INVESTIGATIONS: Winging a Broadway Angel

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When backers complained about delays in payments. Adela gave excuses about how banks had lost her deposits, how Indonesia had frozen her assets, or how the C.P.A. in Djakarta had died, fouling up her accounting system. But then some began checking her stories. Her Panamanian company bore a confusing relationship to her similarly named Indonesian firm. A Swedish firm with which she said she was working real estate deals in Spain was not listed in any Swedish corporate directory.

Alarmed, three of Adela's investors filed bankruptcy proceedings against her earlier this month. Meanwhile, the New York State attorney general's office had been conducting the investigation that led to last week's indictment. The SEC is pursuing a separate inquiry.

But Adela professes to be unfazed.

"I am very confident," she says. "I don't disappear." She goes to her office each day and continues to make last-minute changes on her autobiography, If at first . . ., which is due out in the fall. After firing two other attorneys, she has now settled on Roy Cohn, the onetime investigator for Communist-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy. "1 know he is controversial," says Adela. "but he treats me like a human being." On 70 charges of second-degree larceny in the New York indictment alone, she could be sentenced to a total of 490 years in jail, not counting the additional decades that might be added for other state charges. The total would make Adela the longest running Broadway play ever.