G Robert Blakey, the legal architect who transformed how America prosecuted organized crime and spent decades hunting for answers in two of the nation's most infamous assassinations, died at 90.
Blakey's fingerprints are on some of the most consequential crime-fighting legislation of the past 50 years. In 1970, he authored the section of the Organized Crime Control Act that created the RICO statutes, named after the Edward G Robinson gangster character from the 1931 film Little Caesar. The RICO provisions became the government's primary weapon against mob enterprises and white-collar criminal networks, and they remain in use today.
His father's crusade against organized crime began in a courthouse hallway. While prosecuting a defendant early in his career, the man pulled Blakey aside and told him bluntly: "You're doing a great job, but don't worry, you're not going to win. The rules won't let you." That conversation haunted Blakey and drove him to rewrite those rules. His son John, later a Chicago federal judge, said this encounter shaped his father's entire legal philosophy.
Before the RICO Act, Blakey had already left his mark on crime legislation by drafting the wiretapping section of the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act. Governments across the country relied on him as the primary expert when drafting their own crime statutes.
Blakey's work on organized crime might have remained confined to academic circles and courtrooms, but in 1977 he was pulled into the national spotlight when the House Select Committee on Assassinations hired him as its second chief counsel. The committee was reopening investigations into the November 1963 shooting of President John F Kennedy and the 1968 assassination of Rev Martin Luther King.
The committee's investigation of Kennedy's death produced conclusions that contradicted the Warren Commission's 1964 findings. Blakey's report, bolstered by an audio recording captured from an open microphone on a motorcycle in Kennedy's motorcade, concluded that the assassination was "probably" the result of a conspiracy. While Blakey accepted that Lee Harvey Oswald had fired three shots from behind the presidential limousine, killing the president with one of them, the HSCA concluded that a second gunman had fired from the grassy knoll in front of the car, missing his target. Blakey pinned responsibility for the alleged conspiracy on organized crime figures, specifically New Orleans don Carlos Marcello and Tampa mobster Santo Trafficante Jr.
In 1981, Blakey and journalist Richard Billings published The Plot to Kill the President, which became a bestseller. Billings, who had worked at Life magazine in 1963, had been instrumental in acquiring the rights to Abraham Zapruder's home movie footage of the assassination. The book revived public interest in the Kennedy case and challenged the official account that had stood for nearly two decades.
The HSCA investigation also faced significant obstacles. When the committee's first chief counsel, Richard Sprague, complained about lack of cooperation from federal intelligence agencies, the committee chairman demanded his resignation. The committee members rebelled against their own chairman, leading him to quit instead. His replacement brought in Blakey to take over as counsel. Blakey discovered the committee had received no classified material from the FBI or CIA and demanded a CIA liaison officer. But little cooperation materialized, and according to later accounts, intelligence agencies effectively stonewalled the committee's investigation into any CIA connections to the assassination.
In 2003, declassified documents revealed a troubling detail: Blakey's CIA liaison during the HSCA investigation, George Joannides, had been the CIA's handler for Cuban exile groups in 1963, some of whom had contact with Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination. The revelation raised questions about what Joannides may have known or hidden during his time working with Blakey.
After the 1991 release of Oliver Stone's film JFK reignited public debate over the assassination, Blakey helped draft the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act in 1992, which created yet another investigation by the Assassination Records Review Board. That same year, he and Billings published a revised edition of their earlier book, retitled Fatal Hour.
Blakey was born in Burlington, North Carolina, the son of Lewis, president of First National Bank, and Myrtle, who managed a local department store. He graduated from Notre Dame in 1957 with a degree in philosophy and earned his law degree there in 1960. He married Elaine Menard, a graduate of St Mary's College, Notre Dame's sister institution.
His career took him to the Justice Department's organized crime division, where he worked under Attorney General Robert Kennedy starting in 1961. After Kennedy's assassination, Blakey returned to Notre Dame as a law professor. He later served as a consultant to President Lyndon Johnson's commission on law enforcement and worked closely with Arkansas Senator John McClellan's committee investigating mafia witness Joe Valachi. In 1973, Blakey became director of the Institute on Organized Crime at Cornell University before joining the assassination committee.
Blakey returned to Notre Dame in 1980 and remained on the faculty until retiring in 2012. One of his later notable cases involved a 2006 Supreme Court argument on behalf of anti-abortion activist Joseph Scheidler, who was sued under the RICO Act. Blakey successfully argued that RICO did not apply to the alleged actions, which lacked the extortion or robbery elements required under the statute.
His wife Elaine died in 2002, and son Matthew in 2014. He is survived by two sons, Michael and John, and five daughters, Elizabeth, Marie, Katherine, Christine and Margaret.
Author James Rodriguez: "Blakey spent his life trying to hold powerful criminals accountable while battling the same government institutions that should have backed him, a contradiction that defined both his greatest triumphs and his deepest frustrations."
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