Most white-collar criminal prosecutions use lowest-level employees as witnesses against more senior targets.

Most white-collar criminal prosecutions use low-level employees as witnesses against more senior executives.

Some, citing the McDonnell Douglas case, feared he would soft-pedal white-collar prosecutions.

Dan Kahan, a professor at Yale Law School, said the value of white-collar prosecutions was extremely difficult to measure.

Rod J. Rosenstein, deputy chief of the Justice Department tax division, said that "in white-collar prosecutions we do not attempt to introduce every" criminal act, just enough to convict.

The white-collar prosecution will be presented to the down-home Texas jury by a couple of East Coast organized-crime busters.

The attention paid to the tactics in the white-collar prosecutions does sometimes seem excessive.

Thus in 1970 a new prosecuting attorney was elected in King County, Washington (Seattle and environs), partly on a platform of increasing consumer fraud and general white-collar prosecution.

EVEN white-collar prosecutions that seemed successful have been sabotaged by these problems.

But criminal lawyers said that the world of white-collar criminal prosecutions had changed dramatically in recent months.