September 22, 2009 - A Voice for the Poor is Silenced

By Michael Powell for City Room (New York Times)


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.

Rick Wagner, a Brooklyn Legal Services lawyer, died at home on 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.