Deal-making is not small potatoes in Virginia. Our report of the biggest transactions of 1998 is a pretty impressive compendium. A flurry of announcements late in the year, however, foretold of even bigger deals that could close in the next few months.

America Online Inc. of Dulles, for instance, came in at the top of our mergers and acquisitions list with its purchase of Mirabilis Ltd. of Tel Aviv, Israel, for $407 million. Next year that will be blown away by the merger of Exxon and Fairfax-based Mobil. And even AOL has topped its 1998 purchase by announcing a $4.2 billion acquisition of Netscape.

Where will AOL get the cash? In part, from its high-flying stock. The company raised $549.5 million in a secondary offering this year. But that still put it behind Freddie Mac. For the first time in its 10 years of public trading, Freddie Mac's directors decided to issue common stock to raise $975 million in capital.

DynCorp of Reston was the deacon of contract deals for 1998, winning four of the top 10 spots for a combined total of $1.9 billion. DynCorp knows government contracting.

The top contracts also show there's great money in the great beyond: DynCorp will be working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, albeit in the not-so-glamorous area of desktop and communications services. But a Fairfax-based joint venture called Space Gateway Support won a $2.2 billion contract with NASA to run base-operations support. Meanwhile, Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles won a contract with VisionStar Inc. of New York, a communications company that wants to tap Orbital's satellite expertise.

It took a premier property to put Richmond at the top of the real estate deals for 1998. In our last report, Northern Virginia properties held every spot on the list. But in 1998, Boston Properties Inc. moved into the Richmond market in a big way by purchasing Riverfront Plaza -- the "towers of power" -- from Metropolitan Life for $174 million.

The deals summarized on the following pages had to meet some ground rules: It wasn't enough for a deal to be announced, it had to actually close in 1998. We've included every deal we could identify, and we apologize if we overlooked something. We're already on track with some big deals for 1999, but let us know of any transaction that could make the cut for next year.

-- The Editors