Other notable deaths

PAT FORDICE, 72 First lady of Mississippi

Pat Fordice, a former first lady of Mississippi and a champion of the arts, literacy and beautification projects, died Thursday, her family said.

Mrs. Fordice became a public figure after her husband, Kirk Fordice, a brash millionaire construction company owner, was elected in 1991 as Mississippi's first Republican governor since Reconstruction.

She was instrumental in bringing two popular international art exhibitions to Jackson.

In 1996, Palaces of St. Petersburg: Russian Imperial Style featured tapestries, china, paintings and other glittering objects. Two years later, The Splendors of Versailles featured French treasures.

The Fordices divorced in 2000 after 44 years of marriage. Mr. Fordice died of leukemia in 2004 at age 70.

After leaving the governor's mansion in January 2000, Mrs. Fordice remained active as host of a radio talk show and co-host of a television talk show for Mississippi Public Broadcasting.

She also appeared in a series of commercials for Keep Mississippi Beautiful and the Mississippi Department of Transportation as part of an anti-littering campaign.

In recent years, Mrs. Fordice supported the children's hospital at the University of Mississippi, the Mississippi School for the Arts, the International Ballet Competition and the Special Olympics.

EDWARD KURIANSKY, 63 N.Y. prosecutor

Edward J. Kuriansky, a leading prosecutor in New York state's nursing home scandals in the 1970s, the state's chief prosecutor for Medicaid fraud in the 1980s and early 1990s, and New York City's investigations commissioner in the Giuliani administration, died of colon cancer Tuesday in Manhattan.

Mr. Kuriansky was a senior managing director at Citigate Global Intelligence. From 1980 to 1995, he was the deputy state attorney general in charge of investigating Medicaid fraud. The program pays the medical costs of poor people. Before that, he was the chief assistant to Charles J. Hynes, the current Brooklyn district attorney, who in the 1970s was the state's special deputy attorney general investigating the nursing home industry. In that capacity, Mr. Kuriansky ran an 18-month undercover operation that led to the conviction of more than 50 nursing home officials and suppliers for involvement in extensive kickback schemes.

Previously, Mr. Kuriansky had handled the federal District Court case that upheld the conviction of Bernard Bergman, the owner of two Manhattan nursing homes who was found guilty of Medicaid and tax fraud in 1976. It was the Bergman case that opened up the scandal over the lack of proper health care for patients and the considerable profits reaped by some nursing home owners from unmonitored government programs.

In 1982, two years after Mr. Kuriansky replaced Mr. Hynes as special deputy attorney general, the House Select Committee on Aging issued a report saying that although most states were doing a poor job of policing Medicaid fraud, New York state was doing an excellent job. The report said that Mr. Hynes and Mr. Kuriansky had "changed New York from the least effective to the most effective state in terms of Medicaid fraud detection and prosecution."

Mr. Kuriansky was born in Stamford, Conn. He graduated cum laude from Dartmouth College in 1966 and received his law degree from Harvard University in 1969. For two years after law school, Mr. Kuriansky was a clerk for U.S. District Judge Morris E. Lasker in Manhattan. He was then appointed an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

In 1996, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani appointed Mr. Kur- iansky commissioner of the city's Department of Investigations.

Among numerous investigations he pursued in his six years in the post were cases in which more than 600 people, including 200 city employees, were arrested in connection with the theft of more than $8 million in welfare payments. In one case, government workers created false identity documents for 50 nonexistent children to defraud the welfare system.

Mr. Kuriansky sometimes used unusual investigative techniques. In 1987, when he was the special Medicaid prosecutor, he revealed that three years earlier he recruited a 78-year-old retired social worker, Muriel Clark, as an undercover agent. Clark became the central figure of a nine-month investigation in which nursing homes took bribes from her supposed "son" to accept her as a resident.

"She did a really gutsy thing," Mr. Kuriansky said at the time.

RAYMOND PETERSEN, 88 Magazine executive

Raymond J. Petersen, a trustee of the Hearst Family Trust and a member of the board of directors of Hearst Corp., as well as former executive vice president of Hearst Magazines, died July 11 in Palm Beach, Fla.