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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.<\/p>\n
Mr. Blakey died at the home of his son John, a federal judge, where he was staying. His son confirmed the death.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 organized crime \u2013.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The law \u2013 Title IX of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, for which Senator McClellan was the driving force \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n