mexican special forces and a third seized by American agents as he fished in the Pacific from a boat called the Dock Holiday. U.S. and Mexican authorities shut down several "narcotunnels," elaborately engineered smuggling passages that run as deep as 100 feet below the fence that separates Tijuana from the United States. Stash after stash of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana was seized in town or intercepted at the border.

But by the measure that matters most to the average citizen — security — the situation was as bad or worse than ever. Even as the Mexican government was sending fleets of security officers to Tijuana, there were at least 15 drug-related killings there the week of García Luna's visit.

This pattern has become common in Mexico. Since the end of 2006, the Calderón government has sent more than 25,000 soldiers and federal police on high-powered anti-drug "operations" to combat drug cartels. It has initiated sweeping plans for judicial and police reform. It has extradited several top cartel figures to the United States, earning praise and a package of anti-drug aid from the U.S. government. Yet this year is on pace to be the bloodiest on record for Mexico's drug war, surpassing by almost 50 percent last year's toll of more than 2,500 deaths.

Soon after the Tijuana shootout, the police got a tip about another building nearby — a plain-looking house with pale yellow walls and a basketball hoop outside. They raided it and found an underground chamber that they called an "assassin training school." A policeman in a black ski mask gave me a tour, guiding me down a wooden ladder hidden beneath a fake bathroom sink. It went down into a long room with a low ceiling and lined with thick black insulation. There was heavy equipment for outfitting and repairing guns, and an estimated 30,000 rounds of ammunition were neatly organized by caliber on gray plastic shelves. Used shooting targets were pinned up to metal cans filled with scraps of tire, and hundreds of shells littered the floor. "It is incredible, facing these weapons," García Luna told me later, shaking his head. "It is truly astonishing, in terms of quantity, in terms of caliber. Before, the most powerful weapon we would find was the cuerno de chivo" — the goat's horn, Mexican slang for an AK-47. "Now we're finding grenades, rockets."

Since taking over as Mexico's top cop at the end of 2006, García Luna has repeatedly said the situation with the drug cartels would get worse before it got better. But when I spoke to him after his visit to Tijuana, even he seemed startled at just how bad the violence had become — especially since the narcos had started turning their weapons on the state instead of on one another. One of García's Luna's top lieutenants, the federal police chief Edgar Millán Gómez, told me in March, "We are seeing a response to our operations: more attacks on police." A month and a half later he, too, was dead.

A few weeks after the Tijuana bust, I went with García Luna to a meeting of state commanders and some local police chiefs outside Acapulco. The city has suffered its own bouts of drug violence in recent years. It is a major entry and distribution point for Colombian cocaine, and for much of last year two rival cartels were fighting for the turf. Acapulco has became famous for beheadings. In one notorious case, the heads of two police officers were deposited in front of a government building, along with a hand-lettered sign that read, "So that you learn some respect." We traveled to the site of the meeting, an upscale beachfront hotel filled with American tourists, under the guard of gunmen in armored black S.U.V.'s.

Although he was just 38 when Calderón tapped him for his current job, García Luna had already spent almost 20 years in the security services, much of it monitoring organized crime and drug trafficking. By his late 20s, he was considered something of a wunderkind. Trained as an engineer, he was savvy about and comfortable with new technology at a time when those skills were becoming valued in security circles, and he rose quickly through the ranks. In the late '90s, as Mexico began to emerge from 70 years of one-party rule, García Luna became a central player in efforts to reform the police. He helped found a new "preventive" police charged with keeping order throughout the country, then headed up the new Federal Investigation Agency, or AFI. Both these organizations are now functionally under his command, and if he has his way they will become an integrated federal police force in the coming years.

Raúl Benítez Manaut, a security analyst at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, calls García Luna's task "the hardest job in the country." For now, in carrying out many of the biggest operations against the cartels, the government has relied on the Mexican military. But militarization carries risks. The military worries about increasing corruption and a growing number of soldiers deserting their units to join the traffickers; others have warned that militarization will lead to major human rights violations. García Luna recently announced that the military should be heading back to the barracks, and a new and improved police — better-armed, better-trained, less corrupt — should begin fighting on its own by the end of this year. Before that can happen, though, he will have to build a kind of cohesive and effective federal police force that Mexico has never had.

At the meeting in Acapulco, the police chiefs, tough-looking men with mustaches and wearing guayabera shirts, were waiting for García Luna, their boss, in a conference room. With his square jaw, squat build and crew cut, García Luna cultivates the image of a cop in a world of politicians, a doer in a world of talkers, and after a cursory welcome he quickly moved to the matter at hand. He wanted to discuss, he said, "combating corruption through the systematic purging of the police corps." That would mean "cleaning up" the forces controlled by some of the men in the room — with their help if possible, "by force if necessary."

Local police forces — which make up the vast majority of police in Mexico — are the "Achilles' heel of Mexican security," as Jorge Chabat, a security expert close to the government, puts it. In much of the country the police are popularly viewed as abusive, incompetent and corrupt — a perception not helped by periodic scandals, like the recent appearance of videos showing Mexican police officers being trained in torture methods. In some of the main trafficker strongholds, the police are the protectors of the cartels; U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officers on the ground refuse to even interact with local police departments for fear that doing so will put them at risk. David Zavala, a federal police commander running García Luna's operation in the border city of Juárez, told me: "When we arrived, we first had to get the municipal police out of the way. A lot of them are involved in trafficking. Sometimes they'll tell us, 'There's nothing over there.' That's the first place we look."

The system of local law enforcement in Mexico has been "abandoned," García Luna told me. "There is no strategy. Wages are very low. There is no trust." Corruption among police officers, he went on, "is part of their everyday life." García Luna has resorted to a variety of measures to bring the nation's police in line, and he was explaining them to the police chiefs in Acapulco. To get their share of the $300 million the government has for improving local law enforcement, he said, the local departments will have to start working with a new national crime and intelligence system and subject their officers to a regimen of "trust tests" — polygraph exams, financial audits, psychological evaluations. Until then, as many of the chiefs knew from experience, García Luna would not hesitate to use more extreme measures, including forcibly disarming suspect officers.

After the meeting, I joined García Luna as he went to the hotel bar to have a beer with a police commander. García Luna said he thought the meeting had gone well, but he seemed more interested in talking about bomb design. The week before, a homemade explosive device had gone off in the center of Mexico City, killing the man carrying it and wounding a woman who was with him. The word was that the bomb was intended for a police official's car as retribution for a series of strikes against the so-called Sinaloa cartel — signaling, many feared, a new phase in the drug war. Mexican security experts were talking about "Colombianization" or "the Pablo Escobar effect" — the idea being that, as with Escobar in Colombia in the late '80s and early '90s, the cartels were responding to the crackdown with a no-holds-barred assault on the state. "Now, in 2008, we are reaching terrorist violence," Samuel González Ruiz, a former head of the Mexican attorney general's organized-crime unit, told me the day after the explosion. "It is an escalation in their fight against the authorities."

But escalation was not the cartel's only tactic. Reports were filtering out of Tijuana that, in the wake of the shootout there, representatives of the Arellano Félix cartel had offered police and military officials a pact: the cartel would agree to control violence if the authorities would agree to let the cartels do business. The offer leaked to the press, prompting speculation about whether the government might negotiate.

The mere suggestion of a negotiation made García Luna angry. "Look, I'll tell you with all forcefulness, we are not going to make a pact with anyone," he said. "We are obligated to confront crime. That is our job, that is our duty, and we will not consider a pact." And with that, he changed the subject.

Until quite recently, however, pacts between the government and the cartels, spoken or unspoken, were the norm. For most of the 20th century, Mexico was ruled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The P.R.I. was authoritarian and corrupt, but these traits offered certain advantages when dealing with the drug trade. Political power was centralized and tightly controlled. For a cartel, buying off a key figure in the P.R.I. was enough to guarantee dominance on a patch of territory. In exchange, the cartel had to keep the killing at a tolerable level and to stay off other cartels' turf. Having accepted the drug trade's existence, the government could act as an arbiter and as a check on violence. These arrangements were what García Luna refers to as "the historical laws of corruption" — and they are precisely what he sees it as his task to break.

"In some cases," Jeffrey Davidow, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico in the final years of the P.R.I., told me, "there was absolute corruption, in the sense that the cartels would go to the governor or a mayor and say, 'Here's the money, don't bother us.' In other cases, and this might have been more common, the cartels would say, 'Look, we're going to do business here — don't bother us, and we won't bother you.' It was a matter of reaching accommodation. There were reports that if the cartel had to kill anyone, they would take that person across state lines and kill them in the neighboring state."

In the latter half of the '90s, Mexico's one-party political system started to open up, and in the 2000 presidential election, the P.R.I. lost power to Vicente Fox, a former Coca-Cola executive running under the banner of the National Action Party. The transition to democracy was a moment of great hope for Mexico. But it also undermined the system of de facto regulation of the drug trade. "What happened," explains Luis Astorga, a Mexican scholar who studies the history of drug trafficking, "is that the state ceased being the referee of disputes and an apparatus that had the capacity to control, contain and simultaneously protect these groups. If there is no referee, the cartels will have to resolve disputes themselves, and drug traffickers don't do this by having meetings."

García Luna became a key player in Mexico's antidrug efforts while this transition was taking place. "When we went in, we staked everything on taking on the heads of the criminal structure, going after the bosses," he told me. The government has captured or killed some of the top figures in the Mexican cartels — several of the Arellano Félix brothers of Tijuana, Alfredo Beltrán Leyva of Sinaloa and Osiel Cárdenas Guillén of the Gulf cartel, which dominates the border towns abutting southeastern Texas. "The idea," García Luna said, "was that by taking off the head, the body would stop functioning." Instead, he noted ruefully, "the assassins took control."

Rather than destroying the cartels, the government's high-level strikes transformed the cartels from hierarchical organizations with commanding figures at the top to unruly mobs of men vying for power. The cartel's hit men and hired muscle began shooting and slaughtering their way into the upper ranks of the organizations. "The government has gotten rid of some of the old bosses, but now we've got ourselves new leaders who are less sophisticated and more violent," a top Mexican intelligence official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told me.

There have also been changes in the drug trade itself. As Mexico has grown more prosperous, domestic drug use — driven in part by cartel employees who are paid in product — has grown considerably. Trafficking patterns have shifted as well. As Colombian cartels were weakened by a U.S.-backed government crackdown starting in the 1990s, and Caribbean routes became riskier for traffickers, Mexicans started taking over — just as a Nafta-induced trade boom made it easier than ever to get drugs across the border. The Mexican cartels long ago replaced the Colombians as the dominant players in the global cocaine trade. Now, according to U.S. government figures, about 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States enters by land from Mexico.

When I met García Luna in Washington in January, soon after the shootout in Tijuana made headlines in the United States, he was carrying with him a manila envelope full of color photographs. The photographs were grisly full-color shots of dead Mexican police and narco gun caches — a police officer bleeding on the ground; the aftermath of the shootout; the underground firing range. García Luna thought of them as a sort of secret weapon of his own.

García Luna was in Washington to make the rounds of U.S. government agencies and Congressional offices — visiting those who would have to approve and implement the Merida Initiative, a $1.4 billion package of counternarcotics aid that the Bush administration proposed. (Congress has since authorized $400 million worth of aid to Mexico for next year, including equipment and technical support for García Luna's police.) Seeming out of his element in the government buildings and think tanks — unlike many powerful Mexicans, he does not speak much English (all of my interviews with him were conducted in Spanish) — García Luna met with government officials and diplomats and gave a stilted power-point presentation to policy experts. He seemed more interested in the photographs he had brought, his way of making a blunt point about a touchy aspect of U.S.-Mexican relations: the vast majority of weapons in the cartel's arsenals (80 to 90 percent, according to the Mexican government's figures) are purchased in the United States, often at loosely regulated gun shows, and smuggled into Mexico by the same networks that smuggle drugs the opposite direction. García Luna has a hard time concealing his anger about the fact that U.S. laws make it difficult to do much about this "brutal flow" of firepower. "How is it possible," he asked me, "that a person is allowed to go buy a hundred cuernos de chivo" — AK-47's — "for himself?" In the United States, he said, "there was a lot of indifference."

In meetings with U.S. officials, García Luna passed around the photographs, with little fanfare or preface. Davy Aguilera, the Mexico attaché for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, who was present for one of García Luna's presentations, said that the images of gun violence "made a real impression inside the Beltway." Many U.S. officials have come to share García Luna's frustration. "You take the guns away and you'll win," a senior Senate staff member who worked on the Merida Initiative (and who is not authorized to talk publicly about legislation that came out of his committee) said to me. "But if you can't deal with the issue of guns, you're not going to see much progress. They're finding unopened boxes of AK-47's."

García Luna told me that "the most important thing is co-responsibility" — an acknowledgment that the United States owes Mexico its support in a long and difficult war. The point of this acknowledgment is not just symbolism. The narcos, he explained, "terrorize the community to build their own social base through intimidation, through fear, so that they can carry out their criminal activities with impunity." U.S. support would help bolster the message that the good guys will not back down. Projecting toughness and resolve, as García Luna sees it, may be the most important weapon of all.

The cartels seem to understand this way of thinking, and they try to send the opposite message: the bad guys will never back down, either. In 2005, they started posting videos of gangland executions on YouTube. It was, García Luna and others have argued, a gimmick copied directly from insurgents in Iraq. "It was truly brutal. There was postproduction, editing, special effects," he pointed out. "These were not just videos meant to show what had happened." They were, rather, shots in the media war, meant to grab headlines and persuade the Mexican people that resistance is futile. It did not help the government's cause that some of the videos seemed to show the involvement of the police in cartel executions — including police officers operating under García Luna's command.

García Luna generally wins praise for acknowledging just how central police corruption is to the drug trade. He has ordered a substantive overhaul of the police, including new educational requirements and higher salaries for incoming officers. He has removed almost 300 federal police commanders, replacing them with trusted officers trained at a new police academy. U.S. counternarcotics officials tend to view the key people under García Luna's command as an honest core that can be trusted with U.S.-acquired intelligence. That improved intelligence-sharing has led to some high-profile successes in the past year: the seizure of more than 23 tons of cocaine, the biggest bust ever; the arrest of a legendary cartel figure known as the Queen of the Pacific; the discovery of $207 million in supposedly methamphetamine-related cash stashed in the walls of a Mexico City home. "The intel sharing has been key in all of those," Steve Robertson, a D.E.A. special agent who works on Mexico, told me.

Still, the sheer amount of money involved makes some police corruption as well as other high-level corruption almost inevitable. U.S. and Mexican observers alike are quick to hedge their praise of García Luna's efforts, often with a bit of history. In 1997, Mexico's newly appointed drug czar, an army general named Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, was arrested for working with the Juárez cartel. For months before that, he was celebrated as the tough, honest new face of Mexican counternarcotics.

"In Tamaulipas, you never know who is with you and who is against you." Edgar Millán, the federal police chief, made this pronouncement as we drove through a scrubland of farms, factories, fast food and truck traffic in the state, which lies just across the border from South Texas. Conveniently for the cartels, Tamaulipas also has a major port on the Gulf of Mexico. Cocaine comes to Mexico by sea, stashed in cargo from South or Central America, and then is smuggled into the United States in one of the millions of private vehicles or shipping containers that cross every year. In a single day, thousands of cars and trucks enter the United States from Tamaulipas alone. Enough cocaine to supply American demand for a year, a market worth some $35 billion, might fill a dozen or so tractor-trailers.

Tamaulipas has been one of the bloodiest fronts in Mexico's war on drugs for several years. And as in Tijuana, this year started out on a bad note. "We had to show the cartels that the Mexican state was not going to back off," Millán told me as we rode along the U.S. border in an armored pickup truck. We were in the middle of what is considered the stronghold of the Zetas, a group of former Mexican special-forces operatives who formed a paramilitary cell for the Tamaulipas-based Gulf cartel. The Zetas had become the most feared force in Mexico. "For them, this zone was untouchable," Millán said. "We practically couldn't come here." Several years ago, Mexico captured the Gulf cartel's boss, Osiel Cárdenas, and proclaimed a major victory. But that only left the Zetas to run the business on their own and made the rival Sinaloa cartel think it might have an opportunity to move into Tamaulipas. As a result, the Zetas were warring among themselves for control while also trying to fend off Sinaloa operatives.

When we got to the small border town of Río Bravo, Millán directed his driver to go to a former cartel safe house, near where the police engaged in a lengthy shootout with Zeta gunmen at the beginning of this year. Millán pointed out locations where bodies had fallen and grenades had landed. He hardly thought it worth noting that the safe house is directly across the street from the local police station. When I asked him about it, he shrugged. "The power and money of the cartels allows them to recruit police at every level," he said. "Local police forces have the most contact, the most presence in the streets, so they are the most infiltrated." Local taxi drivers also serve as a statewide surveillance network for the cartels, Millán explained.

Despite the poor start to the year, by spring García Luna was holding up Tamaulipas as evidence of what his strategy could achieve. Millán agreed that, after months of a heavy federal police and military presence — of checkpoints on the main highways, of targeted raids on suspected cartel houses, of "neutralizing" corrupt local police commanders — things had improved. "We have retaken the area," Millán told me. We stopped at a police checkpoint, where officers searched cars while half a dozen men with assault rifles looked on. "It continues to be dangerous, it continues to be difficult," he said. "But our commitment is clear. We are going to win this war." He summoned the commander overseeing the checkpoint, who explained how the police presence has affected the behavior of the cartels. "Now they are operating with a lower profile," he said. I asked him what that meant. "It doesn't mean they are stopping their business," he responded. "They are always looking for new strategies." The police have driven them off the main roads, so "they are using the dirt roads in the fields" to continue trafficking.

Later, I asked García Luna if this was an acceptable definition of success in the war on drugs: violence down, the police seemingly in charge, the cartels operating less conspicuously and less violently. He ducked the question but did not dispute the implication. "Given the temptation," he said, "there are people who are always going to play the game, whether by airplane or helicopter, by land, by sea, because there is a real market. ... There is no product like it in the world." (When I asked David Johnson, the assistant secretary of state for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, about the reason for mounting drug violence in Mexico, he said, without prompting, "In significant measure, it grows out of violent people taking advantage of the continuing strong demand in the United States.") García Luna mentioned Colombia, invoking an analogy that Mexican and U.S. officials generally resist. Colombia has received billions of dollars in U.S. anti-drug aid under Plan Colombia, and violence has fallen significantly in the past several years. "Do you know how much the amount of drugs leaving Colombia has gone down?" García Luna asked me. "Check," he said with a smile. And indeed, by all evidence, there has been no significant decrease in drug flows out of Colombia or in the availability of cocaine or heroin in the United States — and yet, Colombia is considered a success story.

In a recent interview with a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, Mexico's attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora, acknowledged that the objective "cannot be destroying narcotrafficking or drug-related crime." "Trying to get rid of consumption and trafficking," he said, "is impossible." Jorge Chabat explained to me: "The strategy of the government is to turn the big cartels into lots of small cartels. If you have 50 small cartels instead of four big cartels, first you have less international pressure, and second, you will have violence in the short term, but in the long term you will have much less violence."

Achieving even that goal means changing the balance between the government and the cartels — and that may be a much bloodier task than García Luna and many Mexicans anticipate. The police have uncovered plots against top law-enforcement officials in Mexico City involving grenades and rocket launchers. The attorney general's office recently released statistics showing that under Calderón's government, almost 500 law-enforcement personnel — some of them clean, some of them surely corrupt — have been killed in drug violence. One border police chief even sought asylum in the United States. And in recent polls, Mexicans have expressed growing doubt that the authorities are up to the fight: 56 percent say they believe that the cartels are more powerful than the government, while just 23 percent say they believe the government is more powerful than the cartels. But García Luna and his men contend that they will not back down until the cartels have been broken. As Millán told me in Tamaulipas, "They think we will step back, but on the contrary, we will attack them harder."

A few weeks later, Millán was shot to death in an apartment in Mexico City. A disgruntled former federal cop had reportedly sold information about Millán's movements to the Sinaloa cartel. Two other federal police officials close to García Luna were also killed around the same time; another senior officer and his bodyguard were gunned down in June while eating lunch in Mexico City.

I asked García Luna recently whether the fight was worth it, for him personally and for Mexico. "This has been my life," he said, suggesting that such a calculation was not possible for him: he will fight because that is what he does. "I have been chosen to live this," he went on. "I have 20 years of it, and this position is the summit of my career. I feel a personal obligation." García Luna argues that Mexico is in a moment of violent transformation and that the only way through is to keep pushing forward. To Americans, he likes to bring up the example of the Mafia, to show that this has nothing to do with Mexican incompetence or corruption. "That is how it has been all over the world," he said. "Look at Chicago, New York, Italy."

García Luna had begun repeating the same phrase Millán used, which has turned into something of a mantra — ni un paso atrás, "not a step back." When I asked him about when violence would begin to decline, he became frustrated. "Is it costly?" he said. "Yes, it is costly. You have to face it." Over his shoulder was a small statue of Don Quixote, which he keeps on a shelf behind his desk.

For her 13th birthday, my daughter wanted to go to the mall with her friend Jacqueline. This was not the mall near our house, but a discount mall we had never visited. We don't have a TV (my husband and I choose not to), but my daughter heard about the place from the girls at school. She looked it up on the Internet, repeatedly went over all the stores, made a list of the ones she wanted to visit and decided that it was indeed worth the half-hour drive.

I hate malls, but I was not about to drop the girls off by themselves. I invited Jacqueline's mom to come with us. I didn't tell her that I was inviting her because I hated malls and needed someone to listen to me complain about malls. I just told her that lunch was on me. I like Jacqueline's mom, and I would have preferred taking her somewhere where I would not be in a prolonged bad mood, but daughters turn 13 only once, and it was hard to say no to her one birthday request.

My aversion to malls goes back to when I was 7. That was the year we moved to America from Iran. One of the first times we went to a mall, a man approached us, talking with urgency. We didn't speak English, but my brother Farid said this man was selling a religion. We let him know that we spoke only Persian, but then he pulled out a sheet of paper, in Persian! He wanted to tell us about Jesus Christ. We told him we were Muslim, which felt like cheating since we never practiced Islam. My dad even ate ham. But this man was not deterred. He was pumped up! We finally got rid of him, but from then on I decided that malls were places to approach with caution, and maybe with a Koran, a Bible and the Torah for good measure.

Thirty years later, my dislike for malls has nothing to do with religion but with culture. Right around the time junior-high-school girls started wearing thongs, I decided that there was something very wrong with the choices being offered to young girls and that malls epitomized this wrong something. At one point I sat my daughter down for a talk about it. I explained to her that my dream for her was that she would do whatever she wanted in life. I told her that my beloved Aunt Sedigeh had to marry when she was 14, even though she was the smartest person in the family. That was life in Iran back then, I said, but this is America! Girls can do, in theory, anything they want. But there are so many bad choices to navigate, and as far as I'm concerned, I told her, certain clothing and the mindless desire for it are the beginning of the end. My daughter told me that she understood about my aunt because, Lord knows, this was not the first time she had heard that story, but that she still liked going to the mall.

On the day of our big excursion, I packed two protein bars and timed our trip to get there right when it opened to avoid any parking drama. When we arrived there were almost no other cars. The girls could barely contain their excitement, so we decided to let them go off by themselves for an hour. This particular indoor mall had not only endless stores but also rows of portable kiosks in front of and in between the stores. It reminded me of a science experiment in grade school: the teacher put big rocks in a jar; then when you thought it was full, she added some smaller rocks. Then when you thought it was full, she added water. This mall was just missing the water. The kiosks were in every nook and cranny, selling key chains shaped like the 50 states, costumes for pets, bamboo plants, personalized lollipops and nail decals.

"Can't you just see the trajectory from dressing your pug in faux leopard to wearing palm-tree nail decals to deciding you don't want to go to college?" I asked Jacqueline's mom. She couldn't quite see it, but she could see the Neiman Marcus outlet.

We went in, and the next thing I knew I was on my third trip to the fitting room, arms loaded with clothes I could not normally afford. That's when Jacqueline's mom told me that we had forgotten to meet the girls. "Let's come back," I said, parting with the clothes longingly, experiencing a feeling usually reserved for loved ones leaving on trips overseas.

The mall was crowded by this time, and we passed groups of teenage girls with too much makeup; sari-clad Indian women shopping with multiple generations of their families; Hispanic guys checking out Hispanic girls who were all dolled up; and moms with toddlers, strollers, diaper bags and sippy cups. We found the girls at our designated meeting spot. "You're 15 minutes late," my daughter said. "We were worried." I apologized to the responsible members of our party, explaining how I'd gotten caught up in all the great Dana Buchman outfits.

In the end, my daughter gave me a lesson not only in punctuality but also in restraint, buying one pair of jeans and one blouse and no nail decals. Which is less than I can say.

WASHINGTON -- It began with a twitter from one of Capitol Hill's best-known technophiles.

"I just learned the Dems are trying to censor Congressmen's ability to use Twitter Qik YouTube Utterz etc -- outrageous and I will fight them," Representative John Culberson, Republican of Texas, wrote last Tuesday on his personal page on the online text-messaging site Twitter, where he posts a daily, rapid-fire log of his thoughts. Messages on twitter are called tweets.

A few hours after he posted his first complaint (always 140 characters or less when twittering), Mr. Culberson logged back .. I could post a Tweet I would have to get approval of the twits that run the House!" And an hour later: "The Dems will do this unless the Internet community stops them."

Mr. Culberson was responding to a proposal by Representative Michael E. Capuano, chairman of the franking committee, that would impose new guidelines on legislators who post videos on external Web sites like YouTube.

Mr. Capuano, Democrat of Massachusetts, who made the recommendations last month, said they were intended to prevent members from using public money to communicate on outside Web sites featuring commercial and political advertisements.

But some Republicans, like Mr. Culberson and Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House minority leader, are crying foul. They say the proposals are an attack on free speech and fear that Democrats will seek more restrictions.

"Leadership has told me personally that they will next focus on limiting our access to text, blogs, and other social media outlets on the Internet," Mr. Culberson said in an interview.

It was a charge that Mr. Capuano rejected. "We are not currently seeking to address anything other than video -- not blog postings, online chats or any other written form of communication anywhere on the Internet," he said in a statement. "Any assertion to the contrary is a lie."

What started as a microprotest on Mr. Culberson's Twitter page became a macroconflict on Capitol Hill with the two sides feuding on blogs, BlackBerrys and the old-fashioned way -- face-to-face meetings in the halls of Congress. Even there technology has become a weapon in the debate.

Mr. Culberson cornered Mr. Capuano last Wednesday and tried, as he put it, to "interview" him with his video-enabled cellphone ("a Nokia 95 with eight gigabytes of memory," he boasted) with plans to post it to his personal page on Qik, a video-streaming Web site. Mr. Capuano declined.

Mr. Boehner's "G.O.P Leader" blog featured a post entitled, "New Government Censorship? We're Not Laughing."

It did not take long for all the agitating in Congress to reverberate on the Internet. The popular conservative blog, Red State, declared, "Whatever intention the Democrats have, this idea is ridiculous. Congressmen should be able to decide for themselves where and how they interact with their constituents and the American people."

The Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes transparency in government, announced a "Let Our Congress Tweet" campaign with an accompanying Web site and online petition.

On Thursday, all the e-chatter drew a stern response from the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, who, in a letter to Mr. Boehner, rebuffed what she called "inaccurate rumors" that the Democrats were trying to muzzle members of Congress.

Noting her own technological bona fides ("I have a blog, use YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Digg, and other new media to communicate with constituents"), Ms. Pelosi said that the Democrats' proposal would relax rules that prohibit members from posting on sites other than the House.gov domain.

The two sides appeared to agree that antiquated House rules needed to be refreshed. Mr. Capuano wants Web sites where lawmakers post videos to be scrubbed of advertising -- "from the latest Hollywood blockbuster to Viagra," he said -- and political messages that could be seen as endorsements.

"I wouldn't want my stuff appearing next to an ad for John McCain," he said.

But Mr. Culberson, after taking suggestions from hundreds of online "followers" on his Twitter site, drew up a counterproposal on Friday, calling on House leaders to lift nearly all restrictions on external content.

"There are no restrictions on our ability to conduct, radio, television or newspaper interviews or conversations in our official capacity," so why, Mr. Culberson asked, should the Internet be different?

Changing the rules would require approval from the House Administration Committee. The Senate, which has similar external use prohibitions, is also considering updating its standards.

Although the high-tech debate may come down to old-fashioned partisan differences, Mr. Culberson and Mr. Capuano both said they ultimately wanted to help Congress make the leap into the 21st century.

But with all of Mr. Culberson's new media sensibilities, he said it sometimes seemed as if "the franking committee does not know what do to with me." Mr. Capuano insisted that he was every bit as interested in modernizing Congress but was just fine with his official Web site -- without the twittering and live video chats.

"If someone wants to twitter away all day long, that's fine," Mr. Capuano said in an interview. "I don't think my constituents want to hear from me all that often."

LOS ANGELES — Ever since Microsoft waded into the video game wars with the introduction of the original Xbox in 2001, the company has spared little expense in attempting to establish its bona fides with hardcore gamers. From the physical appearance of the first Xbox — hulking, extruded black plastic — to the testosterone-laden, shoot-' em-up essence of Microsoft's signature game franchise, Halo, Microsoft's first, perhaps only, priority has been to reach out to the young men at gaming's historical roots.

Until now. In a significant shift for the company, Microsoft on Monday unveiled a new strategy for its gaming unit that is meant to help the company's Xbox 360 console appeal to the mainstream. Lured by games and consoles like Guitar Hero, The Sims, World of Warcraft and Nintendo's Wii, millions of consumers who would never have thought of themselves as gamers have begun to play video games in recent years. By some projections, the global game industry could approach $50 billion in revenue this year, propelled mostly by gaming's soaring mainstream popularity.

So on Monday at the annual E3 convention here, Microsoft announced a collection of new games and services for the Xbox 360 that are meant to appeal to the everyday entertainment consumer.

"For the last few years we have consciously and continuously fed the core gamer audience, and now we are reaching that inflection point where we have to reach out to the mainstream consumer and bring them into the Xbox 360," David Hufford, Microsoft's director for Xbox product management, said in an interview.

"Everyone plays video games now or has an interest in playing video games," he said. "So we have to appeal to the mainstream more than ever now. And what really is appealing to that mainstream consumer is that social experience, in the living room or online. Whether it's the older consumer or the Facebook generation, they see games not as a solitary experience but as something you do with friends and family, and that's what we want to deliver this fall."

At the core of Microsoft's new initiative is a new interface for the Xbox 360 that incorporates humanlike avatars representing each player. Users will be able to customize their avatars and socialize with other Xbox users, even outside of any particular game. Nintendo has been successful using a similar approach with its Wii, where each person creates a more cartoony figure called a Mii. Sony is also working on such a system with a new service for its PlayStation 3 called Home.

In Microsoft's system, Xbox users will be able to share photos with one another across the Xbox Live network and also watch movies together in real time, even if the consumers are thousands of miles apart.

In addition to the new avatar system, Microsoft announced a partnership with Netflix, so Netflix subscribers can watch any of more than 10,000 movies and television programs over their Xbox 360. Microsoft already offers some films and TV shows for download and on Monday the company announced that its Xbox Live service had generated more than $1 billion in revenue since the Xbox 360's debut in 2005.

Driving home the company's new push for mainstream consumers, the company also unveiled new family-oriented games including a new entry in its Viva Pinata franchise and a madcap B-movie simulator called "You're in the Movies."

But a video game business cannot survive on family-friendly fare alone. To appeal to more traditionally discerning gamers, Microsoft offered a well-received look at the post-apocalyptic role-playing Fallout 3 and Gears of War 2, sequel to one of the best games of 2006.

Perhaps of most interest to serious gamers, Square Enix of Japan showed a lusciously beautiful trailer at the Microsoft briefing from its coming game Final Fantasy XIII, which is scheduled to be released next year. Previous Final Fantasy games have been available only on Sony consoles, but, in a major coup for Microsoft, Square Enix announced that FF13 would also be released for the Xbox 360.

Later in the day, Electronic Arts, the big United States game publisher, held its own media presentation to show off its lineup for the holiday season and next year. Predictably, Spore, the evolutionary biology simulator from Will Wright, creator of SimCity and The Sims, looked almost frighteningly addictive. Spore is scheduled to be released in September, and Mr. Wright said that players had already created more than 1.7 million fictional species using the game's demonstration version.

E.A. has long been a leader in appealing to casual gamers. To reinforce that success, the company showed off a new game called SimAnimals, which appears poised to do well among girls and children. The company also moved to reinforce its credibility with core gamers which looks at Dragon Age Origins, from the BioWare studio, and Left 4 Dead, a survival horror game from the Valve studio. Both BioWare and Valve are among the most respected game developers in the world.

In a surprise move, E.A. announced a publishing partnership with id Software, the inventors of the first-person shooter genre and the famous developers of the seminal Doom and Quake franchises. John Carmack, an id lead programmer, showed a brief snippet from id's coming game Rage.

But the surprise hit of the E.A. news conference was a new science-fiction horror game called Dead Space, which is scheduled to be released for PCs, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in October. Not for children and not for the squeamish, Dead Space takes place on a space station where something has gone horribly, terribly wrong (the combat revolves around what was described at the presentation as strategic dismemberment). The quality of the animation and the evocative tension and fear of its presentation appeared to be of a very high quality, as long as you don't mind flying body parts.

Nintendo and Sony are scheduled to hold their major briefings on Tuesday.

WE know what a criminal White House looks like from "The Final Days," Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's classic account of Richard Nixon's unraveling. The cauldron of lies, paranoia and illegal surveillance boiled over, until it was finally every man for himself as desperate courtiers scrambled to save their reputations and, in a few patriotic instances, their country.

"The Final Days" was published in 1976, two years after Nixon abdicated in disgrace. With the Bush presidency, no journalist (or turncoat White House memoirist) is waiting for the corpse to be carted away. The latest and perhaps most chilling example arrives this week from Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, long a relentless journalist on the war-on-terror torture beat. Her book "The Dark Side" connects the dots of her own past reporting and that of her top-tier colleagues (including James Risen and Scott Shane of The New York Times) to portray a White House that, like its prototype, savaged its enemies within almost as ferociously as it did the Constitution.

Some of "The Dark Side" seems right out of "The Final Days," minus Nixon's operatic boozing and weeping. We learn, for instance, that in 2004 two conservative Republican Justice Department officials had become "so paranoid" that "they actually thought they might be in physical danger." The fear of being wiretapped by their own peers drove them to speak in code.

The men were John Ashcroft's deputy attorney general, James Comey, and an assistant attorney general, Jack Goldsmith. Their sin was to challenge the White House's don, Dick Cheney, and his consigliere, his chief of staff David Addington, when they circumvented the Geneva Conventions to make torture the covert law of the land. Mr. Comey and Mr. Goldsmith failed to stop the "torture memos" and are long gone from the White House. But Vice President Cheney and Mr. Addington remain enabled by a president, attorney general (Michael Mukasey) and C.I.A. director (Michael Hayden) who won't shut the door firmly on torture even now.

Nixon parallels take us only so far, however. "The Dark Side" is scarier than "The Final Days" because these final days aren't over yet and because the stakes are much higher. Watergate was all about a paranoid president's narcissistic determination to cling to power at any cost. In Ms. Mayer's portrayal of the Bush White House, the president is a secondary, even passive, figure, and the motives invoked by Mr. Cheney to restore Nixon-style executive powers are theoretically selfless. Possessed by the ticking-bomb scenarios of television's "24," all they want to do is protect America from further terrorist strikes.

So what if they cut corners, the administration's last defenders argue. While prissy lawyers insist on habeas corpus and court-issued wiretap warrants, the rest of us are being kept safe by the Cheney posse.

But are we safe? As Al Qaeda and the Taliban surge this summer, that single question is even more urgent than the moral and legal issues attending torture.

On those larger issues, the evidence is in, merely awaiting adjudication. Mr. Bush's 2005 proclamation that "we do not torture" was long ago revealed as a lie. Antonio Taguba, the retired major general who investigated detainee abuse for the Army, concluded that "there is no longer any doubt" that "war crimes were committed." Ms. Mayer uncovered another damning verdict: Red Cross investigators flatly told the C.I.A. last year that America was practicing torture and vulnerable to war-crimes charges.

Top Bush hands are starting to get sweaty about where they left their fingerprints. Scapegoating the rotten apples at the bottom of the military's barrel may not be a slam-dunk escape route from accountability anymore.

No wonder the former Rumsfeld capo, Douglas Feith, is trying to discredit a damaging interview he gave to the British lawyer Philippe Sands for another recent and essential book on what happened, "Torture Team." After Mr. Sands previewed his findings in the May issue of Vanity Fair, Mr. Feith protested he had been misquoted — apparently forgetting that Mr. Sands had taped the interview. Mr. Feith and Mr. Sands are scheduled to square off in a House hearing this Tuesday.

So hot is the speculation that war-crimes trials will eventually follow in foreign or international courts that Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, has publicly advised Mr. Feith, Mr. Addington and Alberto Gonzales, among others, to "never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel." But while we wait for the wheels of justice to grind slowly, there are immediate fears to tend. Ms. Mayer's book helps cement the case that America's use of torture has betrayed not just American values but our national security, right to the present day.

In her telling, a major incentive for Mr. Cheney's descent into the dark side was to cover up for the Bush White House's failure to heed the Qaeda threat in 2001. Jack Cloonan, a special agent for the F.B.I.'s Osama bin Laden unit until 2002, told Ms. Mayer that Sept. 11 was "all preventable." By March 2000, according to the C.I.A.'s inspector general, "50 or 60 individuals" in the agency knew that two Al Qaeda suspects — soon to be hijackers — were in America. But there was no urgency at the top. Thomas Pickard, the acting F.B.I. director in the summer of 2001, told Ms. Mayer that when he expressed his fears about the Qaeda threat to Mr. Ashcroft, the attorney general snapped, "I don't want to hear about that anymore!"

After 9/11, our government emphasized "interrogation over due process," Ms. Mayer writes, "to pre-empt future attacks before they materialized." But in reality torture may well be enabling future attacks. This is not just because Abu Ghraib snapshots have been used as recruitment tools by jihadists. No less destructive are the false confessions inevitably elicited from tortured detainees. The avalanche of misinformation since 9/11 has compromised prosecutions, allowed other culprits to escape and sent the American military on wild-goose chases. The coerced "confession" to the murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to take one horrific example, may have been invented to protect the real murderer.

The biggest torture-fueled wild-goose chase, of course, is the war in Iraq. Exhibit A, revisited in "The Dark Side," is Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an accused Qaeda commander whose torture was outsourced by the C.I.A. to Egypt. His fabricated tales of Saddam's biological and chemical W.M.D. — and of nonexistent links between Iraq and Al Qaeda — were cited by President Bush in his fateful Oct. 7, 2002, Cincinnati speech ginning up the war and by Mr. Powell in his subsequent United Nations presentation on Iraqi weaponry. Two F.B.I. officials told Ms. Mayer that Mr. al-Libi later explained his lies by saying: "They were killing me. I had to tell them something."

That "something" was crucial in sending us into the quagmire that, five years later, has empowered Iran and compromised our ability to counter the very terrorists that torture was supposed to thwart. As The Times reported two weeks ago, Iraq has monopolized our military and intelligence resources to the point where we don't have enough predator drones or expert C.I.A. field agents to survey the tribal areas where terrorists are amassing in Pakistan. Meanwhile, the threat to America from Al Qaeda is "comparable to what it faced on Sept. 11, 2001," said Seth Jones, a RAND Corporation terrorism expert and Pentagon consultant. The difference between now and then is simply that the base of operations has moved, "roughly the difference from New York to Philadelphia."

Yet once again terrorism has fallen off America's map, landing at or near the bottom of voters' concerns in recent polls. There were major attacks in rapid succession last week in Pakistan, Afghanistan (the deadliest in Kabul since we "defeated" the Taliban in 2001) and at the American consulate in Turkey. Who listened to this ticking time bomb? It's reminiscent of July 2001, when few noticed that the Algerian convicted of trying to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on the eve of the millennium testified that he had been trained in bin Laden's Afghanistan camps as part of a larger plot against America.

In last Sunday's Washington Post, the national security expert Daniel Benjamin sounded an alarm about the "chronic" indecisiveness and poor execution of Bush national security policy as well as the continuing inadequacies of the Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Benjamin must feel a sinking sense of déjà vu. Exactly seven years ago in the same newspaper, just two months before 9/11, he co-wrote an article headlined "Defusing a Time Bomb" imploring the Bush administration in vain to pay attention to Afghanistan because that country's terrorists "continue to pose the most dangerous threat to American lives."

And so we're back where we started in the summer of 2001, with even shark attacks and Chandra Levy's murder (courtesy of a new Washington Post investigation) returning to the news. We are once again distracted and unprepared while the Taliban and bin Laden's minions multiply in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This, no less than the defiling of the Constitution, is the legacy of an administration that not merely rationalized the immorality of torture but shackled our national security to the absurdity that torture could easily fix the terrorist threat.

That's why the Bush White House's corruption in the end surpasses Nixon's. We can no longer take cold comfort in the Watergate maxim that the cover-up was worse than the crime. This time the crime is worse than the cover-up, and the punishment could rain down on us all.

ROME

ROBERTO SAVIANO jokes that he has a mobster's face, which, if true, has done nothing to endear him to the real criminals he writes about. They despise him, so much so that Mr. Saviano, 28, has been forced to live in hiding under state protection, a sort of Salman Rushdie in Italy's still unresolved struggle against organized crime.

The distaste is mutual.

"I have always hated them, a personal hatred, not just an intellectual one," Mr. Saviano said in the safety of his publisher's office here, with his three well-armed police bodyguards waiting outside on the street. "It is a very personal hatred because they ruined my country, forced people to emigrate, killed honest people." By his count, 3,600 have been killed in the area where he grew up, outside Naples, since he was born in 1979.

"I know where to hit them to make them angry," he added.

Mr. Saviano became famous in Italy after the 2006 release of his first book, an up-close account of the inner workings of the Camorra, the crime group that has operated around Naples for more than a century. The title was provocative: "Gomorrah," a biblical wordplay invoking sin and degeneracy. The subject was notable: little has been written about the Camorra, whereas books and films about the Sicilian Mafia have flourished for many decades.

But "Gomorrah" (Arnoldo Mondadori Editore) went beyond expectations. It sold 750,000 copies here and was just released in the United States, partly because of the way Mr. Saviano wrote it: it is a literary scream that names names, of the killers and the killed, in a style inspired by the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini's broad unflinching criticism of Italy and by Truman Capote's devotion to dirty detail.

"When you die on the street, you're surrounded by a tremendous racket," he writes, describing one of scores of slayings he bumped into as a teenager in the town of Casal di Principe, then went out seeking as an adult researching his book. "It's not true that you die alone. Unfamiliar faces right in front of your nose, people touching your legs and arms to see if you're already dead or if it's worth calling an ambulance.

"All the faces of the seriously wounded, all the expressions of the dying, seem to share the same fear. And the same shame. It may seem strange, but in the instant before death there is a sort of shame or humiliation."

Shame has been no small part of the complicated reaction here to Mr. Saviano and his book, despite its ongoing success. It has sold well in translation around Europe, notably in France and Germany. A movie in Italian is being filmed, and a stage version has opened in Naples, though Mr. Saviano did not attend the opening for security reasons. But with the strong desire in Italy to shed its identification with organized crime, the book cut too close to truth to make him a popular man here.

"No one will forgive me for what I did," he said in the interview. "I gave attention to a world that creates problems for the honest part of my country. And also some of the honest ones in my country hate me because I spoke of crime. It is as though I had reduced Italy only to the part of it that is criminal. I don't think I did that."

RECENT news seems to support Mr. Saviano's view of the pervasiveness of the mob: In late October, Italy's small-business group reported that mob activity accounted for the single largest sector of the nation's economy. In August, six Italians linked to the 'Ndrangheta, an elusive crime group from Italy's far south, were killed in Germany — a possibly foreboding expansion of what the group considers its turf.

Mr. Saviano believes that the Camorra — though views differ, he counts it as more powerful than the Mafia or 'Ndrangheta — remains as centrally integrated into life here as ever, a dark and never-purged mirror image of Italy.

Alexander Stille, a professor of journalism at Columbia who wrote one of the most respected books on Italy's struggle with the Sicilian Mafia, "Excellent Cadavers," called the book "very important" for shedding light on an organization that has unjustly "taken second or third billing" compared with the Mafia.

"What the book does so well is to remind people, as if it needed reminding, that a third of the country is essentially condemned to a state of permanent underdevelopment because of the persistent, and in many ways increasing, dominance, of organized crime," he said.

The Camorra is not as well known as the Sicilian Mafia, but much of the lore and romance of mob life was born around Naples. Don Corleone of "The Godfather" was modeled on a Camorra boss, though he was portrayed as Sicilian in the book. The real Lucky Luciano dropped dead of a heart attack in the Naples airport. John Gotti's family was not from Sicily but from a town near Naples, as was Tony Soprano's.

In his book, researched in part by his taking small odd jobs connected to the mob, Mr. Saviano documents the Camorra's recent history, detailing more than just the expected, like its reach in drugs, extortion, high fashion, shipping (increasingly with Chinese gangs) and politics.

He shows other connections, like how Tuscany stays eco-lovely and full of tourists by shipping its trash south illegally, or how money is rarely the first thing on a young mobster's mind. One chapter is called "Women," another "Hollywood," about how mobsters imitate movies as much as movies imitate them.

"People of my age who decide to enter the clan do it less at first for money or power than for fashion, for women, to be a real man," he said. "Because they teach you at an early age how to live with death."

MR. SAVIANO is very much a child of southern Italy, poorer and less developed than the north, drained over nearly a century of people who gave up on Italy to find life elsewhere. His joke about having a mobster's face, with his shadowy eyes and stubble, is not far off the mark. He wears the three rings traditional to the area — for the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

The son of a doctor, Mr. Saviano says he, too, learned the mobster's talent for living with death, growing up in Casal di Principe, home of one of the top Camorra bosses, where he stumbled across his first body in his early teenage years on the way to school. That has served him well over the last year, after the threats started coming. The Camorra, suddenly the topic of a best-selling book, was apparently not happy.

"I can't feel afraid, but this could be one of my limitations," Mr. Saviano said. "It's as if the continuous telling of things, observing things, has perhaps blocked my fear."

Amid other threats as the book gained popularity — and after an appearance in his hometown in which Mr. Saviano publicly challenged Camorra bosses by name, earning both praise for bravery and criticism for being either self-promoting or suicidal — some camorristi were wiretapped discussing Mr. Saviano's "destiny."

"What's required is a public intervention by the state," Umberto Eco, perhaps Italy's most prominent author, wrote at the time. "Let's not leave Saviano alone."

Now Mr. Saviano is never far from his three guards. As he ponders a second book, possibly on crime in Mexico, he knows he will not have the same freedom to report as he did for "Gomorrah." He has no regular home. With Italian crime globalized to a degree that its legitimate businesses are not, when he leaves Italy his bodyguards go, too.

"I have become a type of symbol for them," he said. "I am responsible for all the attention on them."

But now, he said, "If they strike, they will have to spill a lot of blood."

On the bright side, "Gomorrah" is reportedly the most requested book in Italian jails.

As home prices continue to decline and loan defaults mount, federal regulators are bracing for dozens of American banks to fail over the next year.

But after a large mortgage lender in California collapsed late Friday, Wall Street analysts began posing two crucial questions: Just how many banks might falter? And, more urgently, which one could be next?

The nation's banks are in far less danger than they were in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when more than 1,000 federally insured institutions went under during the savings-and-loan crisis. The debacle, the greatest collapse of American financial institutions since the Depression, prompted a government bailout that cost taxpayers about $125 billion.

But the troubles are growing so rapidly at some small and midsize banks that as many as 150 out of the 7,500 banks nationwide could fail over the next 12 to 18 months, analysts say. Other lenders are likely to shut branches or seek mergers.

"Everybody is drawing up lists, trying to figure out who the next bank is, No. 1, and No. 2, how many of them are there," said Richard X. Bove, the banking analyst with Ladenburg Thalmann, who released a list of troubled banks over the weekend. "And No. 3, from the standpoint of Washington, how badly is it going to affect the economy?"

Many investors are on edge after federal regulators seized the California lender, IndyMac Bank, one of the nation's largest savings and loans, last week. With $32 billion in assets, IndyMac, a spinoff of the Countrywide Financial Corporation, was the biggest American lender to fail in more than two decades.

Now, as the Bush administration grapples with the crisis at the nation's two largest mortgage finance companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a rush of earnings reports in the coming days and weeks from some of the nation's largest financial companies are likely to provide more gloomy reminders about the sorry state of the industry.

The future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is vital to the banks, savings and loans and credit unions, which own $1.3 trillion of securities issued or guaranteed by the two mortgage companies. If the mortgage giants ever defaulted on those obligations, banks might be forced to raise billions of dollars in additional capital.

The large institutions set to report results this week, including Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, are in no danger of failing, but some are expected to report more multibillion-dollar write-offs.

But time may be running out for some small and midsize lenders. They vary in size and location, but their common woe is the collapsed real estate market and souring mortgage loans. Most of these banks are far smaller than the industry giants that have drawn so much scrutiny from regulators and investors.

Still, only six lenders have failed so far this year, including IndyMac. In 1994, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation listed 575 banks that it considered to be troubled. As of this spring, the agency was worried about just 90 banks. That number may go up in August, when the government releases an updated list.

"Failed banks are a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator," said William Isaac, who was chairman of the F.D.I.C. in the early 1980s and is now the chairman of the Secura Group, a finance consulting firm in Virginia. "So you will see more troubled, more failed banks this year."

And yet IndyMac, one of the nation's largest mortgage lenders, was not on the government's troubled bank list this spring — an indication that other troubled banks may be below the radar.

The F.D.I.C. has $53 billion set aside to reimburse consumers for deposits lost at failed banks. IndyMac will eat up $4 billion to $8 billion of that fund, the agency estimates, and that could force it to raise more money from the banks that it insures.

The agency does not disclose which banks it thinks are troubled. But analysts are circulating their own lists, and short sellers — investors who bet against stocks — are piling on. In recent weeks, the share prices of some regional banks, like the BankUnited Financial Corporation, in Florida, and the Downey Financial Corporation, in California, have stumbled hard amid concern about their financial health. A BankUnited spokeswoman said the lender had largely avoided risky subprime loans.

In his "Who Is Next?" report over the weekend, Mr. Bove listed the fraction of loans at banks that are nonperforming, meaning, for example, that the assets have been foreclosed on or that payments are 90 days past due. He came up with what he called a danger zone, which was a percentage above 5 percent. Seven banks fell in this category.

An important issue for the regional and community banks will be whether they have managed to sell their riskiest loans to Wall Street firms.

And the government may have fewer failures than in the past because private investment funds might buy some troubled lenders. Regulators are considering rule changes that would allow private equity firms to buy larger shares of banks, and several prominent investors, like Wilbur Ross, have raised funds to leap in.

SAG HARBOR, N.Y.

SOMEONE must sing a proper song of farewell for Shea Stadium, the nice try of a coliseum in Queens, as its dismantling draws near and a new ballpark rises just yards away. But that someone must be able to convey emotions specific to the place, emotions beyond the sadness of many lost Mets summers and the euphoria of two World Series championships. There is so much more.

The romantic idealism and the yeah-right realism. The quickness to mock and to take offense. The need to prove oneself better than any Upper East Side twit and the guilt from having conceived such a hollow ambition. The restlessness, angst and ache of the striver. The Long Island of it all.

Of course the meeting of Shea muckety-mucks to discuss who should sing this farewell probably lasted as long as it took to say: Billy Joel.

Those of you who detest Billy Joel, you self-assured music critics and self-appointed cultural arbiters, you who have Reagan-era flashbacks of being stuck in summertime traffic in a car with only AM radio and hearing "Uptown Girl" or "Pressure" or "Tell Her About It" no matter what button you push and traffic still isn't moving — consider this:

When tickets went on sale several months ago for an absolutely final Shea concert, starring Mr. Joel and taking place this Wednesday, more than 50,000 were sold in 48 minutes; a sellout. Promoters were so, um, touched by this response that they added a final, we mean it this time, absolutely final show for Friday; those tickets sold out in 46 minutes.

That's a lot of Brendas and Eddies buying tickets. Not bad for a 59-year-old piano player who hasn't released an album of new pop songs in 15 years.

A few weeks ago, during a sound check just hours before another sold-out Billy Joel concert at the Mohegan Sun casino in eastern Connecticut, the drummer tested his drums, the saxophone player his sax. Then a short, stocky man in a T-shirt and baseball cap limped up the steps and gimped over to the piano, looking every bit the road-battered stagehand making one last check for Mr. Joel.

He sat down, turned his cap around, propped his coffee mug on the piano — oh, the boss ain't gonna like that — and started fluttering with the keys. A medley of opening strains to old Billy Joel hits echoed through the empty arena, then segued into a little of Beethoven's "Emperor Concerto." Satisfied, the man collected his mug and hobbled offstage to have a cigarette.

Two hours later, this same balding, gray-haired man — Himself, of course — sat before the same piano, in a dark blazer and blue jeans but still looking just as short and stocky. As 10,000 people rose to their feet, a not so angry, not so young, but energetic as hell Billy Joel ripped into the first of two dozen songs, most of them written before the births of the women worshiping him from the front rows.

And here's the thing. He gets it. "I'm just this shlubby guy who plays the piano," he says later.

He knows that save for those large, please-don't-hurt-me eyes, he looks nothing like the bushy-haired young man communing with a white mask on the cover of "The Stranger," the album that launched him into the stratosphere, now being released in a 30th-anniversary deluxe package. (What happened to the 25th anniversary?) Nothing like the baby-faced entertainer asserting in old video loops playing in the casino gift shop that he didn't start the fire — a fire that, post-9/11, seems almost innocent.

While Bruce Springsteen has stalled the aging process through blessed genes or some Faustian bargain, Mr. Joel looks like every heartbreak, bad review, car crash and attendant tabloid dig has exacted a physical toll, so much so that if those adoring young women were to encounter him at the mall, he says, "they wouldn't look twice at me."

But he clearly understands this; he even seizes upon it to mock the myth of the ageless, unapproachable rock star. "I'm from Long Island; I'm not going to delude myself," he says. "I know what I look like. And I want them to know that I know how absurd all this is."

He lets them know by often announcing the release dates — "This next song came out in 1977" — as if to suggest both the song's endurance and a disbelief that he still gets paid to sing it. And he lets them know by poking fun at himself. During this particular Mohegan Sun concert, he recalled a tabloid photograph many years ago of him on the beach, reaching up to hold hands with the tall model Elle Macpherson.

"I looked like Bubbles the Chimp," he told the audience.

One could argue that Mr. Joel can afford to be so self-deprecating. According to the Recording Industry Association of America he is ranked sixth among the top-selling artists of all time, behind the Beatles and Elvis Presley but ahead of Elton John and Barbra Streisand. He has the financial wherewithal to surprise his wife, the cookbook author and television correspondent Katie Lee Joel, with the darnedest thinking-of-you gift: a house in the Hamptons worth roughly $16 million (not to be confused with other multimillion-dollar properties he owns, including an estate in Oyster Bay).

Sitting in another of his homes, this one facing his boat basin in Sag Harbor and large enough so that his collection of vintage motorcycles takes up little space, Mr. Joel says he knows what I am thinking, since I too am from the lower-middle-class middle of Long Island, having grown up 15 miles from Hicksville, his hometown. "I know: rich bastard," he says. "I used to feel awkward about it, but I shrugged it off. It's all luck and sweat. But I earned it — though I can't justify the amounts."

Mr. Joel often expresses an opinion or emotion, then almost immediately holds that opinion or emotion up for analysis, as though running it through some internal truth check. He expresses pride in his work but doesn't want to brag. He makes crazy money but isn't saying he's worth it. He mocks himself before someone else gets the chance.

If you're tired of hearing "Just the Way You Are," well, he's tired of playing it. ("It's a wedding song," he says. "I also feel hypocritical. I divorced the woman I wrote it for.") If you wince when you hear "Honesty," well, so does he, on the inside. ("You hypocrite," he says he thinks to himself. "Since when are you Mr. Sincerity?")

And if he doesn't sing "Uptown Girl," he mimics what you're thinking with a slight rise in his voice: "He's probably mad at Christie." In fact it has nothing to do with Christie Brinkley, his second ex-wife, but with the lost ability to hit the very high notes with consistency.

He may be one of the most successful performers in the world, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an extraordinarily gifted musician who can move from rock to ballad to soulful doo-wop, who can capture with a few spare words the dreams and disappointments of clerks and secretaries rocking their lives away on the Long Island Rail Road.

But he acts as though he still worries what the guys standing outside some 7-Eleven in Hicksville might say, because the worst that they can say is:

He forgot where he came from. He's full of it. A fake.

Mr. Joel is occasionally dismissed as inauthentic, as more of a Tin Pan Alley jinglemeister than a rock musician. While he says the question of authenticity is contrived, he defends himself by resurrecting a couple of pet conspiracy theories. First, he plays piano, suspect instrument of the rich, rather than guitar, revered instrument of the poor. And second, he comes from Long Island — and really, the thought goes, what hard-knocks artistry could possibly emerge from the land of suburban tracts?

The truth is, if rock-star authenticity means having endured pain and tribulation, self-created and otherwise, then Billy Joel sits in the V.I.P. room.

His Jewish grandparents fled Europe to evade the Nazis, leaving behind a successful business. He was 8 when his parents split up and his father returned to Europe. His mother worked as a bookkeeper, paying a few bucks a week for her gifted son's piano lessons. He took up boxing to answer the bullies who teased him about playing the piano; he'll gladly show you the unevenness of his damaged nose. He didn't graduate from high school because he was already a working musician, helping his mother pay bills by performing in bars and clubs from Mineola to Montauk.

Along the way he identified and teased out certain themes about Long Island, his world. He cites a few as he sits in his Sag Harbor home, sipping coffee: how the city that our parents escaped became the first place we wanted to go; how we Long Islanders have an inherent inferiority complex; how we use ridicule and sarcasm to show affection.

"Everything was testing, testing, testing," he says. "Testing your manhood, testing your humor — really, testing your friendship."

He attempted suicide when he was 21 and spent three weeks in a Long Island hospital's psychiatric unit, where he says his time with the profoundly troubled gave him perspective. "I'd go up to the nurse's window and say, 'Hey, I'm O.K., but these other people are really crazy,' " he recalls. "They'd just hand me my Thorazine."

He made it big, really big, then lost money and his trust in some close advisers. He made back his money and more, smashed up cars and motorcycles, and married for a third time, in 2004, to Katie Lee, a woman more than 30 years his junior. A few months later he went into rehab.

"I realized I was still drinking too much," he says. "And I wanted to fix it."

All this has given deeper resonance to his lyrics, many of them written during his precocious youth. When asked which of his songs make him think, Ah, at least I got that one right, he immediately cites two: "Vienna" (1978), a celebration of a life's worth at every age, and "Summer, Highland Falls" (1976), a meditation on emotional extremes. His back and forth between sadness and euphoria may have led to effective songwriting over the years, he says, but he now strives toward the more comfortable middle ground of contentment.

There was a time when he would read a bad review aloud onstage, fulminate and dramatically rip up the article to the cheers of an audience that "most of the time didn't know what I was talking about," he says. Now a bad review doesn't ruin his life. "I think that was a Long Island thing," he says. "Someone would take a swipe, and I felt compelled to swing back."

There was a time when he resented his signature song, "Piano Man," when he simply refused to sing about its Paul, the real-estate novelist, and Davy, forever in the Navy. Now he accepts his role as patron saint of all those who provide wallpaper music in open obscurity, like the slumped man playing for the early-bird crowd at a Sag Harbor restaurant just around the corner.

"I made peace with it," he says — so much so that the song now often closes his concerts.

None of this should suggest that Mr. Joel has achieved a constant state of inner peace. "When I'm low, I'm very low, and when I'm euphoric, I'm very euphoric," he says. "Which is why I seek contentment. And I wish I was less discontent."

These days Mr. Joel works on original instrumental compositions, preferring what he calls a more abstract form of expression. Still, he continues to perform in concert, singing songs he has sung 1,000 times, 10,000 times.

Why?

Because he can. Because it's the greatest job in the world. And, he says, "Because people still want to see me do this."

They do, because they get it too. The Brendas and Eddies of yesterday, who long ago "bought a couple of paintings from Sears," and the Brendas and Eddies of today, buying their wall decorations at Target. Those who moved out and wish they hadn't; those who didn't move out and wish they had. Those who didn't start the fire but lived through it.

A few nights from now they will file into a doomed stadium that will be remembered as much for its tragicomedies as for its triumphs. They will fill those uncomfortable seats. And when a short, stocky, bald man appears onstage, they will roar in recognition.

Anheuser-Busch has agreed to sell itself to the Belgian brewer InBev for about $52 billion, the two companies confirmed Monday in a joint release, putting control of the nation's largest beer maker and a fixture of American culture into a European rival's hands.

The board of both companies have approved the deal, the statement said.

The all-cash deal, for $70 a share, will create the world's largest brewer, uniting the maker of Budweiser and Michelob with the producer of Stella Artois, Bass and Brahma. Together, the two companies would have sales of more than $36 billion a year, surpassing the current No. 1 brewer, SABMiller of London.

The combined company will be named Anheuser-Busch InBev, fulfilling a promise by the Belgian company to include the Anheuser name in the new brewer's title. Anheuser will be given two seats on the board, including one for August A. Busch IV, the company's chief executive and a scion of its controlling family.

For millions, Budweiser is synonymous with American beer. Because of Anheuser's huge advertising budget and strong distribution network, few brands are as omnipresent in daily life as Budweiser and its more popular sibling, Bud Light.

Several American beer giants have already been taken over by larger overseas rivals in the last decade. The Miller Brewing Company was sold to South African Breweries in 1999, and the Adolph Coors Company was bought by Molson of Canada in 2005. (Last year, Molson Coors agreed to merge its United States operations with those of SABMiller.)

Anheuser's concession caps a wave of consolidation within the beer industry. InBev and SABMiller, themselves the products of mergers this decade, have led efforts to gain distribution channels around the world. The rising cost of beer ingredients like grain has also driven companies to seek greater scale and purchasing power.

The deal marked a sharp reversal for Anheuser, based since it was founded in St. Louis. When InBev announced its initial $46.3 billion offer last month, Anheuser mounted a fierce defense. It drew upon its heritage and its history as a major benefactor of its hometown, and argued that it could increase its profits alone.

Many politicians, including Matthew R. Blunt, the Republican governor of Missouri, and Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, expressed support for keeping Anheuser independent.

Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, has major ties to Anheuser. His wife, Cindy, is the chairwoman of Hensley & Company, a large Anheuser distributor, and holds a significant amount of Anheuser stock.

The battle grew nasty early on, as both Anheuser and InBev resorted to lawsuits as bludgeons. InBev had began a campaign to oust Anheuser's board, while Anheuser accused its suitor of lying about its financial commitments and criticized its beer business in Cuba.

But Mr. Busch, the company's chief executive whose family has controlled Anheuser for more than a century, was facing pressure to consider a deal. Anheuser's stock had remained mostly stagnant in recent years, but has climbed since InBev made its offer public last month.

Several of Anheuser's large shareholders, including the billionaire Warren E. Buffett, had indicated that they were leaning toward supporting InBev, people briefed on the matter said.

Anheuser approached InBev last Wednesday, seeking the company's best and final offer, these people said. InBev responded by raising its bid to $70 from $65.

Though InBev professed a desire to make a friendly deal, it showed little hesitation in going hostile. It nominated an uncle of Mr. Busch's as a member of its proposed slate of directors.

But InBev pledged to keep Budweiser as the new company's flagship brand and St. Louis as its North American headquarters.

One unresolved matter, however, is Anheuser's ties to Grupo Modelo, the Mexican brewer of Corona. Through Anheuser's stake in Modelo, the Mexican company has both a right to approve a change in control and the right of first refusal to buy back Anheuser's 50 percent holding.

Anheuser had once sought to acquire the remaining half of Modelo it did not own, as a means to make itself too expensive for InBev, but those talks faltered.

Since 1860, Anheuser has been controlled by members of the Anheuser or Busch families, which expanded the company from a small Midwestern brewer into a beer juggernaut. On the back of Budweiser, Anheuser steadily pushed aside competitors like Schlitz with a mix of brute force and marketing guile.

One of the company's hallmarks is its omnipresent advertising. It is the biggest buyer of Super Bowl ads, according to TNS, a market research company, and last year, it spent about $24 million on those ads. Dozens of its commercials, like those featuring Clydesdales, Spuds MacKenzie and the "Wassup" guys, have been ingrained in pop culture. The company's total ad spending last year in the United States was more than about $475 million.

Yet the domestic beer market has struggled recently as customers drifted toward wine and spirits, craft brews and imports. Though Anheuser holds significant stakes in Modelo and Tsingtao of China, the bulk of its sales come from the United States.

InBev has its own long history, with its predecessor having been founded in 1366. But the modern company sprang from the 2004 union of Interbrew of Belgium and AmBev of Brazil. Though the combined company remains based in Leuven, its chief executive is Carlos Brito, who led AmBev before the merger.

Mr. Brito, an engineer by training, is known for his skills in both deal-making and cost-cutting. Yet analysts have questioned how much he can cut costs at the combined company, because of the limited overlap of Anheuser's and InBev's markets.

InBev is taking on about $45 billion in debt to finance the deal. In a sign of confidence that the deal would go through, the company began syndicating those loans to other banks on Friday.

The two companies already share some ties. InBev distributes Budweiser in Canada, and Anheuser imports InBev beers like Bass. In 2006, InBev sold its Rolling Rock brand to Anheuser-Busch for $82 million.