IN SEPTEMBER of 1996, Rhode Island prosecutors fashioned a point-by-point denial of the allegations that they had hidden evidence from the DiPrete-defense team.

The DiPretes' lawyers argued that the information most crucial to their assertion of the DiPretes' innocence was contained in the 30 boxes that the prosecutors had only recently turned over.

The DiPrete-defense team had spent days cataloguing and cross-referencing the 68,000 pages of new material held in the 30 boxes -- comparing it with 600 boxes of material previously turned over.

They said the new material contained the first clues that the prosecutors' star witness had lied to a grand jury and been given an undisclosed promise of immunity.

The witness, former DiPrete fundraiser Rodney M. Brusini, had lied before the grand jury when he denied owning an interest in a building that had been rented by the state. Brusini had been promised immunity from prosecution for perjury.

Brusini's lie and the state's promise not to prosecute him came to overshadow the question of the guilt or innocence of former Gov. Edward D. DiPrete and his son Dennis L. DiPrete.

IT WAS SUPPOSED to be a simple pretrial hearing. A diversion from the dry cases she was working on -- a chance to beat up on a big-shot lawyer from Boston.

At least that's what her superiors told Special Assistant Atty. Gen. Kathleen M. Hagerty when they assigned her to defend the prosecutors against the accusations of hiding evidence.

Hagerty was told by Michael F. Burns, chief of the attorney general's criminal division, that he had previously tangled with DiPrete lawyer Richard M. Egbert -- Burns had bested him in a case involving the mob enforcer "Bobo" Marrapese. Burns pumped Hagerty up, describing how he'd clobbered Egbert in that courtroom fight, telling her she would now get a chance to do the same.

Hagerty, a former paralegal who had gone on to law school, had risen rapidly to the criminal division's Special Prosecutions unit. Atty. Gen. Jeffrey B. Pine liked her aggressiveness. Typically refusing to back down, she seemed to relish a courtroom fight; some co-workers called her Nails. In approving her assignment to the DiPrete case, Pine put in for a pay raise for her.

Hagerty had won major convictions: against Frank M. Mattera, a former Pawtucket special prosecutor who had solicited a bribe to help fix a drunken-driving charge; against John Michael McKone, an East Greenwich accountant who had embezzled more than $100,000 from clients; against Robert C. Devaney, a Providence high-school teacher who had sexually assaulted a special-education student and made sexual photographs and videotapes of two other special-needs students.

Hagerty worked hard to prepare a case. She had a smooth style of presentation, and she was adamantly pro-victim. She also said what was on her mind, which sometimes caused friction.

According to Superior Court Presiding Justice Joseph F. Rodgers Jr., four judges had complained that Hagerty was self-righteous and pushy -- both with opposing lawyers and with witnesses. Even the jurors in an arson case that she'd won complained to Rodgers that Hagerty had a hostile manner.

After winning the conviction of a child beater, Hagerty was enraged when the judge imposed a lesser prison sentence than she'd wanted. When the state bar-association president was quoted as supporting the judge, Hagerty wrote a letter to the Rhode Island Bar Journal accusing the president of ignorance of the criminal-justice system.

She signed herself "Hostage #4647" -- her Rhode Island Bar number.

(Hagerty has declined comment for this series.)

ON OCT. 21, 1996, Superior Court Judge Dominic F. Cresto took the bench to begin hearing the DiPrete lawyers' assertion that the state's prosecutors had withheld evidence.

First off, Kathleen Hagerty challenged the judge's authority to hold the hearing. The state, she said, denied any prosecutorial misconduct. But even if the prosecutors had "secreted evidence," she said, "the remedies are quite limited. And in fact Your Honor may not impose sanctions" to penalize the prosecutors.

Since the DiPrete lawyers now possessed the evidence to which they were entitled, Hagerty continued, the most that Judge Cresto could do was postpone the trial, to give the lawyers time to review all the evidence.

"Denied," snapped Cresto.

A FEW DAYS BEFORE, Hagerty had gone to lunch with her immediate boss, Asst. Atty. Gen. Joseph L. DeCaporale Jr., and J. Richard Ratcliffe, the original DiPrete prosecutor, who was now in private practice.

At the luncheon -- which Ratcliffe would later describe in testimony -- they discussed the allegations made by the DiPrete defense lawyers, especially their assertion that a Brusini perjury deal had been concealed.

Ratcliffe, according to his testimony, then talked about the state's decision to immunize Brusini against any perjury charges.

Hagerty asked Ratcliffe if he had ever informed anyone else in the attorney general's office that he had arranged for Rodney Brusini to get immunity. He said he had, but Hagerty pressed on -- How clear had he been?

Ratcliffe said he had been very clear. And he found the skepticism now expressed by both Hagerty and DeCaporale alarming: Didn't they believe him?

After the luncheon, Ratcliffe was fearful that his former colleagues were setting him up as a scapegoat -- that no one else would acknowledge the perjury deal made with the state's star witness against the DiPretes. He later testified that he then sought out his former boss and mentor, James W. Ryan.

Ryan, the long-time chief of the attorney general's criminal division, had in 1995 been demoted by Attorney General Pine and replaced by Michael Burns. Having challenged Pine over the attorney general's problematic drug Strike Force, Ryan was now not one of the favored in the office. His salary had been slashed and he was assigned only a few cases.

Ratcliffe, Ryan would later testify, told Ryan about the flap over the Brusini perjury deal. Ratcliffe referred to a meeting he had attended with Pine and other top prosecutors in which they'd discussed whether to charge Brusini with perjury -- the meeting had occurred before Ryan's demotion; did he remember?

Ryan, according to testimony, checked his files and found his notes from not one but two meetings, back in 1993. Pine and Michael Burns, Ryan's successor as criminal-division chief, had attended both.

In the first meeting, Ryan had summed up the consensus, writing of Brusini: "Charge him!"

But in the second meeting, months later, opinions had shifted; the prosecutors decided not to charge Brusini. Ryan wrote prophetically that the decision would come back to haunt them: "We'll hear it til [sic] we're sick."

THE FIRST WITNESS called by the DiPrete lawyers to testify in the hearings before Judge Cresto was Rodney Brusini's lawyer, Richard A. Gonnella.

Gonnella, a veteran criminal-defense lawyer, testified that he had offered the prosecutors his client's cooperation in the DiPrete case, in exchange for "an explicit promise" that Brusini would not be charged with perjury. Investigators believed that Brusini had lied to a grand jury about his part-ownership of a building rented by the state during the DiPrete administration.

Gonnella told the judge that he could not understand why the state's prosecutors were contending that no such promise had been made. He said that former prosecutor Richard Ratcliffe had recalled giving Brusini such an assurance. And, said Gonnella, a few days earlier he had told prosecutor Joseph DeCaporale about Ratcliffe's explicit promise.

Gonnella was still on the witness stand when Richard Ratcliffe received a telephone call at his downtown law office from an investigator in the attorney general's office.

"You've got to get over here," said the investigator. "It's getting ugly."

Ratcliffe, whose testimony could confirm or contradict what Gonnella was saying, said that he was too busy to come that morning.

The investigator persisted. "Joe [DeCaporale] wants you here right now."

When Ratcliffe insisted he couldn't come, the investigator hung up. A few minutes later, the investigator walked into Ratcliffe's office, in the Hospital Trust Tower, and handed him a subpoena.

But when Ratcliffe arrived in Judge Cresto's courtroom, it was unclear to Ratcliffe why he had been summoned so hurriedly. During the next recess, he asked to be excused, and the judge let him go.

The next day, Ratcliffe went to the attorney general's office, to review documents in preparation for his eventual testimony. As he sat in a conference room, he would later testify, in walked Attorney General Pine and Pine's deputy, Thomas M. Dickinson.

The two asked Ratcliffe about the immunity that had been given to Rodney Brusini. Ratcliffe said that Brusini had indeed been offered immunity from perjury charges, and that James Ryan, Ratcliffe's former boss, had notes corroborating what Ratcliffe was saying.

Dickinson wasn't satisfied, Ratcliffe testified. He began grilling Ratcliffe:

"Was it a promise, reward, or inducement?" Or was it, Dickinson asked, merely "an understanding"?

"Who the hell cares?" Ratcliffe answered.

To him, a promise and an understanding were the same thing.

Pine asked Ratcliffe whether "an explicit promise" had been made to Brusini. Ratcliffe said that it had.

Pine left the room, saying he would check his appointment calendar from 1993. When he returned, Ratcliffe later testified, Pine said that nothing in his book indicated a meeting about Brusini's perjury on the date that Ratcliffe had specified.

After this discussion, Ratcliffe later testified, he informed prosecutor Kathleen Hagerty of the Ryan notes documenting that Pine and Dickinson had attended the meetings on the perjury deal.

Ratcliffe testified that he told Hagerty so that the state would turn Ryan's notes over to the DiPrete lawyers.

According to the court record, the attorney general's office waited 10 days to tell the DiPrete lawyers about Ryan's notes.

BEFORE JUDGE CRESTO'S hearings began, Richard Ratcliffe later testified, he was puzzled by the apparent confusion at the attorney general's office over the Brusini perjury deal.

Ratcliffe testified that before he left that department, more than a year earlier, he had taken his replacement, prosecutor Bruce Astrachan, on a tour of his voluminous DiPrete files. And before the current hearings, Ratcliffe called Astrachan to advise him to amend the state's written declarations to reflect the Brusini perjury promise.

"You never told us that," Astrachan responded, according to Ratcliffe.

"Well, I'm telling you now," Ratcliffe said he replied. Ratcliffe testified that he was shocked by Astrachan's response.

Ratcliffe said he had thought that Astrachan would "take what I had to say and look into it and amend the response." But no one in the attorney general's office did.

ON OCT. 21, 1996, Bruce Astrachan looked transfixed as he stood in Judge Cresto's witness box.

For six days, the young man who had become the prosecution team's third member was grilled by the DiPrete lawyers, Richard M. Egbert and R. Robert Popeo.

They wanted to know about the state's failure to turn over evidence. They wanted to know about the state's deals with Rodney Brusini. They wanted to know about the state's deals with Cranston engineer Frank N. Zaino.

Astrachan's friends characterized his ordeal as an "out-of-body experience."

What the prosecutors had expected to be a routine prelude to the trial of Edward and Dennis DiPrete had taken on a life of its own. Suddenly, it seemed, it was the "good guys" who were on trial.

Astrachan's signature was on many of the papers the state had filed attesting that all relevant evidence had been given to the DiPrete team.

But under questioning by Egbert and Popeo, Astrachan sheepishly acknowledged that he had not read much of the evidence and therefore didn't know exactly what had been turned over. He said that he had signed the papers "as a matter of convenience."

Now Astrachan allowed that he and his fellow prosecutors had erred in swearing to the court that they had turned over all the evidence. And, he said, the prosecutors had been wrong to attack the DiPrete lawyers as incompetent liars for having said that evidence had been withheld.

In their written "point-by-point refutation" of the accusation that they had hidden evidence, the prosecutors had painted the DiPrete lawyers as incompetent and lazy -- "proving their ineptness in ferreting out facts that lay in their laps."

"The State," wrote the prosecutors, "cannot be faulted for [the] defense counsels' haphazard review of records and their inability to determine the relevancy of those records."

The DiPrete lawyers, the prosecutors asserted, were wasting the court's time by "their own lack of diligence in reviewing the documents" that they'd received before getting the 30 new boxes of material.

As Astrachan's testimony went on, Judge Cresto grew impatient, scolding the young prosecutor for evasive answers.

Meanwhile, Kathleen Hagerty was worried about what the DiPrete lawyers were doing to Astrachan.

"I believe this kid is being set up," she told the judge at a sidebar conference, out of the hearing of the courtroom spectators. Hagerty said that Richard Egbert had vowed to "have this kid's ticket."

She said she feared that Astrachan could face disciplinary action -- something that could lead to the revocation of his license to practice law.

Later, Joseph DeCaporale, Astrachan's boss, said privately that he never should have let "the kid" sign the papers.

FRANK N. ZAINO was the Cranston engineer who had told a grand jury that he had funneled campaign contributions to Rodney Brusini, DiPrete's chief fundraiser, and to Dennis DiPrete, in return for state contracts.

Like Brusini, Zaino had negotiated a deal to cooperate with the state's investigation of the DiPretes. Zaino, too, had potential legal problems.

Under Robert Popeo's grilling, prosecutor Astrachan said that he was aware that in 1990 Zaino had opened a bank account in the name of his son and daughter-in-law, in order to hide money from his wife during the Zainos' divorce.

The prosecutors knew that Zaino had failed to list this bank account on the Family Court's asset-reporting form for divorce cases. Although Zaino had signed the form under oath, the prosecutors took no action against him, nor did they notify the Family Court of the false affidavit.

The DiPrete lawyers said that they first learned about what Zaino had done and the state's decision not to prosecute him when they received the 30 new boxes of evidence.

Former prosecutor Ratcliffe would later testify that he had wanted to present a credible witness at trial. To achieve that, he told Judge Cresto, the state had helped Zaino amend his 1990 tax returns.

By 1993, Ratcliffe testified, the prosecutors knew that Zaino had committed tax fraud by using his company's travel-and-entertainment expense account for personal purchases, such as gifts of lingerie and jewelry for a girlfriend. He had also used the account to reimburse employees and relatives who made contributions to the DiPrete campaign.

As was disclosed at Judge Cresto's hearings, the investigators had calculated the amount of money from Zaino's travel-and-entertainment account that was not a legitimate deductible expense and given that figure to Zaino's accountant, so that Zaino could square up with the federal and state tax authorities.

While Robert Popeo's questions to Bruce Astrachan focused on Frank Zaino, Richard Egbert's questions to Astrachan focused on the state's dealings with Rodney Brusini.

Egbert confronted Astrachan with a prosecutors' memo outlining the state's intentions, back in 1992, to charge Brusini with perjury. The memo was a document that the DiPrete lawyers had only recently received.

"You're talking about a document which was prepared prior either to my involvement in this case or even my association with the department," Astrachan protested.

Said Egbert: "So's the Constitution."

Astrachan testified that in hindsight he agreed that some of the evidence should have been turned over much earlier than it was. But he said, repeatedly, that he had never meant to deceive anyone.

He said he had merely relied on the word of his superiors, Michael Burns and Joseph DeCaporale.

"You found that you could not rely on [them], didn't you?" Popeo said.

"Well," replied Astrachan, "I think what we've seen through this hearing is that some of the responses were inaccurate and . . . that may be the case."

At another point, Popeo demanded to know who was in charge of the DiPrete case -- didn't the attorney general have authority over it?

"Well, certainly ultimate authority," said Astrachan. "I suppose it would be fair to say that the attorney general has the ultimate authority."