Stanley Sporkin, tough-minded U.S. judge, dies

Stanley Sporkin, who was the scourge of industry in the 1970s as the crusading chief enforcement officer of the Securities and Exchange Commission and who later had a colorful and controversial tenure as a federal judge in Washington with strongly worded rulings on high-profile cases, died March 23 at a hospice center in Rockville, Md. He was 88.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his daughter, Elizabeth Sporkin.

Sporkin was nothing if not an activist in interpreting how the law should be applied, in cases large and small.

At the SEC, where he spent seven years as the agency’s director of enforcement, he led lawyers — whom he called “the finest law firm in the country” — in bold actions against such wellknown companies as Gulf, Exxon, Mobil, Lockheed, R.J. Reynolds and 3M for trying to bribe political figures in foreign countries.

One of Sporkin’s first major SEC cases resulted in the 1974 conviction of George Steinbrenner, a shipbuilder and owner of the New York Yankees, for illegal campaign contributions. The chairman of Lockheed was ousted after admitting to funneling $22 million in payoffs to foreign politicians.

“I was told that this was done all over the world,” Sporkin told The New York Times in 1990. “My answer was that it is not legal, and it is wrong, and that you cannot accept these shortcomings just because everyone is doing it.”

At both the SEC and later as a federal judge, he often showed a quick mind and sharp tongue in courtroom battles.

“He’s despotic, offensive many times,” one of his legal adversaries, Milton S. Gould, said in 1977, “but he’s instilled a little morality in the business community.”

Stanley Sporkin was born Feb. 7, 1932, in Philadelphia. His mother was a homemaker, and his father a judge who desegregated a Philadelphia swimming pool in the early 1950s.