Morris Lasker | Sentenced Boesky, 92
Morris Lasker, 92, the judge who sentenced Ivan Boesky to prison in a 1980s insider-trading scandal and helped eliminate horrid conditions in New York jails, died Friday in Cambridge, Mass., from cancer.
Morris Lasker, 92, the judge who sentenced Ivan Boesky to prison in a 1980s insider-trading scandal and helped eliminate horrid conditions in New York jails, died Friday in Cambridge, Mass., from cancer.
He was appointed to the federal bench in 1967. He served for 25 years in Manhattan and 15 years in Boston.
In 1987, he sentenced Boesky to three years in prison in what was then Wall Street's biggest insider-trading case.
For more than two decades, he presided over lawsuits seeking to change brutal conditions in New York jails, where suicides occurred weekly. He ordered changes, and the city spent more than $1 billion improving conditions.
- AP