Louis A. Craco, who recruited lawyers for poor, dies at 86

Louis A. Craco, a white-shoe lawyer who in the 1980s helped to expand the pool of volunteer attorneys providing free legal services to people in New York City who could not afford them, died on Feb. 15 in Manhasset, New York. He was 86.

The cause was a stroke, his son William Craco said.

Craco (pronounced CRAY-koh), a partner at Willkie Farr & Gallagher, was a founder in 1984 of Volunteers of Legal Service, a program, designed in part to make up for cutbacks by the Reagan administration in federal legal services for the poor, that more than doubled the amount of time private lawyers donated to public interest work. At 50, he was at the time the youngest president of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.

Law firms and corporate legal departments, which together employed 5,000 lawyers, agreed to provide 30 hours a year per lawyer, mostly to cases involving civil fraud, landlord-tenant disputes and wrongful denial of government benefits.

Services were already being provided, particularly in criminal cases, by the Legal Aid Society and other organizations. But Craco’s program expanded the available resources for civil matters. Today, Volunteers of Legal Services enlists about 1,000 lawyers and others every year from 60 law firms and legal departments to serve some 4,300 low-income New Yorkers through collaborations with more than 200 community organizations. As the president of the City Bar Association, Craco was outspoken in his opposition to political influence in the selection of judges. “The independence, integrity and impartiality we expect of our courts are inevitably eroded,” he wrote in The New York Times in 1983, “in a system that forces judges to worry whether their decisions are safe or popular, to defer to well-connected clubhouse lawyers and to conform appointments of law secretaries, guardians and other officers to the dictates of patronage.”

Craco was counsel to Rep. John V. Lindsay’s transition task force after Lindsay, R-Manhattan, was elected mayor in 1965; he was then named to head the Mayor’s Task Force on Reorganization. He suggested an overhaul of city government, consolidating some 40 municipal departments into 10 streamlined superagencies.

Some departments were consolidated by executive order, others by legislation, in an effort to reduce bureaucracy and deliver municipal services more efficiently.

Craco had studied the city administration as staff counsel, from 1959 to 1961, of a state commission on municipal government operations, whose findings resulted in changes to the New York City charter that gave more power to the mayor.

He also figured prominently in the 1970s as a lawyer for the lien holders in the Penn Central Transportation Co.’s protracted bankruptcy reorganization, the largest business failure in U.S. history at the time.