Gangster

AS a 35-year-old father of a 16-year-old son (yes, I was a teen-age father), and as a professor and ordained Baptist minister who grew up in Detroit's treacherous inner city, I am disturbed by some elements of gangster rap.But I'm even more anguished by the way many black leaders have scapegoated its artists.While gangster rap takes the heat for a range of social maladies from urban violence to sexual misconduct, the roots of our racial misery remain buried beneath moralizing discourse that is confused and sometimes dishonest.

LAS VEGAS -- Warren Beatty has brought stylish gangster Bugsy Siegel back to life in "Bugsy," a movie about the ex-hood's dream of starting "a gambling Garden of Eden in the desert." But even Bugsy would have trouble recognizing the gambling mecca he launched in 1946.For further information on Las Vegas, call (702) 735-3611.

MENACING giant spiders, large mole-like people from subterranean depths, a gangster brain from outer space set out to conquer Earth are the creatures that have made movie actor John Agar a cult figure to thousands of science-fiction/horror fans.For FANEX reservations and further details, call 665-1198.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Fourteen months after an inner-city Housto teen-ager aimed his 9mm gun at the neck of a Texas state trooper outside Victoria and pulled the trigger, the question before the court is this: Does life imitate rap?The answer will reverberate nationwide from the Austin courtroom -- from the boardrooms of the record industry to the mean streets of gangster rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur. It will be felt from the small Texas town of the trooper's widow to the jail cell of Ronald Ray Howard, a reputed cocaine dealer and seventh-grade dropout who killed the officer.

You Kill Me kills you softly with its smiles. This scruffy gangster comedy about Frank (Ben Kingsley), an alcoholic hit man for the Polish mob in Buffalo, N.Y., proves that craftiness and hip performances can make a tasty pig-in-a-blanket out of an old and tattered sow's ear. You Kill Me (IFC Films) Starring Ben Kingsley, Tea Leoni, Luke Wilson, Bill Pullman. Directed by John Dahl. Rated R. Time 92 minutes.

We're being taken for a ride again. We've been made an offer we can't refuse. Mother of God, is this the beginning of a cycle?Yes, it is. In one of its periodic, perhaps whimsical, shifts in subject matter, the American film industry has reinvented a hallowed figure from its own storied past, the gangster.Right now, in a limited fall film market, at least three gangster movies are in release: "GoodFellas," Martin Scorsese's vivid look at a tribe of low-ranking Long Island mafiosi; "State of Grace," about the Westies, an Irish thug subset that tried to strike an accord with the Italians on New York's West Side in the mid-'70s; and, less seriously, "Marked for Death," in which martial arts star Steven Seagal is matched against highly organized Jamaican drug posses in the suburbs of Chicago.

When Froggy staged a crime spree to finance his wooing of Miss Mousie, children's book author Kevin O'Malley had the court send him to prison for a long stretch.But when O'Malley's fanciful "gangster" version of the old folk tale got the boot from Baltimore County elementary schools last spring after one parent complained, the author never had his day court -- neither a hearing nor notification of the ban. The rules don't require it.Now, after appeals from O'Malley and from Clara Grizzard, a neighbor and art educator, school officials have decided to allow O'Malley to plead his case.

"Tough Jews - Fathers, Sons and Gangster Dreams in Jewish America," by Rich Cohen. Simon & Schuster. 256 pages. $25.Contrary to Hollywood and popular fiction, hoods with names that ended in vowels didn't begin to dominate the newspapers )) till the late 1920s. Before then, from about World War I almost till the end of Prohibition, many if not most of the most capable and creative gangsters in America - Monk Eastman, Arnod Rothstein, Moe Dalitz, Waxey Gordon, King Solomon, Meyer Lansky, Doc (( Stacher, Lepke Buchhalter, Jacob Shapiro, Bo Weinberg, Arthur Flegenheimer (a.k.

Time for Mayor Martin O'Malley to get cable. Because he doesn't watch HBO, Baltimore's mayor came out of his first foray into the world of New York celebrity feeling a bit like a small-town rube. And his unwitting encounter with a TV gangster made the gossip columns. During a recent trip to the Big Apple to recruit new business to Baltimore, O'Malley and his deputy mayors found themselves in the famous East Side show-biz watering hole, Elaine's. While they dined with former New York City Deputy Police Commissioner Jack Maple, who's been hired to help cut Charm City's murder rate, O'Malley was approached by a big man with a thick New Jersey accent.

VIDEOSHoffman as a gangster"Billy Bathgate" passed quickly from the screen last fall as one of the biggest flops of the year. But the film, with Dustin Hoffman as the gangster Dutch Schultz, was certainly worth seeing, even if it lacked the dynamism of the '30s gangster films and the operatic grandeur of the "Godfather" films. Hoffman's vitality kept it afloat. The movie only foundered when it left him and instead followed the less interesting adventures of young Billy (Loren Dean). Rated R. ** 1/2 stars.