Newsday from New York, New York • 9

lHi ft'i oiiiiiiii 1 I VYV 9 Tax Dodge to Cost Cartier $2. 2M sour, Thomas J. Foster, 63, were in- The Associated Press chasing a $100,000 diamond necklace punishment, ends midnight Jan. 81. Cartier was nabbed under the "Big Ticket project, directed at catching tax evaders on luxury high-cost purchases.

Ben Thylan and his Ben Thylan Furs corporation also pleaded guilty for foiling to collect sales taxes. Other cases pending include those against the Bulgari, Carimati and Van Cleff Arpcus jewelry stores and Christie Brothers Fur Corp. Cartier Inc. pleaded guilty to one count of falsifying business records, a felony, before Acting State Supreme Court Justice Joan B. Carey in Cartier the Fifth Avenue jewe-lery store, pleaded guilty yesterday to failing to collect sales tax by mailing dummy packages to out-of-state addresses, and agreed to repay the state $2.2 million, state officials announced.

As part of the plea agreement. Car-tier will pay $1.22 million for unpaid taxes, $647,000 in interest and $336,000 in fines, said Attorney General Robert Abrams. He said the figure was the "largest sum ever paid in a tax case in the states history. Cartier, its manager, S. Howard Warnock, 42, and the assistant man- would save $8,260 in sales tax through the scheme.

Since the scheme was "fostered by Cartier and not the customer, Abrams said consumers who benefited from it would not be prosecuted. With only days left to make restitution under the state's Tax Amnesty program, Abrams said the Cartier case was proof that officials are serious about catching and vigorously prosecuting tax cheats. The amnesty program, which allows businesses and residents to pay delinquent personal or business taxes without dieted in March on charges of scheming to avoid collecting city and state sales taxes on millions of dollars of over-the-counter purchases. The case against the two -employees is still pending. Abrams said store employees asked customers if they lived out of state or had relatives who did and then offered to send an empty package to the address so the customer could avoid paying the 8.25 percent sales tax.

Abrams said the practice was used "as a device to encourage more business. For example, a customer pur TA Improvement Plan A Mess9: Chief Engineer By Margaret Gordy The Transit Authoritys 237-million program to improve and renovate the citys 463 subway stations is a shambles, with all projects up to four years behind schedule end an average of 10 percent over budget. "Its a mess, absolutely, said Michael Ascher, the TAs chief engineer who assumed stewardship of engineering and construction in. April. "We have ordered a moratorium on all new projects for the next three years while we try to untangle this.

Problems range from water corrosion and sinking floors to chipped and broken signs and improperly installed lights. In one case, the TA has spent four Dennis Duggans column, In the Subways, which normally appears Wednesdays, will appear tomorrow. lower Manhattan, workers found widespread water leaks corroding the steel structure, which could cost $500,000 to fix. another case, hundreds of thousands of dollars in floor work has to be redone at the Borough Hall station in Brooklyn, because newly applied tiles have come loose, exposing large patches of cement. The contractor for the station, Louis A.

Wenger, said he disagreed with the TAs assessment of his work, "but we are replacing the tiles under protest. At least five kinds of construction work is simultaneously in progress at all but 25 of the 463 stations. Ascher said work on the 75 station improvement contracts was at least seven month end as much as four years behind schedule and an average of 10 percent over budget. "In this day and age of high technology, thie fo how our time gets consumed, Ascher said. Although the renovation work began in 1981, there was no direct TA field supervision until last summer, when Ascher reorganised the department and hired seven prqject managers, a chief architect and an assistant vice president for station construction.

Aschers predecessor, George Ziegler, Continued on Page 32 they were delivered. The problem was with the escalators handrails, which slipped off when the escalators were put into operation. Weatinghouse fixed five of them after switching handrail manufacture ere, but the others, including eight at the heavily traveled Herald Square station in Manhattan, are still broken. A Westinghouse spokesman in Pittsburgh said yesterday that the companys escalator division could not comment. At the Clark Street station in Brooklyn, the contractor defaulted, leaving work at a standstill while the authority spent months seeking new bids.

At the Fulton Street station in Photo by Tam Kltta Ducking the Call These three youngsters from IS 44 in Manhattan attempt, without much luck, to lure some ducks to the shore as they spend part of a frigid afternoon yesterday In Central Park. They probably could have used a bag of bread crumbs. Cold weather will continue today with temperatures in the mid 20s and a chance of snow; the low tonight will drop into the teens. NEWSDAY, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29, The Solicitous Cop Follows Road to Ruin Early in the morning 16th last. Police Frederick Sherman opened his apartment door to Lt.

Peter H. Smith, his assigned escort to the station house to explain how the patrol car he commanded had killed one septuagenarian, wounded another and then run away. His bearers had had to wait while Sherman fed his birds. "He felt concerned about them, Smith testified yesterday. Even a ence to and alienation from i him, and there are too many reasons to think Frederick Sherman a cop who had lost that fight in panic, and when the car drove away in wild haste to lurch down a aide street, and he had not waked until aroused by a sudden chill from the night air.

He had opened his eyes to see Officers Anthony Conte and Edwin Collazo "babbling in their agitation. He inquired about the windshield hole of a i somewhere between a baseball and a fruit, end got no answers more tangible than be-aeechings until it was at last confessed that they had hit a garbage can. He was too seasoned a hand not to know that garbage do not run across the street and into motor vehicles, and his immediate and single thought was of "how to protect my cops." "Those two officers might have come across as under the influence, Sherman explained. "I might have diffused the blame, but it would Continued on Page 32 and gone to the bad. Even so he needed still to show tenderness to some of Gods animate objects, if only His birds.

A ww minutes before Smiths court appearance, Sherman had completed his witness in his own defense, and, if he carried away from the stand almost as many mysteries as he brought there, by no means the least of those was the persistence of his wish to preserve the illusion that he had kept intact some corner of the gentle side of his nature. He had, he swore, "snuggled down in the backseat of his patrol car a little after 11 p.m. and gone to sleep from the exhaustion of 20 hours of toil first on his construction job and then on his duty tour. He had slumbered when the car struck two pedestrians, when one victims head broke its windshield, when the two patrolmen in front shouted 0 turn.