Three Expected to Plead Guilty in Scheme Involving City’s Payroll Project

The three are related to the lead defendant in the case, Mark Mazer, who has been accused of helping to orchestrate the scheme, which prosecutors said involved more than $600 million in city money and more than $40 million in kickbacks.

Mr. Mazer has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled for trial along with two co-defendants in September. In 2012, a government contractor, Science Applications International Corporation, agreed to forfeit more than $500 million as part of a settlement for its role in the case. Two other defendants have pleaded guilty.

The three defendants who are expected to enter guilty pleas are Mr. Mazer's wife, Svetlana Mazer; his mother, Larisa Medzon; and a cousin, Anna Makovetskaya. All three were charged with money laundering conspiracy, and were accused of using shell companies to help Mr. Mazer hide kickbacks he was allegedly receiving in the scheme.

The office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, declined to comment. It said in a letter on Tuesday to the judge, George B. Daniels of Federal District Court, that the three would plead to unspecified charges as part of agreements with prosecutors. Lawyers for the three defendants declined to comment or did not return calls seeking comment.

Rose Gill Hearn, the commissioner of the Department of Investigation, citing the previous guilty pleas and the city's recovery of $500 million, said, "This case continues to move forward and yield positive results for the taxpayers."

Mr. Mazer's lawyer, Gerald L. Shargel, said of the three defendants expected to plead guilty: "It has long been recognized that people may plead guilty to avert the draconian consequences of conviction. I am certain that these issues were in their thoughts."

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Spoils of the Sea Elude Many in an Alaska Antipoverty Plan

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

"You eat from one bowl," said Ivan M. Ivan, 67, a tribal leader in Akiak, quoting the Yup'ik Eskimo cultural adage about sharing resources, in good times and bad. "That didn't happen." More Photos »

AKIAK, Alaska — The humble pollock, great cash fish of the north, conquered the world through the flaky bland hegemony of a fish stick. At more than $1 billion a year, there is no bigger fishery for human consumption on the planet.

But pollock was also meant to be a savior, part of a Washington-backed antipoverty plan aimed at residents here on Alaska's mostly undeveloped west coast. A generation ago, organizers envisioned federally guaranteed shares of the pollock catch that would create a rising tide of funds to lift up poor, isolated villages where jobs and hope are scarce.

Pollock did succeed, wildly. The dollars that flowed into the Community Development Quota Program, as the catch-share system was called, created a hydra-headed nonprofit money machine. Six nonprofit groups arose on the Bering Sea shore, and they have invested mightily in ships, real estate and processing plants. Over two decades, the groups amassed a combined net worth of $785 million.

But the results on the ground, in rural community and economic development, have been deeply uneven, and nonexistent for many people who still gaze out to the blinking lights of the factory ships and wonder what happened.

"You eat from one bowl," said Ivan M. Ivan, 67, chief of the native community here in Akiak, quoting the Yup'ik Eskimo cultural adage about shared resources. "That didn't happen."

Collectively, the groups created tens of thousands of jobs and scholarships in one of the poorest regions of the nation. But critics say that community development, over time, got lost in a push toward institutional sustainability — and in some cases lavish salaries for leaders. Deregulation became self-regulation with a board of overseers appointed by the groups themselves the only real watchdog in recent years.

Meanwhile, a lopsided division of spoils among the groups has festered into a conflict that some Alaskans fear could unravel the catch-share project itself, which has done much good, they say, despite its flaws. In 2011, according to the most recent figures, one group with a small population got nearly 22 times more revenue per resident than another, larger group, based on allocation formulas locked in by Congress in 2006.

The fate of places like Akiak, a village of 350 people about 400 miles west of Anchorage, was dictated by a political compromise two decades ago, when a line was drawn 50 miles from the Bering Sea. Villages inside the line got pollock money. Akiak's rutted dirt roads and 80 percent unemployment rate, residents said, bespeak its outsider status, 20 miles from that border.

Residents of Napaskiak, by contrast, a village of similar size 24 miles away, get scholarships, free firewood, free tax assistance and subsidized boat motors, all courtesy of the local catch-share group, the Coastal Villages Region Fund, which also buys halibut and herring from local fishermen.

The rules were hard but necessary, said Dick Tremaine, an economist who was a consultant to the state in the early 1990s. "This was a social engineering experiment that had not yet existed," he said.

But even communities within the line have seen uneven development.

The federal health clinic in the village of Teller, for example, in Alaska's northwest corner, went months without toilets last year after its septic system failed. Doctors and patients used five-gallon buckets instead, then stacked them in the street. Worse still, there were often not enough buckets to go around. Cardboard boxes, lined with plastic bags, then had to suffice.

Teller is not unique: 10 of 15 villages dotting the tundra along the Bering Sea outside of Nome — all within the catch-share system — do not have complete sewer service or running water.

"I can understand how C.D.Q.'s, in the early years, focused on the development of businesses," said Ed Backus, vice president for fisheries at Ecotrust, an economic development group in Portland, Ore., that works in Alaska, referring to the Community Development Quota Program. "But over time as those revenue streams really bulked up, which they have, I think it's important to remember the main mission of C.D.Q.'s is to really improve life in the villages."

Spokesmen for the nonprofit groups agreed that not every village has seen the same benefits.

Part of the problem is geography, said Simon Kinneen, vice president and chief operating officer of the Norton Sound Economic Development Corporation, which covers the northern corner of the catch-share region, including Teller. "Developing fisheries and economies in our member communities that do not have reasonable access to commercially viable fish species is difficult at best," he said in an e-mail.

A spokesman for the Coastal Villages Region Fund, Dawson Hoover, conceded that much more work should be done.

This article was written in cooperation with InvestigateWest, a nonprofit investigative journalism organization based in Seattle that covers the Pacific Northwest.

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Award-Winning Journalist Michael Hastings Dies

LOS ANGELES — Award-winning journalist and war correspondent Michael Hastings, whose unflinching reporting ended the career of a top American army general, died early Tuesday in a car accident in Los Angeles, his employer and family said.

Hastings, who was 33, was described by many of his colleagues as an unfailingly bright and hard-charging reporter who wrote stories that mattered. Most recently, he wrote about politics for the news website BuzzFeed, where the top editor said colleagues were devastated by the loss.

"Michael was a great, fearless journalist with an incredible instinct for the story, and a gift for finding ways to make his readers care about anything he covered from wars to politicians," said Ben Smith, BuzzFeed's editor-in-chief.

Smith said he learned of the death from a family member.

Authorities said there was a car crash early Tuesday in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles that killed a man, but coroner's officials could not confirm whether Hastings was the victim.

Hastings won a 2010 George Polk Award for magazine reporting for his Rolling Stone cover story "The Runaway General."

His story was credited with ending Gen. Stanley McChrystal's career after it revealed the military's candid criticisms of the Obama administration.

Hastings quoted McChrystal and his aides mocking Obama administration officials, including Vice President Joe Biden, over their war policies.

At a Pentagon ceremony for his subsequent retirement in 2010, McChrystal made light of the episode in his farewell address. The four-star general warned his comrades in arms, "I have stories on all of you, photos of many, and I know a Rolling Stone reporter."

When he died, Hastings was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where Managing Editor Will Dana was quoted Tuesday saying Hastings exuded "a certain kind of electricity" that exists in great reporters whose stories burn to be told.

"I'm sad that I'll never get to publish all the great stories that he was going to write, and sad that he won't be stopping by my office for any more short visits which would stretch for two or three completely engrossing hours," Dana said.

Hastings was also an author of books about the wars. "The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan" was published late last year and details shocking exploits of the military overseas.

In 2010, with the publication of "I Lost My Love in Baghdad," Hastings told the story of being a young war correspondent whose girlfriend died in Iraq.

In the summer 2013 issue of Vermont Life magazine, Hastings was quoted telling an audience at the Burlington Book Festival that he doesn't believe in objectivity in journalism.

"What I try to do is be intellectually honest in my writing," he said.

Hastings' family moved to Vermont when he was 16, a state he told the magazine was his "spiritual home." According to the magazine, he lived in New York with his wife.

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In Bulger’s Underworld, a ‘Judas Was the Worst’

By Brent McDonald

AP|Boston Globe|Reuters|Boston Police|U.S. Attorney's Office

The Trial of Whitey Bulger: Reporters who covered the Boston crime boss James (Whitey) Bulger describe how he became one of the most notorious gangsters in American history.

BOSTON — "Family and friends come first," John Martorano, an aging gangster known as the Executioner, declared from the witness stand here on Tuesday. "My father always taught me that. The priests and the nuns I grew up with taught me that. They taught me that Judas — Judas was the worst person in the world."

Just a few days into testimony at one of the most sensational criminal trials in this city's history, it is clear that something more is at stake than the racketeering and murder charges in the 32-count indictment against James (Whitey) Bulger, the notorious ruler of Boston's underworld in the 1970s and '80s.

The trial has focused in its early days on the criminals' concepts of honor and loyalty, codes they say they lived by.

Mr. Martorano, for one, who has confessed to at least 20 murders, took offense at being called a "mass murderer," did not like the term "hit man" and rejected the label "serial killer."

He preferred the term "vigilante," seeing in it the noble pursuit of protecting friends and family, especially if they were being hurt or double-crossed or could be hurt or double-crossed.

"Is there any honor or integrity in what you did?" Mr. Martorano was asked under relentless cross-examination on Tuesday by Henry Brennan, a defense lawyer.

"I thought so," Mr. Martorano replied. "I thought both. I didn't like risking my life, but I thought if the reason was right, I'd try."

That concept of honor has been a subtext of this trial since the moment it opened last week. Mr. Bulger's lead lawyer, J. W. Carney Jr., took the unusual tack of immediately acknowledging that his client was guilty of several charges against him, including drug dealing, illegal bookmaking and loansharking, and said he had made "millions upon millions" of dollars through his criminal enterprises.

But, the lawyer insisted, Mr. Bulger, 83, was never an F.B.I. informer, as the prosecution alleges. Nor, he said, did Mr. Bulger kill the two women on the list of 19 murders he is accused of participating in.

The code prohibits the killing of women. And being an informer is totally unacceptable — something that Mr. Carney said was deeply ingrained in the Irish, who for so long had to protect one another from their British overlords.

"The worst thing that an Irish person could consider doing was becoming an informant because of the history of the Troubles in Ireland," he told the jury in his opening statement.

Mr. Martorano, 72, who told the court that he had regarded Mr. Bulger as a brother, is now testifying for the prosecution against him because, he said, he found out belatedly, after decades as partners in crime, that Mr. Bulger had violated that code and was an F.B.I. informer all along. (He was testifying under a deal that let him off with a 14-year sentence for his 20 confessed murders.)

Some legal observers of the trial have quickly concluded that the show going on in the federal courthouse is an exercise in self-delusion, all for the purpose of allowing Mr. Bulger — who sought the trial when he pleaded not guilty to all charges against him — to profess to the world that he abided by his personal code.

"They all have their own codes, and they betray those codes if they need to," said Michael D. Kendall, a former federal prosecutor who investigated some aspects of Mr. Bulger's activities. "They kill their friends, they kill their girlfriends, they want to make themselves sound better than they are. Whitey's code is, 'I didn't strangle the woman, I watched the other guy strangle the woman.' "

The trial has gripped Boston, attracting scores of reporters from far and wide and earning prominent daily coverage in the newspapers, online and on the local news. Part of the fascination is with a world gone by, not only the old gritty streets of South Boston but the world before cellphones and e-mail became standard forms of communication.

In the world unfolding at the courthouse, a parade of aging gangsters describe speaking into walkie-talkies. They used phone booths. They hid astounding amounts of cash inside walls. They shipped arms across country by checking them on an ordinary passenger bus.

This world was marked by gangland slayings that now seem passé. At the center was the code that they now use to justify their actions.

"Bulger is the creator of that cult of the code," said Anthony Cardinale, a criminal defense lawyer who has represented mobsters and who first exposed Mr. Bulger as an informer.

"This trial is about to eliminate the myths around this guy as a Robin Hood figure and let everyone know he is a bona fide rat," Mr. Cardinale said. He added that he saw the trial as "a big, face-saving gesture" on Mr. Bulger's part. "He wants to say: 'Sure, I was a criminal, but why would I need to be a rat if I was so successful? And most important, I didn't kill those two women.' "

In court, the prosecution treated Mr. Martonaro, a star witness, with kid gloves as it led him through sanitized descriptions of many of his murders. But the defense painted an entirely different picture, of a ruthless killer who gunned down innocent bystanders without remorse and who lied. And it charged especially hard at Mr. Martonaro's notion that he doing the right thing by his friends and family.

"When you were doing the 'right thing' killing these people, why did you run and hide?" Mr. Brennan, the defense lawyer, asked him. "If you got caught, couldn't you just explain that you were doing the right thing?"

Mr. Martonaro had no answer.

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Obama Has Plans to Cut U.S. Nuclear Arsenal, if Russia Reciprocates

Johannes Eisele/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

President Obama and his wife, Michelle, were greeted by an honor guard in Berlin on Tuesday.

WASHINGTON — President Obama plans to use a speech in Berlin on Wednesday to outline plans for further reductions in the American nuclear arsenal if Russia agrees to pare back its weapons at the same time, administration officials said Tuesday.

Resuming a drive toward disarmament that he had largely shunted aside over the past two years, Mr. Obama will propose trimming the number of strategic warheads that each of the two big nuclear powers still maintains by up to a third, taking them below the 1,550 permitted in the treaty he signed with Russia in his first term, a senior administration official said. That would leave each country with just over 1,000 weapons.

Mr. Obama will also declare that he will work with NATO allies to develop proposals for major cuts in tactical nuclear weapons, which are not covered by the existing treaty. Russia, which has far more tactical nuclear weapons deployed than the United States and Europe do, has firmly resisted such cuts. There are fears that its tactical weapons are in parts of Russia where they risk being seized by terrorist groups.

Mr. Obama will also announce that he will host a final nuclear security summit meeting in the United States just before he leaves office.

The president, who once talked about eventually ridding the world of nuclear weapons, faces enormous obstacles to any further reductions, both in Moscow and in Washington. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has demanded further concessions on missile defense before entertaining deeper nuclear cuts, and Republicans in the Senate have made clear they would resist any treaty that went beyond the New Start pact ratified in 2010. Mr. Obama's aides have said that they have no appetite for another treaty battle, and that they would try to follow the precedent of the first President George Bush, who arranged reciprocal but not binding cuts with the dying Soviet Union without a treaty.

But the president's return to the issue of nuclear reductions, however tentative, suggests he wants to invest at least some of his remaining time in office to making enough progress that he can point to it as an important legacy. "It's a way of signaling what he sees his agenda for the rest of his second term being," said an administration official, who, like others, declined to be identified in advance of the speech.

Supporters of further disarmament said they hoped Mr. Obama would refocus attention on the goal after rarely mentioning it in recent years, while he was consumed by other issues. "The most important thing he could do is lay out the broad agenda for the next three and a half years," said John Isaacs, executive director of the Council for a Livable World, an advocacy group.

In addition to further reductions, Mr. Isaacs said, there are several policy changes Mr. Obama could take that would move the country further away from cold war-style national security. He said the president could take nuclear weapons off high alert and change nuclear doctrine to say that the only purpose of such weapons would be as a deterrent.

But administration officials cautioned against expecting the Berlin speech to be a sequel to Mr. Obama's 2009 address in Prague laying out his vision for a nuclear-free world. Instead, nuclear reductions will be just one element of a larger, thematic address, officials said, and the president will not get into much detail about specific policy changes.

That is a significant lowering of the bar: For a while, Mr. Obama considered setting out much more ambitious goals in a speech administration officials hoped he would give this month, on the 50th anniversary of a famous speech John F. Kennedy gave at American University. That speech, less than a year after the Cuban missile crisis, created the push for what became the nuclear test ban treaty, signed two months later.

Early in Mr. Obama's first term, aides described an ambitious agenda that included ratifying the long-stalled Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and negotiating a new treaty that would ban the production of new fissile material, the makings of nuclear fuel. In the Berlin speech, Mr. Obama will repeat his call for the test ban treaty but will set no deadline for submitting it to the Senate, because of administration fears that it would go down to a second defeat.

Pakistan has blocked the opening of negotiations on the fissile material ban, and administration officials say they will put pressure on the new Pakistani government to move on that issue. He will also have to press Pakistan to cease its deployment of a new generation of tactical weapons that officials fear could easily be stolen by terrorists.

Mr. Obama's early agenda has been frustrated by many setbacks. North Korea has conducted two nuclear tests during his tenure. Iran has installed 17,000 centrifuges and now has enough low- and medium-enriched fuel to produce a half dozen weapons, with further enrichment. Pakistan has the world's fastest growing arsenal. Once Republicans made gains in the Senate, Mr. Obama never submitted the test ban treaty for ratification or negotiated further cuts with Russia.

Perhaps Mr. Obama's biggest success has been his effort to lock down vulnerable nuclear materials around the world, a task nearly all countries have agreed to, even if he did not accomplish the entire job in the four years he initially envisioned.

The New Start treaty limited both the United States and Russia to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads and 800 missiles, bombers and submarine launchers, of which 700 could be deployed. As of March 1, Russia — with 1,480 deployed warheads and 492 deployed launchers — had already met two of the three limits and was close to the third. The United States — with 1,654 deployed warheads and 792 deployed launchers — was close but not under the caps.

Mr. Obama appears to recognize that the follow-up treaty he once envisioned with Russia now may be too difficult to push through the Senate. Instead, if Russia agreed to further cuts, the existing verification systems in the old treaty would be used to confirm that both sides were abiding by their new commitments.

But if Mr. Putin rejects this offer, one of Mr. Obama's aides noted, "it will be very tough slogging for the next three years."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 18, 2013

An earlier version of this article overstated gains Republicans made in the Senate during the Obama administration. The Democrats still control the Senate, not the Republicans.

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Game 3: Bruins 2, Blackhawks 0: Dealt Early Blow, Blackhawks Are Punchless vs. Bruins

Bruce Bennett/Getty Images

The Bruins' unflappable goaltender Tuukka Rask stopped all 28 shots he faced against the Blackhawks in Game 3 on Monday, boosting his series save percentage to .960.

BOSTON — The Bruins on Monday played like the relentless team that swept the Penguins from the playoffs. And they did not need overtime to prove it.

Tuukka Rask's superb goaltending and goals from Daniel Paille and Patrice Bergeron helped throttle the Blackhawks, 2-0, at TD Garden and give Boston a 2-1 advantage in the Stanley Cup finals. It was the first game in the series decided in regulation. Game 4 is Wednesday here.

"We're playing the best hockey of the season right now," Bruins Coach Claude Julien said. "That's what you've got to do to give yourself a chance to win a Stanley Cup."

The Blackhawks never seemed to recover from the loss of Marian Hossa, whose 15 playoff points are tied for the team lead, to a freak injury in warm-ups.

Paille, who notched the overtime winner in Game 2, opened the scoring as he twirled near the right circle and wristed the puck past goaltender Corey Crawford at 2 minutes 13 seconds of the second period. Later in the period Paille's speed and hustle helped set up the second goal when he burst past Chicago defenseman Niklas Hjalmarsson and drew a tripping penalty with 11 seconds still left in a Boston power play.

Zdeno Chara gave Jaromir Jagr the puck to the side of the net, and Jagr fired a pinpoint pass through the goal mouth to Bergeron at the other side. Crawford slid across and almost made the save, but Bergeron buried the chance just after the first Chicago penalty expired.

The 41-year-old Jagr, who was criticized by the television analyst Mike Milbury for being too old and too slow during Game 2, played another effective game. Though he has not scored in the postseason, he has eight assists.

"I'm not that fast anymore, but I still can see," Jagr joked when asked if he saw Bergeron open when he made the pass. "Give me some credit."

Bergeron had a mammoth game, leading both teams with seven shots on goal while winning a remarkable 24 of 28 face-offs. He was the biggest hero of the Bruins' record-setting comeback from a three-goal deficit in Game 7 against Toronto in the opening round, when he scored the game-tying goal with 51 seconds left in regulation, and the winner in overtime.

On Monday he talked about the completeness of the Bruins' effort. "It's about the little details that go unnoticed, but not by us," Bergeron said.

In the Boston goal, Tuukka Rask remained virtually unbeatable. He stopped all 28 shots, logging his third shutout in seven games and boosting his series save percentage to .960. But the Bruins' defense made sure that most of the shots he faced came from the perimeter.

Crawford stopped 33 of 35 shots.

Without Hossa, the already sputtering Blackhawks offense sputtered further. They have not scored since Patrick Sharp's first-period goal in Game 2, a span of 122:26.

Hossa seemed to hurt himself trying to take a shot in warm-ups. Chicago Coach Joel Quenneville, who would only say that it was an upper-body injury and that Hossa's status was "day to day," said that his absence was not the reason for the loss.

"It's a low-chance game — it's a low-chance series," Quenneville said. "It's hard to get A-plus chances."

Jonathan Toews, with only one goal and eight assists in the playoffs, was smothered for a third straight game by Chara and his defense partner, Dennis Seidenberg. Quenneville tried to place Toews with different sets of wings in an effort to get him free of the pair, but nothing worked.

Patrick Kane, another Blackhawks big gun, seemed tentative at times without Hossa on his line. At one point in the second period, he broke in on Rask but declined to shoot until too late, allowing Rask to make an easy save.

The Bruins' penalty killers repelled four Chicago power plays. They have not allowed a power-play goal in 26 straight attempts, stretching back to Dan Girardi's goal in Game 5 of their second-round victory over the Rangers.

Hossa was replaced by Ben Smith, who had played only one game this season for Chicago; he skated a team-low 10 minutes and was on the ice for Paille's goal.

The 6-foot-9, 255-pound Chara was also injured during warm-ups when he collided with the 6-4, 220-pound Milan Lucic, sending both crashing to the ice. Chara sustained a cut over his left eye that required stitches to close, but he played the entire game.

With 12 seconds left in the game, as the Blackhawks pulled their goalie and tried in vain to put a goal on the board, Chara wrestled with Bryan Bickell, and Chicago's Andrew Shaw threw a punch at Boston's Brad Marchand. But the Bruins held firm.

"Tonight was great," Rask said.

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Incorrect Date of Koch’s Birth on Tombstone

But Mr. Koch left the dates of his birth and death to be engraved after his burial, when he could no longer supervise the work.

This week, someone noticed that two numerals in the year of the mayor's birth had been transposed. Instead of Dec. 12, 1924, the engraver carved 1942.

The mistake, reported on Monday by WNBC-TV, was made two weeks ago when the engraver, Tommy F. Flynn of Flynn Funeral & Cremation Memorial Centers Inc., was putting the final touches on Mr. Koch's tombstone.

"I inverted 1924 to 1942, and I'm going to fix it," Mr. Flynn said by telephone. "It was a simple human error." He said it would be fixed within three weeks.

Mr. Flynn said he worked with Mr. Koch for eight months designing the granite tombstone. It includes the last words of Daniel Pearl, the reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was beheaded in 2002 by Islamist terrorists in Pakistan: "My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish."

Mr. Flynn said both the date of the former mayor's birth and his death were left blank, to be added after Mr. Koch's burial. He died on Feb. 1 at age 88 and was buried at Trinity Church Cemetery in Washington Heights after an elaborate funeral.

Though Mr. Koch spent years meticulously preparing for his death — he planned his funeral, choosing a rabbi and potential speakers years in advance — Diane Coffey, his former chief of staff, said he would have been amused by the mix-up on his tombstone. "He always used to talk about how he had a 29-year-old brain," she said. "So now he practically bought two decades."

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DealBook: Britain’s Top Fraud Office Aims to Add Bite to Its Bark

David Green, the director of Britain's Serious Fraud Office, is in a combative mood.

On his desk at his office, a stone's throw from Trafalgar Square in London, sits a souvenir plaque commemorating the signal that Admiral Horatio Nelson sent to his fleet on the eve of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. It says, "England expects that every man will do his duty."

Mr. Green says his duty is to revive confidence in his office as a top-tier prosecutor of serious fraud and corruption. And he plans to do that with the help of one of the biggest cases the organization has ever taken on: the investigation into the rigging of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor.

His office plans to bring criminal fraud charges against Thomas Hayes, a former trader at UBS and Citigroup, as early as Tuesday, according to a person briefed on the case. Mr. Hayes, who was charged with fraud late last year by the United States Justice Department, is seen as a central character in the rate-rigging scheme. His role figured prominently in the case against UBS, which under a settlement pleaded guilty to one count of felony wire fraud and paid about $1.5 billion in fines. The criminal charges against Mr. Hayes would be the first brought by British prosecutors for suspected manipulation of Libor.

"What people look to is success in the very big headline cases, and inevitably Libor comes to mind," Mr. Green, 59, said in an interview this month. "I am in the business of doing justice and restoring public confidence in the rule of law. The public need to have confidence that white-collar criminals are dealt with as criminals, that they are not given some special rosy path with a cop-out sentence at the end of the day."

When Mr. Green took over as director of the fraud office in April last year after 25 years as a prosecutor and defense lawyer, he found an agency whose reputation was in shambles and whose staff morale had hit rock bottom. Two London businessmen, the Tchenguiz brothers, Robert and Vincent, had dragged the office to court over a botched investigation into their connections with failed banks in Iceland. The fraud office apologized and started an internal investigation but also ran up huge legal costs that might continue to grow.

Additional embarrassment came in 2011, when the office decided against investigating Libor and shifted responsibility instead to the Financial Services Authority. While the Justice Department started to delve into the Libor case from abroad, the fraud office said it would only be a further drag on its already stretched resources.

Despite an increase of publicity-friendly dawn raids on suspected wrongdoers and some saber-rattling speeches, the fraud office had built an image of a prosecutor that barked but would not bite. So bad was its reputation that when the government started to change the way it regulated the financial industry after the financial crisis, it seriously considered abolishing the office.

Mr. Green is well aware of these problems. One of the first things he did when he arrived was to clearly define the mission of the organization, he said. Unlike his predecessor, Richard Alderman, he is not in the business of giving guidance and striking deals with defendants. "The sentence is a matter for the judge," he said. "I am here to prosecute."

"There was a general perception in this country and abroad that the S.F.O. lacked somehow the stomach to prosecute and preferred the easier route of civil settlement," he said. "There was a perception that the S.F.O. had dumbed down and has taken easier, less-complex cases."

But those times are over, he said, and his message to criminals is clear: "If your conduct is criminal and comes within the purview of the S.F.O., we will go after you."

When he took over, Mr. Green simplified the office's structure by setting up two divisions for fraud and two divisions for bribery and hired new senior staff members, including Geoffrey Rivlin, a retired judge feared and respected for being a stickler for detail, to help prepare cases for court.

John Fingleton, chief executive of Fingleton Associates, which advises clients on regulatory issues, said Mr. Green "hired some good people and tries to tidy up the place." But the job is not easy, Mr. Fingleton said.

"The S.F.O. has been heavily starved of resources, and crime enforcement in Britain is generally far more difficult than in the U.S.," where there are fewer burdens on the prosecution and plea bargains are commonplace, he said.

Mr. Green takes particular issue with the suggestion that the fraud office would refuse to open an investigation because it was too expensive. "Absurd," he said, before adding, "disgraceful."

"I will not stay in this job and do that," he emphasized.

The Libor inquiry is the largest of the fraud office's 67 active cases and a vast undertaking that required Mr. Green to double the investigation team to 60 this year. Another handful of investigators are on loan from the tax authority, and there is some staff from large accounting firms and foreign regulators. A deal to swap staff with the Justice Department is in its final stages, he said.

As determined to prosecute and passionate about his work as Mr. Green is, he is reluctant to talk about his private life or even his earlier legal cases. His father worked for a bank while his mother brought up the children. After studying history at Cambridge University, Mr. Green took an interest in criminal law and worked for a while for his brother-in-law, a lawyer.

He then worked as a prosecutor and defense lawyer on cases that included financial crime and murder. He said he defended financial organizations for regulatory and criminal offenses in the past but would not give any names.

His main prosecution work included cases involving the importation of heroin from places like Afghanistan, organized crime and fraud, but he declined to give any detail. In 2005, he was named director of revenue and customs prosecutions, successfully prosecuting money-laundering groups and cigarette smugglers. More than 90 percent of the cases secured a conviction.

Alison Graham-Wells, a lawyer who worked under Mr. Green in the 1990s, said he stood out in court for his ability to explain complex cases of financial fraud in simple terms to a jury. "He has a very good court presence," she said.

Whether Mr. Green, now at the fraud office, is successful will depend on the outcome of the Libor investigation. Some analysts said he was taking a risk by focusing on Libor and pointed out that with a prominent international case like this, the likelihood of prosecution could be taken out of his hands.

But Mr. Green is defiant. "A risk-averse person should not be doing this job," he said. "I've been a trial lawyer all my life. The whole process is about assessing and managing risk. Do I ask this question? Do I raise this point? What is the clearest way of presenting this to a jury?"

Next to the Nelson quote plaque on his desk, Mr. Green keeps another one, which he picked up during a trip to Washington and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. It is closely associated with the Apollo 13 mission and reflects what Mr. Green really thinks about his mission at the fraud office: "Failure is not an option."

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Obama Defends Authorization of Surveillance Programs

WASHINGTON — President Obama defended his authorization of recently revealed domestic and international surveillance programs in comments broadcast Monday night but rejected the suggestion that his policies were basically a warmed-over version of those of the last White House.

"Some people say, 'Well, you know, Obama was this raving liberal before. Now he's, you know, Dick Cheney,' " Mr. Obama told Charlie Rose on his PBS interview show. "Dick Cheney sometimes says, 'Yeah, you know, he took it all lock, stock and barrel.' My concern has always been not that we shouldn't do intelligence gathering to prevent terrorism, but rather, are we setting up a system of checks and balances?"

In perhaps his most expansive explanation of his surveillance policies since leaked documents exposed a pair of secret programs, Mr. Obama said he had made important changes from the policies of George W. Bush, including making sure that surveillance was approved by Congress and a secret foreign intelligence court. "But I think it's fair to say that there are going to be folks on the left – and what amuses me is now folks on the right who are fine when there's a Republican president, but now, Obama's coming in with the black helicopters," he said.

Yet like Mr. Cheney, who appeared on "Fox News Sunday" over the weekend, Mr. Obama defended the effectiveness of surveillance programs in heading off threats to the United States. "The one thing people should understand about all these programs, though, is they have disrupted plots, not just here in the United States but overseas as well," he said. He added that while other factors were at work, "we are increasing our chances of preventing a catastrophe like that through these programs."

The White House hoped to use the interview to calm concerns about the surveillance programs, and Mr. Obama emphasized that intelligence agencies were not listening in on Americans' telephone calls without court orders. A new CNN/ORC International poll suggested that many Americans were uncomfortable with his handling of surveillance, and in the wake of several recent controversies, his approval rating had slipped to 45 percent from 53 percent.

Mr. Obama said he had directed intelligence agencies to examine whether more information about the surveillance programs could be declassified to satisfy Americans that they were conducted within legal bounds and were far less intrusive into personal privacy than critics assume. He emphasized that intelligence agencies were not listening in on Americans' telephone calls without court permission, but that they were only collecting data like telephone numbers called and the duration of calls. An Internet monitoring program, he added, was directed at foreigners with ties to terrorism, cyberhacking and the spread of dangerous weapons or technology.

In his first public remarks about his shift on Syria, Mr. Obama said he wanted to bolster the opposition to President Bashar al-Assad "so there's a counterweight that can potentially lead to political negotiations." But he rejected more assertive measures like establishing a no-fly zone or a humanitarian corridor to help refugees. He said that "90 percent of the deaths" had not been caused by airstrikes and warned against anything that would "slip-slide your way into deeper and deeper commitments."

Mr. Obama said it was important to understand "if you set up a no-fly zone, that you may not be actually solving the problem on the zone."

"Or if you set up a humanitarian corridor, are you in fact committed not only to stopping aircraft from going that corridor but also missiles?" he continued. "And if so, does that mean that you then have to take out the armaments in Damascus and are you prepared then to bomb Damascus? And what happens if there's civilian casualties?"

Noting extensive deliberations in the Situation Room, he added, "Unless you've been involved in those conversations, then it's kind of hard for you to understand that the complexity of the situation and how we have to not rush into one more war in the Middle East."

He rejected critics who said he should have intervened more aggressively and earlier in a civil war that has cost more than 90,000 lives. "This argument that somehow we had gone in earlier, or heavier in some fashion, that the tragedy and chaos taking place in Syria wouldn't be taking place, I think is wrong," he said.

He said that his team "had to sort out and figure out exactly who it is that is in the opposition" and that arming the rebels "willy-nilly is not a good recipe for meeting American interests over the long term," given that some of the most effective fighters are with Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate.

Mr. Obama also reached out to Iran's newly elected president, holding out hope for a rapprochement that would prevent the Iranian government from developing nuclear weapons and ultimately "normalize the relationship between Iran and the world."

Mr. Obama said the election of Hassan Rowhani over a field of more hard-line candidates signaled that the Iranian public was eager to end its international isolation and could presage a new chapter in the fitful negotiations over the Islamic republic's nuclear program. But he cautioned that the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was still calling the shots.

"Clearly you have a hunger within Iran to engage with the international community in a more positive way," Mr. Obama said. "I do think that there's a possibility that they decide, the Iranians decide to take us up on our offer to engage in a more serious, substantive way."

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Afghan Forces Struggle as U.S. Weans Them Off Support

Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

Pvt. Abdul Wali, 18, a soldier in the Afghan National Army, lost his legs and the sight of one eye in a recent battle.

KABUL, Afghanistan — When the American-led NATO coalition officially transfers security responsibility for all of Afghanistan to government forces in a ceremony on Tuesday, it will in part be a formality. Already this year, Afghan forces have been in the lead in fighting the Taliban in more than three-quarters of the country — and they have been killed and wounded at a record pace, accordingly.

But after Tuesday, these are supposed to be the rules everywhere: while American units may sometimes be close by, Afghan forces must operate without American air support, medical evacuation helicopters or partnered combat units. If they get in trouble, NATO will not be riding to the rescue, except in the most dire cases.

This summer is shaping up as a lesson in tough love from American military mentors to demonstrate whether the Afghan forces really can become self-sufficient by the withdrawal deadline for Western forces in 2014.

Just how tough that has been is perhaps nowhere more evident than in Room 648 of the Afghan National Army's Military Hospital in Kabul. The room is shared by two soldiers wounded in the same battle against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan on May 22 and 23. One of them lost three limbs, the other lost two.

Their company, with the 205th Afghan Army Corps, was based in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province. In May, they were sent to a village near Zangabad, the site of a popular anti-Taliban uprising in March that American and Afghan officials had hailed as turning a corner in an area long dominated by the militants. Just two months later, though, the insurgents were back.

According to the wounded soldiers' accounts, later confirmed by their company commander, they found the area heavily mined and booby-trapped. When the soldiers began tripping mines, Taliban gunmen attacked, using tunnels through walls between adjoining homes in the village to hit and run.

"No one came to our aid and did anything," said Lt. Masiullah Hamdard, who lost both legs and his left arm in the fight and was still twisting in pain from his injuries. He said that two American helicopters and a jet were circling above the battle. "We kept begging them to shoot up the place but they didn't do anything whatever."

Indeed, from Tuesday on, that is American policy everywhere in Afghanistan. The American military has decreed that no air support be available to Afghans unless an exception is approved by an officer holding a general's rank — and already, the anecdotal evidence indicates that such exceptions have been rare.

Instead of close air support, the American military has been providing equipment and training to help the Afghans use mortars and other artillery when they get in trouble, according to Maj. Gen. James C. McConville, the American commander in eastern Afghanistan. "If you do it for them, they will never build the capability and the capacity to do it," he said. "We don't want them to get used to a capability they're not going to have in the future."

Coalition officials still have combat ability here — roughly 65,000 American troops are still in Afghanistan — and say they would use it in cases where Afghan forces got into real trouble. The fighting in Panjwai, apparently, did not reach that point.

"I am 100 percent sure if we had air support available to us like the Americans would have, we would not have the sort of casualties that were inflicted on us there," said the Afghan company commander in the Panjwai fight, Capt. Safid Gul. He was more philosophical than rueful, however. "This is our house and we have to protect it. No one else can save it for us."

Captain Gul said that government forces, which numbered 40 soldiers and 40 police officers in all, took a total of 20 casualties in Panjwai — 13 wounded and 7 killed, or a fourth of their number in all. Those numbers were roughly confirmed by the Panjwai district governor, Haji Faizal Mohammad.

Afghan forces have paid dearly in other skirmishes with the Taliban, including a May offensive by the insurgents in Sangin district, a much-contested area in Helmand Province. The Taliban were beaten back, but at a cost of 19 soldiers and police officers killed.

Afghan Army casualties reflect their increased role in the fight. According to Gen. Dawlat Waziri, the deputy spokesman of the Defense Ministry, from March 21 to June 11 of this year, usually a slower time than later in the summer, a total of 276 Afghan soldiers were killed. That was already on pace to top the previous Afghan year's total of 1,170, itself a record. In the same March 21 to June 11 period, fewer than 50 Americans were killed. (Afghans observe a lunar year, which began March 21 this year).

On Sunday alone, 10 Afghan soldiers were killed in four different provinces, the Defense Ministry said Monday.

The increased casualty rate for the Afghan National Army has raised concerns about what effect it might have on the military's already high attrition rate. Last year, Afghan officials confirmed that because of desertions, casualties and low re-enlistments, the army had to replace about a third of its soldiers annually.

More recently, Defense Ministry officials have refused to divulge attrition statistics, saying that they are considered secret because of the possible impact on morale.

Sharifullah Sahak contributed reporting from Kabul, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

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