“A Voice for the Poor Is Silenced”

The Board and Staff of Brooklyn
Legal Services Corporation A (“Brooklyn
A,” a program of Legal Services NYC) were shocked and deeply saddened to learn of the passing Monday, September 21st, of
the program’s long term Director of Litigation, Rick Wagner.  Rick was a
brilliant and fiery lawyer, deeply committed to the struggle for economic and
social justice in the world and in our neighborhoods.  

Over the years he
invested his incredible skills in fighting to achieve those goals at the Center
for Constitutional Rights, the law firm of Stolar, Alterman, Wagner & Boop,
and for the last 25 years at Brooklyn A.  He used his incredible energy,
creativity and vision to apply, among the other tools, the federal RICO statute
to empower tenants, and in most recent years was a national leader in the fight
against predatory lending, mortgage frauds and title rescue scams, protecting
low income, mostly minority homeowners in huge and successful battles to save
or recover their homes. 

Rick was truly one of a kind, and will be greatly
missed by his clients, by his colleagues and by his huge network of admirers.

In a piece published Tuesday in the New York Times City Room blog, Michael Powell wrote :

Rick Wagner, a legal services
lawyer, died at home Monday, apparently of a heart attack, bringing to
a sudden end a lifetime of service to the poorest New Yorkers.

Mr. Wagner’s passing represents loss for those who live in the
straitened precincts of East New York and Brownsville, Brooklyn, and
faint hope for the goniffs — Yiddish for scoundrels and Mr. Wagner’s
favorite insult — whom he pursued to the end of the world or the New
York City line, whichever came first.

Round-bellied and bearded, Mr. Wagner, who was 65, grew up in the
Five Towns region of Long Island and served as litigation director for Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation A
in East New York. Settling in an abandoned bank branch, he commandeered
the former president’s office as his lair, and his legal files piled as
high as floodwater sandbags around his desk. He rescued a portrait of
George Washington from a garbage pile and gave it an honored place on
the wall, explaining that the bewigged fellow was “the first
revolutionary.”

An inventive lawyer who took himself not too seriously, he
possessed a Ph.D. in sardonic insult and aphorism. Confronting a
dim-witted prosecutor, he inquired if the lawyer needed a GPS device to
find his backside. Of a particularly exotic form of mortgage fraud, he
noted with just a touch of admiration that “larceny is the mother of
invention.”

Alas, much of Mr. Wagner’s most inventive, not to mention joyful,
verbal handiwork remains unprintable in The New York Times.

Except to take a breath, he rarely stopped talking. He once asked
this reporter to quote one of his younger colleagues, who had labored
hard on a particular case. His request was difficult to honor as Mr.
Wagner rattled on for most of the interview and kept everyone,
including his client, laughing.

Mr. Wagner was of a generation that viewed radical social change as
challenge and obligation, not to mention worth a chuckle. After
graduating from New York Law School, he found a home in William M. Kunstler’s radical nest, the Center for Constitutional Rights,
before founding his own left-wing firm. “We were going to be a
progressive legal collective, but our political standards lowered as
our fees increased,” he told City Limits magazine a decade back. “It’s
hard to say no to a heroin dealer who drops 75 grand on your desk.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Wagner took a pay cut and left to work for legal
services in 1985. With a colleague, Jim Provost, he pioneered the use
of civil racketeering laws in East New York. Their first targets were
the landlords of a large development who certified every month to HUD
that their decrepit federally subsidized apartments were in decent and
sanitary condition. Because the owners sent these transparently
fraudulent certifications more than once through the mail, and
deposited the federal subsidies into their bank accounts, the legal
services lawyers argued that the landlords fit the federal definition
of racketeers. That meant the owners could be sued for triple damages.

The landlords experienced a come to God moment and turned the deed over to the tenants in 1995.

Of late, Mr. Wagner reasoned that the Federal Reserve and Treasury
were doing a splendid job of looking out for the bankers, so he took up
the legal cudgel to protect impoverished homeowners from foreclosure.
He and a colleague convinced the F.D.I.C. to substantially write down a
mortgage for an elderly client, he waged a decade-long civil battle
against a particularly unrepentant house flipper, and grew so
frustrated with the inaction of the Brooklyn district attorney in
combating mortgage fraud that he took to traveling around Brooklyn on
weekends, showing up at forums to challenge prosecutors.

One Saturday last winter, he cornered a wincing deputy prosecutor
before a crowd in a church basement in Flatlands. “Most of the con
artists perpetrating frauds continue to have a better chance of being
kidnapped by Somali pirates than of being prosecuted by your office,”
Mr. Wagner noted to hoots of applause.

Weeks later, the district attorney, Charles J. Hynes,
announced with some fanfare the arrest of a low-level ring of
swindlers, not least a man who had impersonated his own mother. Mr.
Wagner was not overly impressed.

“Here’s your headline,” Mr. Wagner said. “ ‘D.A. Accuses Man of Not
Being His Own Mother: Charles Hynes is guardedly optimistic that the
gynecological evidence will sustain his accusation.’ ”

We reporters are not supposed to draw too close to our sources,
which is a good rule of thumb. But that cannot inoculate against
respect, or a good laugh. Mr. Wagner summoned both. He probably could
have made a golden pile in criminal or corporate law.

He chose a different path.

                ("A Voice for the Poor is Silenced," NYT City Room blog.)

Obituaries have appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the New York Law Journal. 

Funeral and memorial services have not yet been scheduled. For further information,
visit www.bka.org.