Arkansas rapids.

The Whitewater ride continues, and from the look of things, the water gets rougher ahead.

Mr. Crudele is a columnist for the New York Post who has covered Whitewater for years.

"WERE you the trooper who took Bill Clinton to the hospital on the day he overdosed?" an FBI agent recently asked one of the members of the Arkansas governor's security detail. That was just one of the many very personal and delicate questions posed to this trooper and more than a dozen of his col- leagues a few weeks ago by investigators for Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. For the record, Trooper Roger Perry said he never took Mr. Clinton to the hospital because of a drug problem, never saw him use drugs, and saw him drink only moderately.

But if you think that means President Clinton is out of the woods, then you just don't know your way around the landscape of the Clinton scandals.

Remember Whitewater? In the media frenzy over the Asian fundraising scandal, Independent Counsel Starr's investigation of wrongdoing in Arkansas has largely been ignored by the press. Starr briefly re-emerged into public view when he recommended a drastically reduced sentence for Whitewater figure James McDougal, and when he asked for an extension of the Little Rock grand jury that was hearing Whitewater-related evidence. Otherwise, the public focus has been on the sensational stories surrounding the flow of illicit dollars into the Democrats' coffers in 1995 - 96.

But the questions now being asked by Starr's FBI investigators make it clear that all the older points at issue -- the White House travel-office firings, the White House's use of FBI files, Vincent Foster's death, illegal campaign contributions in Arkansas, and the overall governance of Arkansas during Clinton's dozen years in the governor's mansion -- are very much alive.

Prosecutors aren't giving any details, but the action behind the scenes in Starr's investigation -- some of it prompted by McDougal's cooperation -- sug- gests rough waters ahead for the White House. Starr is quietly making the case that Bill Clinton was a kind of mobster -- more precisely, that he was an out-of-control politician who ran his state as a criminal enterprise for his own financial benefit. Tellingly, Starr recently enlisted the services of Thomas Dawson, a veteran prosecutor from Mississippi whose specialty is RICO prosecution of organized-crime cases.

Most troubling for the White House must be Starr's focus on whether Bill Clinton and associates skimmed money off state projects in Arkansas. In particular, Starr's office has been asking about two cases where the Arkansas Development Finance Authority raised money for the construction of prisons through a bond issue in which millions may have been diverted to political campaigns.

More than two years ago FBI agents confiscated documents from an Arkansas farmer by the name of Ray Dawson, who sold a 2,200-acre parcel of land near Forest City, Arkansas, on which a new state prison was to be built. The state raised $25 million in 1990 to build the prison, and another $900,000 just two years later to add more beds to the facility.

More recently, Starr's probers started looking into another prison deal, this one at Calico Rock, Arkansas. The prison cost state taxpayers more than $20 million to build, but sources say that the FBI suspects some of the money went not into bricks and mortar but into the pockets of Arkansas politicians. A state representative named John Miller, in whose district the prison was built, has confirmed that FBI agents took records about the project and that he was questioned.

Roy Drew, who once investigated the ADFA for the state of Arkansas, has been questioned extensively by IRS agents who are part of the Independent Counsel's investigation. "They were looking for specific transactions that involved the First Lady," says Drew, especially ones concerning Southern Development Bankcorp, on whose board she sat. Drew said Starr's office was mainly inter- ested in any quid-pro-quo arrangements with the bank.

STARR'S investigation has gotten so broad that prosecutors are said to be frustrated, feeling they're spreading themselves too thin. One prober attached to the Starr investigation complained early on that prosecutors should simply file a suit labeled U.S. v. Arkansas and be done with it. The other matters still under investigation by Starr's office include:

-- The source of funds going into the ADFA. Starr's investigators have had at least one conversation, for instance, with a truckdriver named Dennis Patrick who gave them documents showing that millions of dollars were passed through a bank account bearing his name. Patrick told a Starr prober in one telephone conversation that he believes the millions were drug money.

-- The way Arkansas state pension funds were used, especially the Teachers' Retirement Fund. Probers have been looking into whether excessive fees were paid in exchange for kickbacks. And they are looking into how the retirement money was invested -- whether loans were given to people and companies in return for favors to the Clintons.

-- Bill Clinton's personal life. The FBI questioned the troopers extensively about who came to the governor's office, and FBI agents spent hours going over logs that the troopers kept. And they wanted to know about Clinton's habit of jogging to a McDonald's on Broadway in Little Rock and to a high-rise condo- minium complex known as Quapaw Towers on 9th Street.

The McDougals had a place at Quapaw, as did both Dan Lasater and Gennifer Flowers. Lasater was convicted on drug charges in the mid 1980s and was par- doned by Clinton. (The son of Joycelyn Elders, President Clinton's former surgeon general who resigned under fire, was also busted for drug possession in that building.) The FBI agents did not tell the troopers exactly what they were after here. But Lasater has always been an important link in Clinton's financial activities. Troopers have been repeatedly asked about Lasater's habit of visiting Clinton in the governor's mansion, and Clinton's practice of going to Lasater's office almost every day.

-- The death of Vincent Foster. While there is still doubt among investigators as to whether Foster in fact killed himself in Fort Marcy Park, the most fruitful avenue of inquiry is likely to be concerning just when the White House knew about the death. (Former presidential aide David Watkins has been quoted by the New York Post as saying he knew about Foster's death from sources inside the White House more than an hour before the White House is supposed to have been informed by law-enforcement officers at the scene.)

JIM McDougal, the erratic former deal-maker who was behind the Whitewater land deal, is one of Starr's most crucial witnesses for a variety of reasons -- starting with his presumed willingness now to corroborate banker David Hale's story that Governor Clinton pressured him to make a fraudulent $300,000 loan.

Starr has documents from 1977, when Bill Clinton was attorney general of Arkansas, that show that McDougal intended to sell Clinton twenty acres of land in a development called Satillo Heights at a suspiciously low price. One year later McDougal had possession of the land again, leading investigators to believe that he allowed the young attorney general to "flip" it in a profitable transaction.

The First Lady's chief potential problem also involves McDougal, specifically a loan he received in 1985 from Stephens Security Bank in Stephens, Arkansas. The $135,000 loan was supposed to go to a real-estate project of McDougal's called Flowerwood Farms. Instead, some of the money fraudulently ended up going to the McDougals' and Clintons' Whitewater project, and the rest was dispersed among various other parties in Arkansas. Starr's investigators have a list of where all the money went, and none made it into the Flowerwood pro- ject, which was never developed.

In any case, the president of Stephens Bank became concerned about an audit and demanded the money back. The Clintons and McDougals didn't have it, so they pressured another banker named David Hale for a loan.

That loan was the basis for last year's trial during which Jim McDougal, Susan McDougal, and Clinton's successor as governor, Jim Guy Tucker, were convicted on many counts of fraud.

The Hale loan was used to pay off the Stephens loan -- and other things. In fact, one state trooper is supposed to have been present when Hillary Clinton actually turned over a check to the Stephens Bank president in McDougal's office. If Jim McDougal gives his account of the Flowerwood loan, Hillary Clinton could be in lots of trouble.

But, despite all this behind-the-scenes action, it's unlikely that there will be an indictment of a sitting President. Starr's office seems inclined to dump the whole matter in Congress's lap. Sources are expecting a report to be issued by this summer. When? Probably around the time that Starr intends to jump ship for a job at Pepperdine University in California.

As for Hillary Clinton? An indictment is far from impossible. The charges? Fraud, perjury, obstruction of justice, and various conspiracies.

If so, the all-but-forgotten Arkansas scandals will dominate what is sure to be a very hot Washington summer.