He may look like just another guy in a chicken suit, but Crackers the Corporate Crime Chicken insists otherwise. Waiting to talk to Mayor Rudy Giuliani outside City Hall last week, Crackers said he is "trying to help the city." The security guards, however, refused to let the seven-foot chicken through the door.

      The latest brainchild of "Roger & Me" filmmaker Michael Moore, Crackers will be a regular feature on "TV Nation" -- Moore's offbeat news magazine show - when it airs on Fox this summer. Topping Crackers's list of suspicious corporate activities is what Moore describes as New York's "most recent and most audacious" case of corporate crime.

      Earlier this year, the Giuliani administration awarded CS First Boston $50.5 million in tax incentives. In exchange, CS First Boston promised to keep its 3704 jobs in the city and to add thousands more. Less than three weeks later, however, the company announced plans to close its municipal bond department - which employs 135 people - and to eliminate up to 765 more jobs.

      Crackers and Moore have already made two trips to CS First Boston to talk to company executives. So far, however, they have yet to get past the lobby. CS First Boston's only response: a threat to call the police. "The irony," says Moore, himself a veteran corporate crime fighter, "is that we should be the ones calling the police."

      With his purple cape flapping behind him, Crackers first banged on Giuliani's office door two weeks ago. The mayor, however, refused to meet with the chicken and said, "This isn't a joke." Last week, Moore confronted the mayor at City Hall. With his television cameras rolling, Moore asked Giuliani if he had felt "used" when he first learned about CS First Boston's proposed layoffs, and if he was now planning to revoke the company's tax incentives.

      "That's a very simplistic, almost silly way of looking at it," said Giuliani, dismissing Moore's questions with a wave of his pinky-ringed hand. "If one financial institution leaves, then two or three or four more could leave. It's not money we're handing them...It's sales tax concessions. We tie that to jobs." Keeping people employed - and able to spend money - means, according to Giuliani, that soon "we will have collected back all of the tax breaks."

      A corporation's employment figures can "go up and down depending on the economy," said deputy mayor for economic development John Dyson. There is, however, a limit to how low employment numbers can dip before the city takes action. Asked in a subsequent interview if CS First Boston's employment numbers have fallen below the minimum, Giuliani's economic development expert claimed not to know. "I'm not 100 per cent sure they haven't," Dyson said, adding quickly, "[but] if they have, then [First Boston] will get less benefits."

      Crackers, meanwhile, is still not satisfied. According to "TV Nation" associate producer Tia Lessin, "The chicken is not seeing justice served so whatever that'll take, we'll do."