DOMINIC F. CRESTO was not pleased.

As the hearings into prosecutorial misconduct in the DiPrete case unfolded, during the fall of 1996, the Superior Court judge found himself in an unenviable position.

The pressure was evident one day when Cresto snapped at a prosecutor who he thought was giggling in his courtroom.

"I don't like being in the position I am in in this case," said the judge. "The allegations being made are most distasteful to me, and they should be distasteful to anybody involved in the criminal-justice system and anybody in the legal profession."

For several days, Judge Cresto had listened to a Rhode Island prosecutor testify that the state had failed to disclose evidence that could be favorable to former Gov. Edward D. DiPrete and his son Dennis.

Because the evidence had not been turned over, the DiPretes' lawyers now sought to have the corruption case against the DiPretes dismissed. Their argument to the judge was that the non-disclosure of evidence amounted to a denial of the DiPretes' right to a fair trial. In fact, said the lawyers, they suspected that they still had not received everything to which they were entitled.

The prosecutors denied that they had intentionally withheld evidence.

Judge Cresto knew that the public expected the DiPretes to stand trial. Their indictment, in 1994, for bribery, racketeering, extortion, and perjury represented one of the biggest public-corruption cases in Rhode Island history.

To dismiss corruption charges against a former governor before a jury could hear the evidence did not sit well with the judge. Moreover, Cresto's earlier dismissal of part of the DiPrete case had been overturned by the state Supreme Court.

Yet, in failing to turn over the evidence, the prosecutors had violated the judge's orders, the rules of the Rhode Island courts, and the U.S. Constitution. And that was something Dominic Cresto was not going to tolerate.

TALL AND IMPOSING, with receding silver hair and piercing brown eyes, Dominic Cresto had earned a reputation in his 17 years on the bench as a judge who could handle the tough, thankless cases.

When Edward DiPrete was indicted, half of the state's 22 Superior Court judges were automatically disqualified from presiding -- Governor DiPrete had appointed them.

In assigning the DiPrete case to Judge Cresto, Presiding Justice Joseph F. Rodgers Jr. took note of Cresto's widely respected integrity, his diligent preparation, and his firm control of the courtroom.

Cresto had a reputation as a law-and-order judge who handed out stiff sentences and tolerated no one's disrespect for the legal system.

"In heaven you have justice," he would say; "on earth you have the law." To courtroom lawyers who addressed him with their hands in their pockets, he would say, "Are your hands cold, Counselor?"

But the judge could also be warm. He was a favorite with jurors, and younger judges looked to him as a mentor.

His courtroom staff loved Cresto because, they said, he made it clear that "you don't work for him; you work with him." At Christmastime, he would take them all out for a fancy meal.

The judge liked to sing. He would sometimes stroll the courthouse corridors giving voice to an Italian aria. Once during a recess, a woman came to clean the courtroom; as she dusted and emptied wastebaskets, she sang in Italian. Cresto came out of his chambers and sat in the witness box, where he joined her in song. The two attracted an audience of lawyers.

At home, Cresto unwound by making wine, cooking gourmet meals, and working with wood. For a granddaughter, he built a cradle and a dollhouse -- a replica of his house in North Providence.

Dominic Cresto was raised, during the 1940s, in Providence's immigrant Charles Street neighborhood. He showed fierce pride in his Italian heritage and even as a youth was a stickler for the rules. A Providence College classmate recalls Dominic's chastising fellow poker players who tried to cheat.

Cresto's father was the maitre d' at the Biltmore Hotel, and the son waited on tables there to help pay his way through Boston College Law School.

As a young labor lawyer, Cresto became active in Democratic politics. He ran unsuccessfully for the Providence City Council, the General Assembly, and Rhode Island attorney general. In the 1972 attorney general's race, Cresto campaigned to de-politicize and professionalize a department he deemed inefficient. He said he wanted to mold prosecutors who were "as dedicated and competent as the defense attorneys with whom they must match wits in the courtroom."

To ensure quality and continuity in the attorney general's office, Cresto proposed protecting the top prosecutors from dismissal when administrations changed. He also advocated raising their pay, to entice them to stay on as career prosecutors.

After a failed bid for lieutenant governor, Cresto moved behind the scenes to become legal counsel to Gov. J. Joseph Garrahy. In 1979 Garrahy appointed him to the Superior Court, despite opposition from some, who considered Cresto arrogant.

Superior Court is a showcase of Rhode Island's legal system -- the stage on which the biggest civil and criminal cases play out. Over the years, Judge Cresto presided over his share of courtroom dramas. He sentenced the two "Blackstone Valley snipers" to life in prison and gave a Foster policeman three life sentences for killing three teenagers.

In 1993, Cresto sentenced banker Joseph Mollicone Jr. to serve 30 years in prison for his $13-million embezzlement -- the crime that had triggered the investigation into the administration of former Governor DiPrete. It was the harshest sentence ever given a Rhode Island white-collar criminal.

After that trial, Atty. Gen. Jeffrey B. Pine wrote to Judge Cresto to commend him on an exemplary performance.

ON OCT. 31, 1996, Day 8 of the DiPrete pretrial hearings, Michael F. Burns took the witness stand. He was the chief of the attorney general's criminal division.

At this point, the attorney general's office maintained that it was unaware that its star witness, Rodney M. Brusini, had been given immunity from perjury in exchange for his cooperation.

Burns was the prosecutor who was planning to question Brusini at the DiPrete trial. But Burns testified that he never knew Brusini had received immunity from charges of perjury -- not until he heard Brusini's lawyer describe the deal in the current hearings.

When Burns took the stand, he brought with him a detailed memo that summarized the DiPrete investigation. The memo had been written by the original prosecutor on the case, J. Richard Ratcliffe, and given to Jeffrey Pine when Pine succeeded James E. O'Neil as attorney general, in 1993.

When Pine took office, Brusini was seeking immunity for various crimes, but no deal had been struck. "We were prepared to indict Brusini for perjury and ethics violations," Ratcliffe's memo said.

The memo also showed that prosecutors had known that Brusini, when he was an adviser to Governor DiPrete, had gotten $2,000 a month from a New York bond firm doing business with the state. The DiPrete lawyers would cite these payments to support their contention that Brusini had been "shaking people down" without the DiPretes' knowledge.

Prosecutor Burns, under questioning by DiPrete defense lawyer Richard M. Egbert, conceded that he and Attorney General Pine had both read the memo in January 1993. But Burns said he'd forgotten about it until he rediscovered it, just the week before.

And until Burns reread the memo, the night before he testified, he and other prosecutors had denied that Brusini had received the $2,000 payments.

Minutes before taking the stand, Burns mentioned the memo to his fellow prosecutors.

"This is going to look bad," said one, Joseph L. DeCaporale Jr.

MICHAEL BURNS had fought some of his most memorable courtroom battles against Richard Egbert, the big-time Boston lawyer defending Edward DiPrete.

Now, in this pretrial hearing, Burns was reunited with his old adversary but in an unfamiliar role: that of witness.

For 11 days, spread over several weeks, prosecutor Burns was grilled by both Egbert and R. Robert Popeo, the lawyer for Dennis DiPrete.

In the middle of his testimony, Burns became ill. The hearings continued with testimony from James W. Ryan, who had been chief of the attorney general's criminal division until Pine replaced him with Burns.

Ryan testified from his notes on the 1993 meetings at which Pine and his prosecutors had discussed the possibility of offering Rodney Brusini immunity from perjury charges.

Ryan disputed Burns's testimony that the perjury case against Brusini was weak, and that the prosecutors had reached no consensus on whether to charge him.

When Burns recovered from his illness, he returned to the stand.

In his earlier round of testimony, he had testified that the perjury case was unprosecutable, because of insufficient evidence. Now, following Ryan's testimony, Burns acknowledged that he thought Brusini had lied, and that a grand jury had been prepared to indict him in 1992.

PROSECUTOR MICHAEL BURNS and defense lawyer Richard Egbert held a grudging mutual respect. They liked to talk baseball, and had even once golfed together. But Egbert's commitment to his client, Edward DiPrete, outweighed any friendship he had with Burns.

With Burns back in the witness box, Egbert pounced.

Burns fought back. He called Egbert reckless for impugning the prosecutors' integrity. But Burns also apologized for mistakes and acknowledged lapses that exposed sloppy management of an important case.

"I can't tell you why they were overlooked . . . if I didn't see them," he said of documents that had not been turned over. Later, questioned by Dennis DiPrete's lawyer, Burns said that some things just "didn't get reviewed, Mr. Popeo. What can I tell you?"

Although he was the supervising prosecutor on the DiPrete case, Burns acknowledged that he was unfamiliar with the contents of boxloads of evidence.

One day Egbert threw out the name of a witness who had testified before the grand jury investigating Rodney Brusini for perjury. Burns seemed not to know the name.

The next day, Burns testified that overnight he had listened to tapes of the Brusini grand jury and only then realized that there were tapes that had never been turned over to the DiPrete lawyers.

Eventually, during Judge Cresto's pretrial hearings, the prosecutors handed over almost 20 tapes of grand-jury testimony concerning Brusini's alleged perjury.

Burns could not explain why the tapes had not been provided sooner; he "assumed," he said, that prosecutor Richard Ratcliffe had turned them over.

But Ratcliffe, who followed Burns to the witness stand, said that before he resigned from the attorney general's office, in 1995, he had told Burns about the tapes, and the need to turn them over to the DiPrete lawyers.

THE DiPRETE PRETRIAL HEARINGS were becoming a spectacle. It was rare to see prosecutors in a courtroom answering for their conduct, instead of making others do so.

As Michael Burns stood in the witness box, the spectator gallery in Judge Cresto's courtroom filled with a who's-who of the Rhode Island criminal-defense bar. Among them were former prosecutors who had worked with Burns and Jeffrey Pine, as well as public defenders, who represent the poorest of the accused.

During one recess, some of the public defenders stood outside Judge Cresto's courtroom and discussed how the hearings exposed the uneven playing field in the courts; their indigent clients could not afford to pay what the DiPretes had spent to unearth undisclosed evidence.

In the courtroom, prosecutor Kathleen M. Hagerty, who was defending the DiPrete prosecutors in the pretrial hearings, tried to fight off the attacks being made on her colleagues' professionalism. Privately, she displayed exasperation.

Richard Ratcliffe, the former prosecutor who had first handled the DiPrete case, testified that over lunch early in the hearings, Hagerty had called prosecutor Joseph DeCaporale "a big dope." And DiPrete lawyer Richard Egbert said that Hagerty was privately referring to prosecutor Burns as "a stupid boob."

One day, in front of the judge, DiPrete lawyer Robert Popeo said that Hagerty had told him there had been "institutional incompetencies," and that her office, the Department of the Attorney General, had "screwed up."

ATTY. GEN. JEFFREY PINE stayed away from the courtroom where his prosecutors were being tested.

Asked about his absence by a reporter, Pine said that he had once gone into the courtroom but had had to leave after about 10 minutes, when his beeper went off. Another day, he said, he had walked by and decided not to go in, because it was crowded.

Meanwhile, outside the courtroom, the attorney general went on the talk shows. It's like the second inning of a baseball game, he would say; the state hasn't had its last at-bats yet. Wait till we tell our side.

A Pine political strategist, the late Thomas J. Cashill, called The Providence Journal to complain about its coverage of the hearings. Pine, he said, was a good man -- a breath of fresh air for Rhode Island, a crime buster; the newspaper stories, said Cashill, were hurting him politically.

The DiPrete lawyers argued to Judge Cresto that Attorney General Pine was trying to deflect on the airwaves what was happening in court.

One day after Pine had been on a talk show, DiPrete lawyer Popeo said to Judge Cresto: "I see this being twisted. To the extent that one believes there's any remorse or contrition or regret about what has occurred, one need only review the videotape of the interview with the attorney general last evening [and his comments about] the 'curious' orders issued by this judge."

" 'Unusual,' " corrected the judge. "The word used by the attorney general was 'unusual.' "

MANY DAYS brought fresh disclosures of information that the state had not turned over as required.

Perhaps the most bizarre instance was the mystery of the missing notebooks.

Back on the first day of the hearings, on Oct. 21, 1996, the DiPretes' lawyers had complained to Judge Cresto that the state was still withholding information. The DiPrete lawyers had seen a few pages of notes made by one of the original investigators, Peter Blessing, but nothing more. Blessing had left the attorney general's office a few years before and was now living in California.

Two days later, Gina M. Merandi was placing some DiPrete-case records in a file cabinet at the attorney general's headquarters. Merandi, who worked for the state police's Financial Crimes unit, was in charge of the voluminous DiPrete files.

Merandi opened a drawer and saw an unfamiliar cardboard box. Inside the box she found 11 spiral-bound notebooks filled with interview notes regarding the DiPrete case. The notes, dated four years earlier, had been taken by Peter Blessing.

Merandi was stunned, she later testified.

Why had the notebooks not appeared before, with the other DiPrete evidence? And what were they doing in this file cabinet?

She called Michael Burns.

"Michael, are you sitting down?"

Merandi then collared everyone with any involvement in the case: prosecutors, investigators, clerical workers, even the attorney general. Nobody, she later testified, owned up to having put the notebooks there.

The notes' mysterious appearance, more than their content, added punch to the DiPrete team's argument that not only had the state withheld evidence; it was also continuing to do so.

DiPrete lawyer Robert Popeo suggested that the notebooks be dusted for fingerprints. They never were.

THE NOTEBOOKS weren't the only thing that thrust Gina Merandi into the spotlight.

Merandi testified that prosecutor Bruce Astrachan had lied when he testified earlier in the hearings that the DiPretes now had all the evidence to which they were entitled. Merandi refused to retract her assertion even after Astrachan, Kathleen Hagerty, Michael Burns, and an attorney general's investigator told her, during a recess, that she was mistaken.

In addition, Merandi testified that in 1995 Burns, Astrachan, and Joseph DeCaporale had sat in a conference room amid cardboard boxes of DiPrete-case evidence and culled items that they deemed inappropriate to show Judge Cresto -- after Cresto had asked to see everything that the state had.

Some of the culled items, said Merandi, were now at center stage in the hearings.

Burns later testified that he had not been in the conference room for much of the time that the two other prosecutors were going through the boxes. He said that DeCaporale and Astrachan later assured him that they had never segregated any evidence.

They just "aren't the kind of people" who would withhold evidence favorable to a defendant, Burns told Judge Cresto.

THE MORNING of Dec. 11, 1996, three weeks after she had testified, Gina Merandi was sitting in Judge Cresto's courtroom when she got word that Lt. James P. Mullen wanted to see her at state-police headquarters.

She walked to the jury box to fetch her coat and briefcase, and as she grabbed her things Michael Burns, who was sitting there taking notes, looked up. They were good friends.

"Is everything all right?" he said.

"I have to go to North Scituate," Merandi replied.

When she arrived at the headquarters, Lieutenant Mullen told her that she was a suspect in the crimes of obstructing justice and perjury in connection with the sudden appearance of the 11 notebooks.

He read her her Miranda warning -- that she had the right to remain silent and to have a lawyer, and that what she said could be used against her.

Merandi, hysterical, telephoned a lawyer she had once worked with in the attorney general's office: Kevin J. Bristow, who, after successfully prosecuting embezzler Joseph Mollicone Jr., had left Pine's office for private practice.

"Come here; please come here," pleaded Merandi.

Bristow drove to state-police headquarters and spoke privately with Lieutenant Mullen and another detective. Bristow told the police that Merandi was too upset to be interviewed that day, and advised her not to say anything.

But Merandi insisted. "Bring them in now and we're getting this over with," she told her lawyer.

For the next few hours, Merandi sobbed through an interview by two detectives.

She was never arrested or charged with any crime, or disciplined by the state police, her employer.

But before she left headquarters that day, Lieutenant Mullen told Merandi that she was no longer assigned to the DiPrete case. She never heard again from Michael Burns.

The state-police investigation failed to solve the mystery of the 11 notebooks.

AFTER 32 DAYS, the hearings ground to an acrimonious halt the week before Christmas.

As the state prepared to present its side, DiPrete lawyer Robert Popeo asked prosecutor Kathleen Hagerty for a list of her witnesses, a courtesy he had extended to her with his list of witnesses.

"You'll just have to sit back and watch our case unfold, like everyone else," replied Hagerty.

"You mean unravel," said Popeo.

The prosecutors called only a few witnesses, but not the ones they really wanted -- Robert Popeo and Richard Egbert. The prosecutors were trying to prove that the DiPrete lawyers had obtained on their own the information that they accused the prosecutors of withholding. But Judge Cresto rejected Hagerty's request to call Popeo and Egbert to the stand. The judge said that whatever the lawyers may have obtained on their own did not absolve the prosecutors of their obligations to turn over evidence.

(The state Supreme Court would later rule that Cresto had erred in not allowing the state access to the material that the DiPrete lawyers had obtained on their own. The court ordered the lawyers to turn the material over to the prosecutors if they had not already done so.)

That same month, Attorney General Pine held a $125-a-person fundraiser at his house, on Providence's East Side. He told his guests that he thought Judge Cresto was wrong in having refused to let the prosecutors question the DiPrete lawyers; the DiPrete lawyers, after all, had been allowed to question the prosecutors.

After the final witness had testified in the hearings, the two sides got into another quarrel over documents. Following the court session, prosecutor Joseph DeCaporale jumped up from his seat at the counsel table and stormed out of the courtroom, swearing.

Pointing at defense lawyer Richard Egbert, DeCaporale then shouted: "Who does he think he is? He doesn't make the rules here!"

TWO MONTHS LATER, on Feb. 17, 1997, Attorney General Pine announced that he was replacing the prosecutors in the DiPrete case.

Pine said that he was making the change because "it is clear" that the DiPrete lawyers may try to call prosecutors Michael Burns, Joseph DeCaporale, and Bruce Astrachan as witnesses in the trial, which would prevent them from serving as advocates for the state.

The DiPrete lawyers had their own view of Pine's action.

"This is more obfuscation of the reality here," said Richard Egbert. "It has been alleged consistently that this team of prosecutors was deficient in complying with their obligations to the defendants, the court, and to the Constitution. . . . It seems to me a little late for personnel changes after the harm that has been caused to these defendants."

The new prosecution team would be Assistant Attorneys General J. Patrick Youngs III and Michael J. Stone and Special Assistant Attorney General Kathleen M. Hagerty.

MARCH 11, 1997, was a day that Judge Dominic Cresto had worked toward for weeks, reviewing the mounds of notes he had taken over the 32 days of the pretrial hearings on the DiPrete corruption case.

He had written his decision in long hand, and then asked a court secretary to type it up. In the 38-page document, Cresto made it clear that he was not ruling on the DiPretes' guilt or innocence.

"The manner and magnitude of the prosecutorial misconduct found by the court to exist in this case," he wrote, "has not only resulted in substantial prejudice to the defendants, but has the effect of eroding confidence in the criminal-justice system."

The prosecutors, wrote Cresto, had repeatedly violated his orders, the state-court rules, the U.S. Constitution, and their own agreements with the DiPrete lawyers to give them critical pieces of evidence.

The situation, continued Judge Cresto, "raises the alarming specter that the system works only if an accused has the financial resources to make independent investigation prior to trial to ferret out misconduct, to ensure due process."

Dismissal of the case, Cresto wrote, was the only way "to impress upon the prosecution that it cannot be allowed to benefit from having acted in a manner that is less than constitutional and ethical in the pursuit of convictions."

And with the stroke of a pen, Judge Cresto threw out the case.