EARLY IN 1993, a new attorney general took charge of the investigation of former Gov. Edward D. DiPrete.

Jeffrey B. Pine had been a political unknown, a career prosecutor recruited by Republican Party leaders to run against his former boss, Atty. Gen. James E. O'Neil.

Crisscrossing the state during 1992, hitting Chamber of Commerce breakfasts and Rotary luncheons, Pine, 37, criticized O'Neil's record on public corruption.

Rhode Island's image as a corrupt state would not change, said Pine, "until we remove those who are responsible" -- along with those "who haven't done enough, or who haven't done their job."

Through the 1980s, Pine had built a reputation as a cool, intelligent, and efficient prosecutor. He was tough on violent criminals -- putting away rapists, child molesters, murderers -- and prided himself on his high conviction rate.

In his 1992 bid for attorney general, as Pine closed the gap between himself and the Democratic incumbent, the campaign grew ugly.

Pine attacked O'Neil for having called a news conference to announce that the Republican mayor of Cranston, Michael Traficante, was being investigated for soliciting campaign contributions from city vendors -- a case that had grown out of the investigation of the Republican former governor and former Cranston mayor, Edward DiPrete.

When Traficante was indicted, a month before the election, Pine questioned the timing.

"Everybody is afforded due process and their civil rights," said Pine. "It's one thing to be a tough prosecutor. . . . You have to be tough but fair."

ON JAN. 13, 1993, prosecutor J. Richard Ratcliffe sent the new attorney general a confidential memo to bring him up to speed on the sprawling investigation of Edward DiPrete and his son Dennis.

The 27-page memo introduced a cast of characters, detailing their interlocking intrigues and their stories of payoffs, deceptions, confessions, denials -- corruption on the grand scale.

Ratcliffe's memo painted a stronger case against Dennis DiPrete than against his father. Two of the ex-governor's fundraisers, Frank N. Zaino and Michael W. Piccoli, had testified to having paid kickbacks to Dennis DiPrete.

Meanwhile, Ratcliffe wrote, the attorney general's office was trying to work out an immunity agreement with Rodney M. Brusini, the former DiPrete aide who said he had acted as the governor's "bagman."

The Ratcliffe memo documented a maze of information -- information contained in hundreds of hours of grand-jury testimony and thousands of subpoenaed documents.

What those facts added up to was a point of debate within the department. This was a case that many prosecutors wanted no part of.

Several prosecutors would have liked a piece of another high-profile case, the upcoming trial of Christopher J. Hightower, for the brutal murder of the Brendel family, of Barrington. But not this high-profile case.

It was too big. Too complicated. There were too many sleazy witnesses. And while the conviction of a former governor would be a historic accomplishment, the case was also a potential minefield.

"What if you weren't right and DiPrete walks?" said one veteran prosecutor. "Then you've made a lot of enemies."

Those working on the DiPrete case, as Ratcliffe's memo illustrated, felt they were on the right track.

Still, the case could at times be frustrating, overwhelming. There was a lot of information to process, a myriad of leads to follow. The investigation's tentacles extended into Cranston, into the state solid-waste agency, and across the breadth of Rhode Island government, from state construction projects to the awarding of prized low-number license plates.

And the Rhode Island attorney general's office was hardly the U.S. attorney's office, with an army of FBI agents at its disposal. Only a handful of investigators were working full-time on the DiPrete case, and Richard Ratcliffe was the one full-time prosecutor.

In a department that brings 6,000 new felony cases a year, where prosecutors each routinely juggle dozens of cases, Ratcliffe's freedom to concentrate on the DiPrete case was unusual.

Several people involved in the case felt that the 36-year-old Ratcliffe had come a long way. When the investigation began, two years before, Ratcliffe was new to the attorney general's Special Prosecutions unit, having just moved upstairs from Narcotics; since then, he had shown intelligence and perseverance in shepherding this case that others didn't want.

But to other prosecutors, the earnest Ratcliffe was in over his head. He was viewed by some of the attorney general's seasoned trial lawyers as an intellectual who had yet to prove himself in the courtroom.

Several prosecutors said that the DiPrete investigation had gotten out of control -- like an underground fire, said one, consuming precious time and resources. Another lawyer called the case "a labyrinth of detail, but not a lot of credible people." Indeed, Ratcliffe, in the memo to Attorney General Pine, wrote that the investigators suspected their potential star witness, Rodney Brusini, of having lied about a $52,000 loan from a state contractor.

Nevertheless, Ratcliffe's memo signaled that the DiPrete case was headed toward indictment.

It would be up to Jeffrey Pine to decide who would bring the case to trial.

MIKE WAS back.

When Jeffrey Pine became attorney general, in 1993, the banishment of prosecutor Michael Francis Burns ended.

Back in the 1980s, Burns had been a rising star, a bold young prosecutor who loved taking on the really bad guys.

He prosecuted mobsters and other vicious criminals -- the kind of people to whom life was cheap: Gerald Mastracchio, who, for a stolen car radio, threw a teenager off the Jamestown Bridge; Bobo Marrapese, a mob enforcer who disposed of a rival with five gunshots to the back; Richard Gomes, a convicted murderer who shot two men outside a Providence diner for looking at him the wrong way.

Burns was a combative and fearless prosecutor. But, his superiors worried, he could also be rash.

In 1989 questions about Burns's judgment had led to a rift with his boss, Atty. Gen. James O'Neil. Burns and O'Neil's grudge match became so nasty that after Burns's resignation O'Neil ordered a sign placed at the reception desk of the attorney general's headquarters prohibiting Burns from entering the building without an escort.

When Jeffrey Pine ran for attorney general, Burns was an early supporter; with Pine's election, in 1992, Burns returned to the place where he'd spent most of his professional life. He was 34 years old and within reach of his dream of heading the attorney general's criminal division, one of the department's top jobs.

Attorney General Pine put Burns in charge of Special Prosecutions. Back when he was campaigning, in the wake of the state banking crisis, Pine had pledged to focus on white-collar crime; now Burns would be Pine's point man in the assault on "economic crime."

William Devereaux, Burns's old friend and fellow organized-crime prosecutor, said that Burns's white-collar assignment didn't play to his strengths. Burns was at his best when dealing with hardened criminals, the geography of bloody crime scenes.

White-collar cases, with their paper trails and financial minutiae, were different. Devereaux and others who respected Burns's courtroom skills said they didn't think of Burns as a "detail-oriented" white-collar prosecutor.

"White-collar crime?" Devereaux recalled kidding Burns. "I never thought that was your big thrill."

Burns's response, said Devereaux, was characteristically upbeat: "We'll be doing some good stuff."

Later in 1993, with the DiPretes' indictments looming, Pine assigned Burns to try the department's most prominent white-collar case. Michael Burns's strength in the courtroom, some people said, would complement Richard Ratcliffe's encyclopedic knowledge of the DiPrete case. One colleague referred to Ratcliffe and Burns as "Brain and Brawn."

Devereaux later recalled that when he heard Burns would be prosecuting the DiPretes, he asked Burns: "What the hell are you doing with that kind of case?"

Responded Burns: "It's my duty."

THE ELDEST of five children, young Mike Burns learned about duty as the son of Irish-Catholic liberal Democrats in Pawtucket.

His parents were well known in the city. Francis M. Burns, for 25 years the city's postmaster, was prominent in Democratic politics and a fixture at the Irish Social Club. Anne T. Burns, a member of Pawtucket's politically powerful McBurney family, was an outspoken educator who once went to prison rather than comply with a judge's back-to-work order during a teachers' strike.

Michael Burns went to Boston College and then the New England School of Law. From the time he was in law school, he gravitated toward a career as a prosecutor.

As a law-school intern in the Rhode Island attorney general's office, the eager, boyish Burns soaked up the atmosphere of the musty court-house on Benefit Street. He got to hang out with lawyers and cops, reveling in a missionary zeal for bringing bad guys to justice.

The kid impressed his elders as mature for his years. While other interns were doing research, Burns sat at the prosecution table during the trials of mobsters and murderers. He would study the lawyers in action.

After graduating from law school, in 1983, Burns became a Rhode Island prosecutor and rose quickly through the ranks. He developed a command of the rules of evidence, an ability to think on his feet, and a dogged style in breaking down evasive witnesses. A colleague recalled that a judge once teased him: "You know, Mr. Burns, there's only one person I know who can carry on an argument longer than you, and I married her."

Within a few years Burns had moved into a showcase job in the attorney general's office, prosecuting organized-crime cases. In 1987, at the age of 29, he scored one of his biggest triumphs, a murder conviction of Bobo Marrapese.

Relying on confessed criminals as witnesses and going up against the prominent Boston defense lawyer Richard M. Egbert, Burns persuaded a jury to convict Marrapese of a murder that had taken place 12 years earlier.

When Egbert attacked the credibility of Burns's witnesses because they were in a witness-protection program, Burns responded that Egbert's witnesses could have come from "the Federal Hill witness-protection program."

That same year, Burns won a conviction in another old murder case. He had major plans for the star witness in that case, an informant named Peter Gilbert.

PETER GILBERT was a small-time hood from Pawtucket.

When the Providence police arrested him, in 1985, on drug and gun charges, he offered to become an informant on the Mafia.

Peter Gilbert seemed a prize catch for Burns and his boss, Atty. Gen. Arlene Violet, the tough-talking former nun who had vowed to bring down the boss of the New England mob, Raymond J. "Junior" Patriarca.

But rather than a prize, Gilbert was to become the focal point of a major law-enforcement scandal that raised questions among Burns's superiors about the prosecutor's professional judgment.

Shortly after Gilbert's arrest, Burns and the Providence police determined that Gilbert should, for his safety, be moved from the state prison to a makeshift apartment inside the Providence police station.

Burns spent hours in the apartment debriefing Gilbert; on at least one occasion, the two drank beer together.

Burns negotiated an unusual plea agreement: Gilbert, who had confessed to three murders, would have to serve only 10 years; and he could do so not in prison but in the custody of the Providence police. With good behavior, he could be out in three years.

In asking Superior Court Judge Dominic F. Cresto to approve the deal, Burns called Gilbert "the brightest and most credible" witness he had ever seen. Cresto rejected Burns's request, but later, after Gilbert's testimony had helped convict two men in a liquor-store holdup, another judge, John E. Orton III, approved the deal.

Meanwhile, Gilbert's "imprisonment" grew more and more lax. Bankrolled by the attorney general's office, he had his police-station apartment refurbished, flew eight times to see family in Florida, and bought liquor, drugs, jewelry, and cars. In all, the state spent $160,000 on him. When a bookkeeper in the attorney general's office questioned some of Gilbert's receipts, Burns told him not to worry.

It all came apart in June of 1988, when Gilbert, at age 43, died of a heart attack after a traffic altercation. He was alone, driving to Connecticut to go skydiving, with 19 packets of cocaine in his parachute bag.

A furor ensued. To investigate the case, the mayor of Providence named a special commission, which found fault with law enforcement for having been bamboozled by Gilbert, "an artful manipulator, skilled in the deception of his fellow man."

"It appears," the report concluded, "that Gilbert received far greater benefits from his bargain than did the State of Rhode Island."

Burns fumed at the criticism. He believed that he had acted properly. Gilbert was no angel, Burns told a friend, and his demands were annoying, but he had helped lock up some bad people. Burns told investigators that he had been unaware of the lax police supervision; had he known Gilbert was skydiving, Burns said, he would have had a heart attack.

THE PETER GILBERT AFFAIR helped sour the relationship between Michael Burns and Atty. Gen. James O'Neil, who had unseated Arlene Violet in 1986.

To O'Neil and other prosecutors, the fiasco epitomized a problem with Burns: he could be a cowboy.

Some colleagues believed that Burns's rapport with the police had colored his judgment. He lived and breathed police work, finding it hard to say no to his friends in law enforcement.

The last straw for Burns came when O'Neil overruled him and the state-police detectives who wanted to seek a series of indictments based on the testimony of informants with criminal records. O'Neil and the chief of his criminal division, James W. Ryan, believed that the cases -- and the witnesses -- weren't strong enough.

Burns resigned from the attorney general's office in 1989. He told friends that he felt unappreciated by O'Neil, and that he felt he'd been made the scapegoat in the Gilbert mess. One friend said that Burns also chafed under O'Neil's control.

Burns went into a private law practice. Later, his disagreement with O'Neil over the state-police informants became public. After a Providence Journal story in which O'Neil voiced questions about Burns's judgment, the two men crossed paths at Twin Willows, a Narragansett watering hole popular with law-enforcement people.

According to several friends of both men, O'Neil and Burns exchanged words that escalated into a shouting match. It was after this incident that O'Neil had the sign put up banning Burns from the attorney general's building without an escort.

Burns, an avid softball player, quit the attorney general's team and moved over to play shortstop for the public defender's office.

RETURNED TO the attorney general's office in 1993, as the new supervisor of the DiPrete case Michael Burns found himself facing a potential conflict of interest.

The year before, investigators had heard allegations that during the DiPrete administration, positions in state government had been for sale. The investigators had heard that a particular DiPrete aide was the person to approach for a state job.

When the investigators spoke to the former DiPrete aide, in the fall of 1992, he was represented by Michael Burns, then in private practice. The meeting was brief. The investigators didn't question the former aide, he said; they apparently only wanted to "scare" him. Afterwards, the aide recalled Burns's reaction: "These guys are nuts."

It was a few months later that Burns, as the new head of Special Prosecutions, became the supervisor of the DiPrete case.

In January 1993, a member of the Special Prosecutions unit who had pursued the state-jobs-for-sale lead sent Attorney General Pine a memo headed "Potential Conflict of Interest."

The prosecutor, Steven D. Murray, emphasized that Burns had never interfered with or even discussed any aspect of the investigation. Nonetheless, said the memo, Murray wanted nothing to compromise his investigation or Ratcliffe's broader investigation of the DiPrete administration. Murray wrote that he assumed Pine had ensured that Burns would have no involvement, and he asked Pine's guidance on how to proceed.

In November 1993, the investigators did question the former DiPrete aide.

According to court records, the aide said that it had been his responsibility to help people who were seeking state employment, including those recommended by the governor's chief of staff and other politicians. The aide, who also served on DiPrete's campaign-finance committee, said that he had solicited contributions from some of the people he had helped get state jobs -- but that there had been no quid pro quo.

The aide was never questioned again.

ON MARCH 29, 1994 -- more than three years after Richard Ratcliffe had begun investigating a suspicious-looking state lease -- a grand jury indicted Edward and Dennis DiPrete on 24 counts of bribery, extortion, racketeering, and perjury.

From the moment the indictments became public, anticipation mounted for what promised to be one of the biggest trials Rhode Island had ever seen.

Richard Ratcliffe had always assumed that he would deliver the opening argument -- the road map of the state's case. Then he and Michael Burns would divvy up the star witnesses for questioning. Finally, Burns would deliver a rousing closing argument to bring the case home.

But Ratcliffe's scenario proved illusory.

In October 1994, Ratcliffe walked into a Providence courtroom for another, related trial.

Contractor Laura Donatelli -- whose business dealings with one of the state's key witnesses, Michael Piccoli, had surfaced in the DiPrete investigation -- had been charged with obtaining money under false pretenses.

In chambers conferences during and after the trial, Judge Robert D. Krause berated Ratcliffe and belittled the state's case. According to a memo that Ratcliffe wrote, the judge "indicated that he believed this case was brought to squeeze Donatelli into cooperating against DiPrete."

After a three-day trial, the jury acquitted Donatelli. (Donatelli subsequently pleaded guilty to a related charge of filing a false document.)

Sometime after that, Ratcliffe was working at his desk when he was approached by Joseph L. DeCaporale Jr.

DeCaporale, another member of the Special Prosecutions unit, announced that "the General" -- the attorney general -- had asked him to help out on the DiPrete case.

Not long after that, DeCaporale appeared at a meeting of the DiPrete-prosecution team. According to witnesses, Attorney General Pine told the group assembled around the conference table that he had asked DeCaporale to help out -- "if that's okay with you, Joe."

"Oh yes, yes," DeCaporale replied.

The attorney general talked about how important the DiPrete case was. DeCaporale, he said, brought a wealth of experience to the table.

What many of the lawyers didn't know was that the year before, the Rhode Island Supreme Court had privately censured DeCaporale for professional misconduct.