Teah had Hopkins's power of attorney, and the lawyer's name appears on a sales agreement for a building Hopkins bought on City Island that has since been used to raise the million-dollar bail in the homicide case. Teah has explained that his name appeared on the sales papers only because Hopkins was out of town at the time of the signing.

Other questions about Teah have been raised recently. Federal prosecutors are looking into Teah's $29,000-a-year job as president of the Bronx Broadcasting Company, a corporation set up by Bronx Borough President Stanley Simon to produce community programming for a cable system that doesn't yet exist. Teah, who was Simon's campaign manager last year, is also being investigated by a federal grand jury in connection with the giving of more than $168,000 of Simon's campaign printing work to a Yonkers company, Town Hall Printing. The firm is owned in part by two of Friedman's closest aides—Paul Victor, counsel to Friedman's Democratic County Committee, and Murray Lewinter, the secretary to the committee. Town Hall's lawyer told prosecutors that Victor and Lewinter got $15,000 in profits last year on a "handshake" deal that brought the political printing work to the firm.

"So far, we have found that Town Hall has no printing plant and does none of its own printing," one investigator said. "It's just a telephone number in a Yonkers office that passes its printing work on to other firms."

Teah denies knowing that Victor and Lewinter were the secret owners of Town Hall, and he says he did not authorize payments to the firm.

Paul Victor, the cops say, is "well connected." He is law chairman of the Bronx Democratic party and counsel to the Public Administrator's office of the Bronx Surrogate Court. In 1978, as the party's parliamentarian, Victor made the key decision that allowed Friedman to take over the Bronx Democratic organization. In 1984, Governor Cuomo appointed Victor to the state's Law Revision Commission.

Victor is also the son of Genovese crime-family soldier Albert "A1 Sappo" Viggiano.

Despite his involvement in civic affairs, and his influence in picking judges, prosecutors say that much of Victor's income has come from his representation of organized-crime figures.

Jay Turoff, the city's former Taxi and Limousine commissioner, is currently being investigated for awarding 100 taxi medallions valued at $100,000 each to a company in which he may have had an interest; for giving a lucrative taxi-meter contract to a family friend; for steering TLC business to a Brooklyn Democratic-party printer; and for improperly borrowing $244,000 from a taxi-industry credit union that allegedly paid Turoff a $30,000 bribe. His mob links, his comp trips to Atlantic City, and his penchant for blackjack are something else.

Through his gambling activities, Turoff became friendly with Charles Meyerson, an employee of the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City. Federal authorities in Brooklyn are now investigating whether Meyerson allowed Turoff to secretly buy into a cab company in Yonkers. Turoff's lawyer, Edward Rappaport, denied any wrongdoing by his client.

Meyerson himself is under investigation for allegedly arranging lines of credit at the Golden Nugget for known mobsters and for sneaking them into the casino.

Until the muncipal scandals broke, law-enforcement authorities had rarely focused on the connections between the mob and the machine. All that's starting to change now. The effects of the new, get-tough approach are likely to be evident in the next few months as the various investigations continue rooting out trouble. Still, some authorities think the effort may be too little too late, at least as far as organized crime is concerned.

"Today, the hoods are almost indistinguishable from the good guys," said former federal prosecutor Raymond Dearie. "Their businesses have been assimilated. Yesterday's hijacker is going to college and is armed with a telex machine instead of a gun. The real story in the next few years will be the extent of this new mob's influence in the city."