THEY CROWDED IN through the swinging wooden doors of the Rhode Island Supreme Court, filling the hard benches, leaning against the paneled walls.

For Atty. Gen. Jeffrey B. Pine, the state's seven-year quest to prosecute Gov. Edward D. DiPrete had come down to this one last chance.

And so the accused and their accusers, the lawyers, the families, the investigators, and the curious gathered on Wednesday morning, Nov. 12, 1997, for the oral arguments in the prosecutors' appeal of the dismissal of the corruption case against the DiPretes.

Edward DiPrete came with his son and co-defendant, Dennis L. DiPrete; Edward's wife, Patricia; Dennis's wife, Susan. The DiPretes' lawyers, Richard M. Egbert and R. Robert Popeo, had made the familiar drive down from Boston.

The ex-governor's smiling wife greeted Justice Florence Murray, asking if she'd attended the funeral that morning of the widow of a former justice.

"No," replied Murray, scurrying off to join her associates. "I didn't know she'd died."

The prosecutors were out in force.

Attorney General Pine sat in a back corner of the vaulted courtroom, occasionally laughing with his deputy, Thomas M. Dickinson.

Kathleen M. Hagerty, who had defended the state against accusations of prosecutorial misconduct, came in from maternity leave.

J. Richard Ratcliffe, the original prosecutor, who in 1995 had left for private practice, brought his father, a Cumberland dentist.

Joseph L. DeCaporale Jr., who had been in charge of discovery in the DiPrete case and was to have played a leading courtroom role, sat in the front row of the spectators' gallery.

Michael F. Burns, whose supervision of the DiPrete case had for two weeks come under intense questioning, stood alone in the rear of the courtroom, arms folded over some papers.

At the front of the courtroom, a green-velvet curtain parted. The five black-robed justices filed in beneath a wooden archway carved with the words, in Latin, Not under man but under God and law.

The arguments began, the latest salvos in a struggle that had been pursued through the courts for four years.

As the arguments progressed, Michael Burns left the courtroom.

TEN DAYS AFTER the Supreme Court arguments of November 1997, Michael Burns committed suicide.

Either late Saturday night or early Sunday morning of the week before Thanksgiving, the 39-year-old chief of the attorney general's criminal division shot himself in the snowy woods near his secluded house, in Johnston.

It wasn't until late Sunday night that concerned friends and Rhode Island state troopers found him; they had followed a solitary set of footprints through the snow to a brook, where the body lay face down, a single gunshot wound in the back of the head. A Keltec 9-millimeter semi-automatic handgun was clutched in the left hand.

Inside the house, the police found Burns's prosecutor's-badge holder, some personal identification, two cigars, a matchbook, and a bag of food -- a hamburger, hot wieners, and French fries.

There was no note.

Outside, in the driveway, the police observed damage to the passenger side of Burns's black Saab. The car was also missing three hubcaps.

Investigators set out to retrace Burns's last hours.

At nine o'clock on Saturday morning, Nov. 22, Burns drove to Massachusetts with friends for a football game at his alma mater, Boston College. At halftime, with BC beating Army, they adjourned to a post-game haunt, the Hammond Lounge, in Brookline. Around four that afternoon, the friends all headed back to Rhode Island.

At 6 p.m., Burns met some of his family at Blake's Tavern, in downtown Providence, then went to a Providence Bruins hockey game, at the Providence Civic Center.

After the game, he went to the Civic Center's Pro Shop bar. Then he apparently picked up some food at Haven Brothers, the downtown eatery, and headed home alone.

As he left downtown, he spoke to a friend on his cellular phone, saying that he was tired but inviting her to stop by his house when she drove home. (The woman would page Burns about 30 minutes later, at 10 p.m., to advise him that she would not be stopping by. But he never returned her page.)

That was the last that anyone is known to have spoken with Michael Burns.

As Burns drove along Route 6 in Providence, his car hit a guardrail, about eight miles from his house. Near the damaged guardrail, the state police would later find the missing hubcaps from Burns's car and broken glass from the taillight.

The Rhode Island State Police were tight-lipped about the death of a man who had counted several friends among their ranks. State-police press releases did not even acknowledge that Burns had taken his own life -- only that he had died of a single gunshot to the head, and that foul play was not suspected.

IN THE YEAR leading up to his death, Michael Burns's friends had been worried about him.

Back in February 1997, a few months after Burns's public grilling in the hearings on prosecutorial misconduct, Attorney General Pine replaced Burns and the entire DiPrete-prosecution team.

Pine said that he had not lost faith in his prosecutors, but that he had had to replace them because the DiPrete lawyers had threatened to call them as witnesses in the trial.

Burns agreed that it was for the best. Still, his friends said, he was disappointed -- he had really wanted to try the case. His removal, coming on the heels of the hearings, as well as some personal setbacks, concerned his friends.

According to two former colleagues, one of Burns's close friends began spending more time with him, so that he wouldn't drink too much and do something "crazy."

At about the same time, another friend said that Burns was "deeply troubled." In the previous few years, another friend noted, Burns had lost both of his parents and seen his brief marriage fail.

The marriage ended after his wife had called 911 and accused him of "beating" her. No criminal charges resulted, but a tape of the 911 call was broadcast on the television news. Friends said the incident was distressing to Burns; he told them the accusation was not true.

In sum, said a former colleague, Burns had "had the stable things in his life destroyed."

After his divorce, he continued to live, alone, in the house in Johnston.

On Valentine's Day, about the time he was taken off the DiPrete case, Burns invited two old friends -- a state-police captain and a former prosecutor -- and their wives over for dinner. One of them, ex-prosecutor William Devereaux, later recalled being struck by how sparsely the house was furnished. He said that Burns's friends had urged him to sell it, to "get out of the woods."

After dinner, the party sat around watching the gangster movie Scarface and reminiscing about mob cases the men had worked on together.

If Burns seemed to take comfort in reliving old times, Devereaux and other friends said that he was growing increasingly concerned about the future.

Proud of his reputation, Burns had been stung by the accusations that he had concealed evidence in the DiPrete case. He viewed himself as a "knight on a white horse," said James Renaldo, a former prosecutor who had been one of Burns's early mentors.

During the DiPrete hearings, Renaldo called Burns to give him a pep talk. Burns told Renaldo that he was incapable of doing what the DiPretes' lawyers were accusing him of; he did not "hide" evidence.

"You'll weather the storm," Renaldo told him. "This will only be a minor setback."

Burns also worried that he had been painted as a bumbler. Under the relentless questioning of the DiPrete lawyers, Burns had acknowledged, over and over, that he didn't know or couldn't remember various details about the case he supervised.

"He felt like a good pitcher who had been shelled in the early innings," said Devereaux. "He didn't have his stuff." The problem, Devereaux said, was that Burns had too much on his plate.

"It was a mistake for him to be the supervising attorney [of the DiPrete case] plus the head of the criminal division," said Devereaux. "That was one of his faults: he couldn't say no to challenges like that."

By the fall of 1997, Burns feared that the controversy over his role in the DiPrete case could finish his public career.

He believed that he had suffered a run of bad publicity, from his wife's 911 call to accounts of his role in the DiPrete case and his supervision of Attorney General Pine's controversial narcotics Strike Force. The drug unit had become the target of a federal investigation for having allegedly fabricated arrest and search warrants, stolen evidence, and allowed an undercover informant to buy drugs for his own use with state money.

Also in 1997, The Providence Journal had reported Burns's role, in 1995, in persuading a judge -- contrary to state law -- to erase the criminal record of Wayne David Collins Jr., a two-time felon with influential friends in law enforcement. Burns had also helped Collins become a bail bondsman and obtain a gun permit. A public furor ensued; Collins gave up his bail bondsman's license and his gun permit and moved to Florida.

Burns worried, too, about how he would be portrayed in The Journal's series on the DiPrete case. He feared becoming an issue in Attorney General Pine's next reelection campaign. He told his friend William Devereaux that he would resign if it came to that.

"I think there were demons inside of him that no one will ever know about, exactly what they were," said another close friend, Stephen R. Famiglietti, an ex-prosecutor. "I think this may have been coming on for quite a long time."

WORD OF MICHAEL BURNS'S death spread quickly through Rhode Island's law-enforcement community. Late that Sunday night, Jeffrey Pine joined other prosecutors and police officers, including the superintendent of the state police, at Burns's house, in Johnston.

The next afternoon, Nov. 24, 1997, more than 200 relatives, friends, and colleagues -- lawyers, judges, police officers, and others -- filled St. Francis Chapel, in downtown Providence, to pay their respects.

Two police cruisers -- one from the state police, one from Burns's native Pawtucket -- straddled the street outside.

Inside, as people sobbed, William Noonan, the Pawtucket public-safety director, bid farewell to his lifelong friend:

"Those of us who loved Michael will take solace in the fact that he is at peace, and beyond anybody's ability to harm him."

THE FATE OF the DiPrete case -- whether or not it would even be tried -- hinged on a battle of intellects at the Rhode Island Supreme Court.

Immediately after the oral arguments of November 1997, the five justices assembled around a large oval table in the Supreme Court's conference room, surrounded by somber oil portraits of 19th-century jurists.

Chief Justice Joseph R. Weisberger, 77, was keenly aware of the public's cynicism toward government, having served through scandals that had toppled his two predecessors, Joseph A. Bevilacqua and Thomas F. Fay.

When Weisberger succeeded Fay, in 1993, he had pledged to restore public confidence in the Rhode Island judiciary.

Gentlemanly and erudite, an alumnus of Brown University and Harvard University Law School, Weisberger had been a Rhode Island judge for 41 years, sitting on the Supreme Court since 1978. He had an encyclopedic recall of U.S. Supreme Court cases and would quote Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Daniel Webster in his passionate discourses on the law.

Weisberger had been planning to retire when Chief Justice Fay's abrupt departure, in 1993, thrust him into the role of acting chief justice. Later, after he took the oath as the permanent chief justice, Weisberger kept his remarks brief and humble: "I pray that God will give me the health, the strength, the wisdom, and the grace to carry out the duties of my office with honor, dignity, and effectiveness."

Now the DiPrete appeal presented the chief justice with a case that would help cap a distinguished career -- a case that the attorney general had already accused a lower-court judge of having taken "away from the people."

At the conference following the oral arguments, Chief Justice Weisberger urged his associate justices to reinstate the charges, so that the DiPretes could go to trial. He argued that Superior Court Judge Dominic F. Cresto had had no authority to dismiss the case. The failure of prosecutors to turn over evidence, he said, could have been the result of a lack of communication. And there had been no harm done to the DiPretes -- they had eventually gotten the information to which they were entitled, before trial.

To punish the prosecutors by throwing the case out, Weisberger said, would be to punish the people of Rhode Island, who were entitled to see the former governor and his son go to trial.

Justice John P. Bourcier disagreed with Weisberger.

Bourcier was relatively new to the court, having joined in 1995. Before that, in his 21 years as a trial judge, Bourcier had earned the nickname Maximum John, for the stiff sentences he handed out. The Superior Court's presiding justice had called him "the brains on the trial court."

Now, speaking like the trial lawyer he had once been, Bourcier delivered an emotional speech to the other justices. The case deserved to be thrown out, Bourcier said, because of the prosecutors' behavior. Superior Court Judge Cresto had acted within his authority, and Bourcier cited state and federal cases to support his view.

If the Supreme Court ruled otherwise, Bourcier said, it would be bending the law to achieve a politically popular result: a trial of the DiPretes.

Weisberger and Bourcier had drawn the battle line. Now it was up to the three other justices to decide which way to vote.

Two of the court's regular five justices had recused themselves from the DiPrete case, because of their ties to former Governor DiPrete. One, Robert Flanders, had briefly served as Governor DiPrete's part-time legal counsel; the other, Maureen McKenna Goldberg, had been appointed to the bench by DiPrete.

As chief justice, Weisberger could have opted to have the three remaining justices decide the DiPrete case: himself, Bourcier, and Victoria S. Lederberg, a former state senator who had come to the court in 1993.

But the case was too important to leave the decision to just three justices, said Weisberger. So he asked two retired Supreme Court justices, Florence K. Murray and Donald F. Shea, to also hear the case. The three had served together for years, starting when they were trial judges, and had become friends.

Over time, there had also been some friction between Murray and Weisberger -- conflict that others had likened to sibling rivalry. But as a parting gesture when she retired, in 1996, Murray ripped up three stinging dissents that she had planned to issue opposing Weisberger.

NOW, at the conference following the November 1997 oral arguments in the DiPrete case, Florence Murray indicated that she agreed with Joseph Weisberger: the charges against the DiPretes should be reinstated. Meanwhile, Victoria Lederberg seemed sympathetic to John Bourcier's position.

That left Donald Shea.

Shea wanted to think about his decision.

A former legislator and Superior Court judge, Shea sat on the Supreme Court from 1981 to 1995. When he retired, he talked about "the public's perception that things are corrupt, or not well run."

By January of 1998, when the justices met again on the DiPrete case, Shea had made up his mind: he agreed with Joseph Weisberger and Florence Murray.

The DiPrete case had gained new life.

ON JAN. 9, 1998, the Rhode Island Supreme Court issued a one-page order reinstating the charges against Edward and Dennis DiPrete.

Behind the scenes, the drama played on as Chief Justice Weisberger crafted his majority opinion and Justice Bourcier crafted his dissent. Drafts of the opinions circulated.

Within the hushed confines of the Supreme Court, a battle took shape with ramifications beyond the DiPrete case.

Weisberger and Bourcier clashed over whether trial judges have the authority to dismiss a case before it comes to trial. At the heart of the debate were court rules designed to protect a defendant's right to a fair trial.

In the full opinion, issued on May 1, 1998, the chief justice wrote that there was no precedent to justify the extreme action of a judge's dismissing a case before trial. Superior Court Judge Cresto, said Weisberger, lacked the authority to dismiss the charges; he even lacked the authority to exclude the testimony of key witnesses.

Judge Cresto had taken "a drastic step," wrote Weisberger -- one that, in the words of a U.S. Supreme Court decision, would "increase to an intolerable degree interference with the public interest in having the guilty brought to book."

It was a step, said the chief justice, that should be taken only in "the most extraordinary of circumstances."

Weisberger did not condone the prosecution's conduct. He accepted Judge Cresto's findings that the state had failed to meet its obligation to disclose evidence to the DiPrete lawyers, and that the prosecutors had not been "completely forthcoming." Judge Cresto, wrote Weisberger, had been "justifiably displeased."

Weisberger elaborated: "Failure to communicate effectively among the members of the attorney general's staff, reliance upon the assumption that prior members of the prosecutorial team had conducted exhaustive searches of documents, and failure to express with full candor the knowledge of criminal conduct on the part of significant witnesses brought forth appropriate critical comment from the trial justice [Judge Cresto]."

Neverthless, wrote the chief justice, dismissal of the charges was unwarranted because the DiPretes could still receive a fair trial -- despite the prosecution's failings, the DiPretes now had all the information to which they were entitled. This was a case, said Weisberger, of "delayed discovery, not denied discovery."

Justice Bourcier argued that trial judges did have the authority to dismiss charges before a trial if flagrant abuse of the discovery process resulted in substantial prejudice to the defendant. The DiPretes had been "irreparably prejudiced" by the actions of the prosecutors, Bourcier wrote; because of the delays caused by the prosecutors' misconduct, the DiPretes had been forced to reveal their trial strategy and denied the right to a speedy trial. Furthermore, the DiPretes could still not be sure that they had received all of the evidence.

Bourcier contended, contrary to Weisberger, that these were "the most extraordinary of circumstances." The DiPrete prosecutors had engaged in unparalleled "deceit and trickery," and Weisberger was underplaying their "flagrant and intentional misconduct."

The Supreme Court majority, wrote Bourcier, "has chosen to refer to the prosecutors' repeated lies to defense counsel and the trial justice as conduct that was 'less than candid' and to the two-year concealment of [crucial information] that had to be finally dragged out by the trial justice as simply 'delayed discovery.' "

"I liken that," concluded Bourcier, "to describing the Titanic disaster as simply a maritime incident following which the Titanic failed to reach its intended port of destination at the scheduled time of arrival."

JUSTICE BOURCIER also contended that the majority was sacrificing its own precedent to see that the DiPretes went to trial.

He pointed out that in the past each of the justices now opposing him -- Joseph Weisberger, Florence Murray, and Donald Shea -- had written rulings upholding the authority of a trial judge to dismiss criminal charges for prosecutorial misconduct.

Bourcier found an order that Weisberger had written in 1986 upholding the dismissal of charges in a case before it went to trial. Weisberger countered that that case was too narrow and convoluted to apply to the DiPrete case.

Bourcier disagreed, quoting Weisberger's old words: "The court is of the opinion that the trial justice had ample authority to dismiss the [charges] in light of the persistent failure of the prosecution to make discovery."

In the DiPrete case, Bourcier wrote, precedent had been "sacrificed on the altar of expediency."

The debate between Chief Justice Weisberger and Justice Bourcier had come down to clashing interpretations of justice.

"We must bear in mind," wrote Weisberger, "that when a grand jury returns an indictment, the people of the State of Rhode Island are entitled to have the issues of fact and the issues of guilt or innocence tried on their merits. The punishment of an errant prosecutor by dismissal of the charges is in effect a punishment imposed upon the people of this state."

But to Bourcier, the majority's decision appeared "to have been fashioned apparently only for this particular appeal."

Weisberger's "noble pronouncement" that the public was entitled to see the DiPretes go to trial, wrote Bourcier, was "strangely reminiscent of the chant heard from the spectators in the ancient Roman Coliseum just before the lions were let loose."

THREE MONTHS AFTER the May 1 issue of the DiPrete opinion, the full current Supreme Court -- with Robert Flanders and Maureen McKenna Goldberg -- released an opinion in another case that criticized the chief justice's position in the State vs. DiPrete.

The case involved a North Providence public-works employee, Robert Musumeci, who had been accused of delivering $50 worth of marijuana. The trial judge, Corinne P. Grande, had dismissed the charges because the prosecutor had failed to turn over a critical policeman's log. Attorney General Pine then appealed the dismissal to the state Supreme Court.

The Musumeci and DiPrete cases had been pending before the Supreme Court at the same time. The oral arguments in DiPrete had come about three weeks before Musumeci, in late 1997. The Musumeci opinion followed by three months the May 1 DiPrete opinion.

The Musumeci opinion revealed an extraordinary quarrel among the justices over a trial judge's authority to punish an errant prosecutor.

The Supreme Court's four associate justices disagreed with Chief Justice Weisberger's approach in the DiPrete case. Although the court, as in DiPrete, reinstated the Musumeci charge, ruling that Musumeci could still get a fair trial, the associate justices shot down the precedent that Weisberger had briefly established in the DiPrete case.

In the DiPrete opinion, Weisberger had outlined a strict standard for trial judges. He said that judges should be allowed to dismiss criminal charges before a trial only if there is "flagrant misconduct and incurable prejudice" that affect the defendant's ability to get a fair trial. Weisberger commented in Musumeci that this standard had not been met in DiPrete, even though the trial judge had determined that the delayed disclosure was deliberate.

In Musumeci, the associate justices restore the wider discretion that they said judges had always enjoyed prior to DiPrete, even though they agreed that cases should be dismissed before trial only under very limited circumstances.

"It would appear," wrote Justice Robert Flanders, that the court's reasoning in DiPrete "stands alone" -- "and is so unique that it is without precedent and is likely to be without progeny."

Flanders suggested that the DiPrete precedent was less valid because two of the justices who had supported it were retired, to which Weisberger cited the combined 60 years' judicial experience of Florence Murray and Donald Shea, and argued that a court should not disregard its past decisions.

"A tribunal that shifts its position every few months may satisfy the individual predilections of its members, but in the long run will diminish its credibility," wrote Weisberger.

The court, the chief justice wrote, should have followed "the teachings of DiPrete."

Flanders countered that the DiPrete decision itself had violated a standard with both "venerable tenure" in Rhode Island and longstanding acceptance in other courts: a trial judge's historic discretion to police discovery violations.

"Remarkably," Flanders added, "neither [Weisberger] nor [Murray and Shea] during their combined one-hundred-plus years of outstanding judicial service had ever before espoused the 'no authority' rule that they articulated for the first time in DiPrete."

Meanwhile, Justice Maureen McKenna Goldberg, one of the recused justices in the DiPrete case, had harsh words for the prosecution's "stonewalling," and its "failure to accept responsibility" for mistakes in the Musumeci case.

Even more troubling, wrote Goldberg, who is the only former prosecutor on the Supreme Court, "is the general and pervasive attitude that the Attorney General's office can disregard the rules of discovery and not be held accountable."

Goldberg argued that the charge against Musumeci should have been dismissed. She said judges should have wider discretion to throw out cases -- even if a defendant has not suffered substantial prejudice -- "as a prophylactic measure to deter future misconduct."

WHILE THE Supreme Court wrestled with its decision in the DiPrete case, Jeffrey Pine made a decision of his own.

On March 4, 1998, he announced that he would not run for reelection as Rhode Island attorney general.

After six years in office, Pine said, it was time to think of his family's financial security. The job of attorney general pays $55,000, dramatically less than what Pine could earn in private practice.

The decision came as a surprise. At 43, Pine had spent most of his adult life as a prosecutor -- locking up the bad guys, standing up for victims. His parents had helped subsidize his calling, leaving him an inheritance; in 1996 Pine's income, from his job and his investments, was $90,000.

The announcement stunned Pine's fellow Republicans; he had been one of the state party's brightest lights. "You ask yourself," said John Holmes, a party leader, " 'Is there more than meets the eye?' But people trust Jeff Pine. When he stood before the cameras, I believed him."

Pine said that he was not leaving because of the problems with the DiPrete case or the Strike Force, nor because of Michael Burns's suicide. The attorney general pointed to his still strong public-approval ratings (more than 60 percent of those polled by Brown University felt Pine was doing a good job) as evidence that he could have won reelection.

Since last winter, Attorney General Pine has refused repeated requests from The Providence Journal to discuss his handling of the DiPrete case. In response to the paper's requests, the attorney general has accused the reporters who worked on this series of misconduct.

LEADERSHIP, said Jeffrey Pine, is defined by how you handle the bad times.

"The true test of leadership is how you deal when somebody's knocking you on the chin," Pine told a television interviewer early this year.

A boxing aficionado, Pine boasted that he had a strong chin -- that he could take the punishment and give it out, as well.

His first four years in office were marked by triumphs. Pine enjoyed a reputation as a tough crime fighter who put away the violent and the otherwise dangerous, took a stand against domestic abuse, pushed for stiff prison sentences, and lobbied for the death penalty.

But controversy over Pine's narcotics Strike Force and the DiPrete case have raised questions about Pine's judgment and generated the criticism that the attorney general does not always fight fair.

In April 1998, five people sued Attorney General Pine in federal court, alleging that their civil rights had been violated when they were arrested by his Strike Force agents on trumped-up drug charges.

"These guys just went out and broke the law in order to try to enforce the law, and that's just not tolerable," said Brian R. Cunha, a lawyer for one of the plaintiffs. The lawyer representing the four other people, former prosecutor Kevin J. Bristow, said that Pine had "ignored" problems that had been brought to his attention about Strike Force operations.

Now, in August, the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union has asked the state Supreme Court's disciplinary board to investigate misconduct on the part of Pine's office in the DiPrete case.

Noting that the attorney general is obliged to "uphold justice, not to win at any cost," the ACLU's Steven Brown wrote that the complaint against the attorney general's office was warranted because Pine "is clearly unwilling to acknowledge the seriousness of the findings made by Judge Cresto. Instead, he has failed to take any responsibility for them, and has more often than not criticized the messenger for the message. . . . In light of this, the likelihood of such improprieties occurring again seems extremely high."

Pine responded that the ACLU's complaint was "without merit," because the Supreme Court's disciplinary counsel, David Curtin, had undertaken a review of the transcripts in the Judge Cresto hearing and informed the prosecutors in June that he had found no evidence of intentional misconduct.

Pine's response to the ACLU drew a terse response from Curtin, who said that the matter was still open. "I have reached no final conclusions," said Curtin. "I think there is going to be a lot more in the DiPrete case.

"For all I know," he added, alluding to President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, "maybe there's a stained dress that hasn't been turned over."

In the matter of the attorney general's Strike Force, while Jeffrey Pine was promoting the drug-fighting unit to enhance his law-and-order image, trouble was brewing behind the scenes.

In April 1995, after one of Pine's top deputies, James W. Ryan, had raised concerns about Strike Force practices, Pine demoted Ryan. The move surprised many who over the years had come to respect Ryan, including the long-time former U.S. attorney, Gov. Lincoln Almond.

"I was surprised at Jim Ryan's demotion," said Almond in a recent interview. "I thought Jim Ryan was a good prosecutor and a straight shooter."

(Ryan recently resigned from the attorney general's office, after more than 12 years, to go into private practice. After his demotion as chief of the criminal division, he had three times been a finalist for a state judgeship; last fall, Pine wrote a letter of recommendation to Governor Almond, praising Ryan's experience and professionalism.)

The same month as Ryan's demotion, a highly publicized Strike Force drug bust unraveled, after the state's star informant admitted to lying about an undercover purchase of narcotics.

The informant was fired, and the charges were dismissed. But prosecutors continued to use the informant's testimony against other drug suspects. And two of Pine's Strike Force agents remained on the job, even though they had sworn in court to having witnessed the informant's fabricated drug purchase.

Publicly, Pine took credit for asking the state police to investigate his Strike Force. But that request did not come until May 1996 -- about a year after the informant had admitted lying, and 16 months after Ryan's memo had raised alarms. Pine's request came only after a defense lawyer -- the former prosecutor Kevin Bristow -- filed a public court statement alleging that the informant had used state money to buy drugs for himself.

By the fall of 1996, the investigation had widened to examine the conduct of Pine's Strike Force agents. Tension then built between the attorney general and the state police.

One day, according to State Police Col. Edmond S. Culhane, the state police discovered that Strike Force agents were still able to gain access to Strike Force records, despite the agents' being targeted by the investigation. The state police then went into the attorney general's building and changed the locks on the office of the Strike Force -- which Pine had by now disbanded, in the wake of publicity over the investigation.

Shortly thereafter -- following questions that Pine faced a conflict of interest in overseeing an investigation of his own office -- federal prosecutors and FBI agents removed boxloads of Strike Force files from the attorney general's headquarters and took over the case.

Also that fall, Pine's people monitored phone calls that state troopers made from the former Strike Force office, according to Colonel Culhane. One day a detective telephoned a Providence Journal reporter from the office; Pine complained to Culhane, accusing the state police of leaking information to the press.

The state police investigated and determined that the call had been "innocent," said Culhane. But Culhane wasn't happy with Pine's "counter-surveillance."

"They were watching their tail," said Culhane. "I was concerned that somebody was investigating the investigators."

"IT'S A BATTLE," Jeffrey Pine said of his job during the hearings into prosecutorial misconduct in the DiPrete case. "It's a battle against the defendants and their lawyers."

When questions were raised about his department's performance in the DiPrete case, the attorney general went on the offensive.

First, Pine's office attacked the DiPrete lawyers, accusing them of exaggerating the state's "inadvertent" failure to turn over evidence.

Then, when Judge Dominic Cresto concluded that there had been serious prosecutorial misconduct, Pine, his prosecutors, and his political strategist criticized the judge.

The political strategist called the inquiry into prosecutorial misconduct the product of "a well-orchestrated defense team getting a lot of cooperation from a judge."

As the hearings turned ugly for the state, Pine told reporters that people he encountered in public were wondering what Judge Cresto was doing.

After Cresto dismissed the case -- blasting the conduct of Pine's prosecutors -- the attorney general threw the blame back on the judge:

"I'm outraged that a judge in this state can unilaterally take a public-corruption case away from the people of this state. . . . It's very frustrating, because I know the public wants this case to go to trial, and so do we. The only ones who don't, apparently, are the defendants, and now the court."

Pine's comments joined a public fusillade against Judge Cresto. In Cranston, Edward DiPrete's home city, several people interviewed -- at a hairdresser's, a lunch spot, a hardware store, a bowling alley -- criticized the judge's decision.

"Typical Rhode Island political deal," said one.

"That's the way it works in this state," said another.

"People who are connected, you know, get off," said a third.

"Do you want the cynical view?" said a fourth. "It almost looks like somebody got hold of the judge."

Pine's comments drew criticism that he was playing to public cynicism to deflect blame from his prosecutors and himself. Even a Pine admirer -- the dean of the Southern New England School of Law, which in 1994 gave Pine an honorary degree -- said that the attorney general's remarks were out of line.

Dean Francis J. Larkin wrote in a Providence Journal letter to the editor that the attorney general "does not understand a fundamental tenet of democracy. . . . The role of the courts is to follow the law, not public opinion. Judges are not 'crime fighters.' Their sole duty is to impartially apply the law, which may at times be unpopular."

Pine's office, in its written appeal to the state Supreme Court, called Judge Cresto's decision "preposterous" and "farcical." The judge, contended the prosecutors, had "virtually adopted the defendants' theory of prosecutorial misconduct."

Early this year, in a television interview, Pine contended that "the major errors were committed in the court, by the judge."

ON JAN. 9, 1998, when the Supreme Court reinstated the charges against the DiPretes and sent the case back to Judge Cresto for trial, Attorney General Pine said that he might seek Cresto's removal from the case, because of his unfavorable rulings.

The same day, Cresto said that he expected to remain as the trial judge.

Three days later, Pine's top deputy, Thomas Dickinson, sent letters to Providence Journal reporters advising them to preserve their notes of any interviews with Judge Cresto "at any time regarding this case." The attorney general intended to subpoena the material if he filed a motion for the judge to recuse himself.

On Jan. 15, Judge Cresto announced that he was removing himself from the DiPrete case.

The judge said that there was no "legal or factual reason" requiring him to do so. Nevertheless, he said, addressing a courtroom that included Pine, he felt compelled to step aside because of the attorney general's attempts to discredit him.

"Public comments have been made from time to time by the attorney general in various forums relative to the reasons for the dismissal that downplayed or totally ignored the conduct of members of his department," said Cresto. The comments, he said, "were made in such a manner that suggested insidious implications with no basis in fact."

"Since the decision to dismiss the indictment," continued the judge, "my motives have been subtly brought into question by the attorney general, which I perceive as an unwarranted impugning of my integrity and character in order to divert attention from the real issues."

Pine responded that his remarks about Cresto were part of his job:

"I viewed it as doing our best on behalf of the state, the people of the state."

In various forums, Attorney General Pine has defended the prosecutors he assigned to the DiPrete case.

Michael Burns was an "outstanding" chief of the criminal division, Pine said in a January television interview -- someone whom Pine had had "very much confidence in."

And Joseph DeCaporale, said Pine in a letter of recommendation last fall, was qualified to be a Rhode Island judge. DeCaporale had been in charge of turning over evidence in the DiPrete case.

"Based on his experience in the courtroom, his service to the public over a number of years, and his professionalism," Pine wrote, "I believe that if selected he would serve the public well on the Superior Court."

(DeCaporale was interviewed by the judicial selection committee, but not selected.)

EIGHT YEARS after the first tip reached investigators, the case of the State vs. DiPrete has yet to find its way to a jury.

At a hearing on July 7, the new judge on the case, Francis J. Darigan Jr., was confronted with still more wrangling between the defense and the prosecution.

One issue concerned money.

The DiPretes are seeking $1.2 million from the state -- two-thirds of the $1.8 million in legal expenses that they say they incurred in ferreting out the prosecutors' misconduct. The DiPretes are not asking for the full $1.8 million, they say, because they realize that Rhode Island taxpayers would have to pay the bill.

The DiPretes' total legal costs, they say, have surpassed $3 million.

Also at the July 7 hearing, prosecutor Kathleen M. Hagerty told Judge Darigan that the attorney general's office disagreed with the Supreme Court that the prosecutors had engaged in misconduct or flouted the discovery process.

The judge, peering over his reading glasses, ordered Hagerty to sit down. "I don't need to be lectured by you, Miss Hagerty, on what constitutes discovery."

ABOUT TWO WEEKS earlier, on June 25, Kathleen Hagerty had been going through some files in Joseph DeCaporale's office when she came across a box containing handwritten notes from witness interviews in the DiPrete case.

The notes, taken by DeCaporale and Michael Burns in 1995, had never been given to the DiPrete lawyers -- despite an order to do so from Judge Cresto.

In 1996 Hagerty had said, in response to a request for notes taken by Burns that there weren't any such notes. Burns had testified that he had never taken notes.

On the afternoon of Hagerty's June 25 discovery, at a hastily called meeting in the attorney general's office, Jeffrey Pine expressed anger. Joseph DeCaporale was briefly called in, but soon excused.

The next week, the prosecutors included the new-found notes with some motions that they filed with Judge Darigan.

At the July 7 court hearing, the new lead prosecutor in the case, J. Patrick Youngs, played down the newly discovered material.

"There is nothing new. There is nothing surprising. There is nothing earth-shattering," said Youngs. "Judge, this is a voluminous case. It could happen again."

Two weeks later, on the morning of July 21, 1998, two of the chief adversaries in the State vs. DiPrete sat down together for a secret meeting.

To maintain privacy, the attorney general and R. Robert Popeo, the lawyer for Dennis DiPrete, met at an out-of-the-way spot, the Marriott Hotel in Foxborough, Mass.

It is not clear who requested the meeting, or what was discussed.

Judge Darigan has set a trial date of Jan. 4, 1999. It is the day before Jeffrey Pine leaves office.