G. Robert Blakey, the lead author of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO, a law that since 1970 has given prosecutors the authority to fight criminal masterminds such as mob bosses rather than go after low-level criminals for individual crimes, died May 1 in Oak Park, Ill. He was 90 years old.
Mr. Blakey died at the home of his son John, a federal judge, where he was staying. His son confirmed the death.
During his career, Mr. Blakey moved between government service and teaching law, mostly at the University of Notre Dame, his alma mater. In the late 1970s, he served as chief counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which investigated the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
As a young lawyer at the Justice Department in the early 1960s, Mr. Blakey later told his son, he was prosecuting a mobster in Pennsylvania when he encountered the defendant in the courtroom’s men’s room.
He remembers the mobster telling him he was “doing a good job, but you can’t win because the rules don’t work for you.”
In an interview with The New York Times in 1985, Mr. Blakey reflected on the difficulty of prosecuting the Mafia in those days. “In the past, law enforcement was like a wolf in front of a pack of animals,” he said. “Prosecutors looked for single cases, they picked out the sick and injured, and only strengthened the herd – organized crime –.”
In 1969, he was appointed as chief counsel to the Subcommittee on Criminal Laws and Procedures of the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was here that he met Senator John L., the Arkansas Democrat who chaired the subcommittee. Worked on RICO legislation under McClellan.
The law – Title IX of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, for which Senator McClellan was the driving force – states that a person or group of people who commit certain crimes as part of a conspiracy or criminal enterprise can be charged with fraud. And it allows people hurt by the venture to sue for three times their actual losses.
Previously, prosecutors would charge people with committing single crimes such as murder, extortion or gambling, or with conspiring to commit those individual felonies. Former New Jersey federal prosecutor Ed Stier said in an interview, “Bob took the conspiracy law and broadened it to describe a pattern of racketeering committed in furtherance of an enterprise.”
There are 35 crimes listed in the RICO statute. In the form of racketeering crimes including gambling, murder, arson, drug dealing, kidnapping and bribery.
“He created a new form of jurisprudence,” Ronald Goldstock, former director of the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, said in an interview. “It was such a dramatic change that prosecutors initially neither understood nor used it.”
Mr. Blakey proselytized for the use of RICO for many years before it gained widespread acceptance as a legal tool. Over time, it would be used against unions, drug cartels, street gangs, police departments, and, its original target, the Mafia.
In 1987, then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Rudolph W. In a case prosecuted by Giuliani’s office, eight men convicted of being top leaders and key associates of the so-called commission that runs the Mafia in the United States received prison sentences of 40 to 100 years.
Some critics have argued that the RICO statute is too vague, it is used too broadly and its penalties are sometimes out of proportion to the crimes being prosecuted.
“It’s kind of the white-collar equivalent of the death penalty,” New York University law professor Stephen Gilers told the Los Angeles Times following the 1989 conviction of a New Jersey investment partnership for involvement in a racketeering conspiracy involving securities fraud.
George Robert Blakey was born on January 7, 1936, in Burlington, N.C. His father, Lewis, was a bank president who died when Bobby, as he was known, was 9 years old. His mother, Malatia (Horrigan) Blakey, went into work after her husband’s death, becoming manager and chief fashion buyer for a local department store.
In 1957, Mr. Blakey received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Notre Dame. Three years later, he earned a Juris Doctor degree from the Law School of Notre Dame.
He edited a law review article in 1957 about a Mafia-family summit in Apalachin, NY, and when he was hired by the Justice Department after law school, he was assigned to its Organized Crime and Racketeering section.
President Lyndon B. As an advisor to Johnson’s Law Enforcement and Justice Administration Commission, Mr. Blakey helped draft a law that authorized court-supervised use of wiretapping and electronic surveillance by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. He continued to work on the legislation when it moved to a Senate subcommittee, and it was signed into law in the same organized crime package that also included RICO.
“The combination of wiretapping and RICO laws resulted in the mob becoming unrecognizable,” Mr. Goldstock said.
While he was on the faculty of Cornell Law School from 1973 to 1980, Mr. Blakey took leave to serve as chief counsel and staff director of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, chaired by Representative Lewis Stokes, an Ohio Democrat.
In its report issued in 1979, the committee agreed with the Warren Commission’s finding in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald had assassinated Mr. Kennedy. It also concluded that a second gunman had fired on the presidential limousine in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and that elements of organized crime – possibly well-known mobsters Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello – may have plotted the shooting.
It did not dispute that James Earl Ray, who had pleaded guilty and later recanted, had assassinated Dr. King, but found that the assassination “probably” developed from a conspiracy by right-wing St. Louis businessmen.
Five of the 12 members of the House committee ultimately disagreed with the finding of conspiracy regarding Mr. Kennedy.
In 1980, the FBI released its own report, which rejected the committee’s determination that a second gunman had fired at Mr. Kennedy from the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza. It drew its conclusions from the broadcast – recorded by a motorcycle police officer’s microphone – which included the sound of four gunshots, rather than the three known to have been fired by Mr. Oswald from the Texas School Book Depository.
“This is outrageous,” Mr. Blakey told Gannett News Service. “The F.B.I. argued that even a second-year physics student would not be involved.”
He assassinated Richard N., the editorial director of the committee. He reiterated the committee’s findings in “The Plot to Kill the President: Organized Crime Assassinated JFK” (1981), written with Billings. He wrote, “The President was not the victim alone of a deranged gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, but of an organized crime conspiracy.”
Reviewing the book in Newsday, author and journalist Michael Dorman, who covered the Kennedy assassination, wrote that Mr. Blakey and Mr. Billings had not made their case: “The authors make no claims that they know who participated in this imaginary conspiracy or who actually inspired it.”
In addition to his son John, Mr. Blakey is survived by another son, Michael; five daughters, Elizabeth and Mary Blakey, Katherine Cox, Christine Corey and Margaret Clark; 18 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. His wife Ellen (Maynard) Blakey died in 2002.
Mr. Blakey consulted with several states on drafting and implementing RICO laws. He also worked with attorneys in Florida and Texas, among the 46 states that used civil racketeering laws to reach a $206 billion settlement in 1998 against cigarette manufacturers to recover Medicaid money spent treating smoking-related diseases.
“If you look at the structure of national syndicates of organized crime,” Mr Blakey Said In an interview with the public television series “Frontline” for the 1998 documentary “Inside the Tobacco Deal,” he bluntly stated, “And look at the structure of the national syndicate of the tobacco industry, you will see how alike they are, hand in hand.”
