Business Notes TRIALS

Government prosecutors have amply proved their ability to persuade white- collar offenders on Wall Street to confess and plead guilty, but can the Feds convict anybody in a court trial? In attempting to try an important case stemming from the Ivan Boesky stock-fraud scandal, the Government is striking out. Last week the criminal stock-manipulation case against GAF and its vice chairman, James Sherman, ended in a second mistrial. After six weeks of testimony and more than 90 hours of deliberations, Federal Judge Mary Johnson Lowe decided the jury was hopelessly deadlocked.

The GAF case evolved from the testimony of Boesky, who fingered West Coast broker Boyd Jefferies. The Government alleges that GAF used Jefferies as a participant in a scheme to manipulate the price of shares in Union Carbide. Prosecutors claim that GAF, which held a large block of Carbide stock as the result of an unsuccessful bid to take over the company, tried to run up the price of the shares before selling them. After many days of technical presentations about stock trading, the jury may have become numbed by it all. Even so, federal prosecutors vowed to try the case again.