Ronald Goldfarb, legal reformer who battled Mafia for RFK, dies at 91

Boston Globe

19-05-2025

Many of his nearly a dozen books stemmed from work done by his Washington law firm, which specialized in public interest cases, taking on subjects such as farm laborer rights in 'Migrant Farm Workers: A Caste of Despair' (1981) and the penal system in 'After Conviction: A Review of the American Correction System' (1973), written with law partner Linda Singer.
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Following the leaks of National Security Agency files by contractor Edward Snowden in 2013, Mr. Goldfarb edited essays from policy experts and ethicists for the 2015 book 'After Snowden: Privacy, Secrecy and Security in the Information Age.'
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'National security and constitutional liberty are not an either-or proposition,' Mr. Goldfarb said at the Miami Book Fair that year, 'but we have to strike an exquisite balance.'
His time in the Justice Department under Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy also came to represent competing priorities, he contended. Mr. Goldfarb was recruited in 1961 and assigned to the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section — a once tiny unit that grew to more than 70 members under RFK.
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Meanwhile, President John F. Kennedy had ordered an all-out effort to depose Cuban leader Fidel Castro after the calamitous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. The anti-Castro plans, overseen by Robert Kennedy, included the CIA seeking possible hit men among mobsters, who were eager to bring back their gambling operations in Cuba, according to later disclosures by congressional investigations and leaked documents.
'They thought they could burn their candle at both ends, and both work with the Mafia at the same time that we were harassing them, and prosecuting them, and investigating them and making their lives miserable,' Mr. Goldfarb told an audience in Alexandria, Va., in 2002.
This double standard became one of subplots in Mr. Goldfarb's 'Perfect Villains, Imperfect Heroes: Robert F. Kennedy's War Against Organized Crime' (1995), a part memoir and part analysis of RFK's single-minded drive to mobilize federal law enforcement agencies against the Cosa Nostra and others.
Mr. Goldfarb's path to the Justice Department began with a chance meeting. He had come to Washington to pay a social visit to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. On the way, Mr. Goldfarb stopped to see a law school friend, who introduced him to a recruiter for RFK's team.
His pitch to Mr. Goldfarb was direct: Toss out your plans to go into academia and stay in the courtroom. Mr. Goldfarb had served in the Judge Advocate General's Corps, or JAG Corps, in the Air Force defending airmen in court-martial hearings and other cases. 'And I ended up in the 'New Frontier,'' he said, using a term coined to describe the youthful President Kennedy and his policies.
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Mr. Goldfarb, however, was initially wary of RFK over his past work. In the early 1950s, Robert Kennedy was assistant counsel for the 'Red Scare' subcommittee led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, that waged career-crushing inquests into suspected communist sympathizers.
'I just thought, like other people, that he was brash, and a bully, and that it was strictly nepotism that he was made attorney general,' Mr. Goldfarb told the Washington City Paper. But he soon began to admire Robert Kennedy's uncompromising style, he said.
Mr. Goldfarb was sent to Newport, Ky., a Cincinnati suburb he described as a 'classic sin city' that at the time was notorious for its political corruption and mob-run vice. Mr. Goldfarb aided in investigations that led to the conviction of nearly the entire Newport city government and dozens of others.
He also worked closely with the county's reform-minded sheriff, George Ratterman, a former professional football player who had been drugged and photographed in bed with a stripper in a blackmail attempt during the campaign for sheriff in 1961. The caper was exposed and Ratterman surged to victory.
The crime syndicates in northern Kentucky eventually moved out. In his book, Mr. Goldfarb adopted much of RFK's views that organized crime was a direct threat to the rule of law and confidence in the political system.
'These were predators, often totally asocial animals, who preyed on society, had no socially redeeming ends, who used the vilest means to get their way, and whose actions, if unchecked, would lead to anarchy,' he wrote. 'They were perfect villains.'
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Yet Mr. Goldfarb also recounted RFK's shortcomings, which included an obsessive pursuit of Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa was convicted in 1964 of jury tampering and other charges and began serving a 13-year sentence in 1967. (The sentence was commuted in 1971 by President Richard M. Nixon and Hoffa was last seen in 1975, but details of his presumed slaying remained unsolved.)
On Nov. 22, 1963, Mr. Goldfarb was part of a meeting with Robert Kennedy that ended shortly before lunch. About an hour later, news broke that President Kennedy had been shot while his motorcade drove through Dallas.
For decades, Mr. Goldfarb staked out a position at odds with the Warren Commission's conclusion that the gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, acted alone in a self-hatched plot. In his book and later articles, Mr. Goldfarb left open the possibility that organized crime bosses — angered by RFK's crusading fervor — had a hand in planning the JFK assassination.
'The most compelling evidence concerns conversations among leading organized crime figures in 1962 and 1963 who were outraged by [Robert] Kennedy's crusade against them,' Mr. Goldfarb wrote in a 1995 opinion piece in The Washington Post. 'There was a conspiracy to kill the attorney general; there is ominous evidence that they switched their wrath to the president.'
His stance brought some derision from book reviewers even as his profile was raised among JFK conspiracy theorists. Mr. Goldfarb remained unmoved but conceded that too much time had passed to either validate or debunk his speculation.
'There is a haunting credibility to the theory that our organized crime drive prompted a plan to strike back at the Kennedy brothers,' he wrote, 'and that Robert Kennedy went to his grave at least wondering whether — and perhaps believing — there was a real connection between the plan and his brother's assassination.'
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Ronald Lawrence Goldfarb was born in Jersey City on Oct. 16, 1933, and was raised in North Bergen. His father was a building manager, and his mother cared for their home.
At Syracuse University, Mr. Goldfarb was part of a law-school-track program, finishing his undergraduate studies in 1954 and receiving a law degree in 1956. After serving in the Air Force JAG Corps for three years, he enrolled at Yale Law School for advanced legal degrees.
Robert Kennedy resigned as attorney general in September 1964, and Mr. Goldfarb joined him as speechwriter in a long-shot — but ultimately successful — run for US Senate in New York, defeating the incumbent Republican, Kenneth Keating, that November.
'My personal contacts with him, especially after his brother was killed, showed him to be a very tortured human being feeling very human things and not at all the machinelike person that he was depicted as,' Mr. Goldfarb said in a 1981 oral history for the John F. Kennedy Library.
Mr. Goldfarb formed his law practice, Goldfarb & Associates, in 1966. Two years later, as Kennedy campaigned in the Democratic presidential primaries, Mr. Goldfarb planned to seek a seat as a New Jersey delegate for Kennedy at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. 'And before I could do anything,' Mr. Goldfarb recalled, 'he was killed.'
Kennedy was shot on June 5, 1968, as he was leaving the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, shortly after winning California's Democratic presidential primary. He died the next day. The gunman, Sirhan Sirhan, remains in prison.
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Mr. Goldfarb's other books include 'The Contempt Power' (1963) about use of contempt of court provisions; 'Ransom: A Critique of the American Bail System' (1966) and 'TV or Not TV: Television, Justice, and the Courts' (1998).
As a documentary producer, he helped develop 'Desperate Hours' (2001), an account of Turkey's role in rescuing Jewish refugees during the Holocaust, directed by Victoria Barrett.
Survivors include his wife of 68 years, Joanne Jacob Goldfarb; sons Nick and Matt; daughter Jody; and seven grandchildren.
In 1963, the Mississippi governor, Ross R. Barnett, was charged with federal criminal contempt for obstructing court orders to desegregate the University of Mississippi. Barnett's supporters in Congress cited passages from Mr. Goldfarb's book 'The Contempt Power' to claim judicial overreach.
Mr. Goldfarb was so troubled that he asked for a meeting with Robert Kennedy to apologize. Kennedy listened and then asked Mr. Goldfarb to sign a copy of his book. (The charges against Barnett were dropped years later.)
'Instead of it being a heavy moment where conceivably he was going to ask for my resignation,' he recalled in the 1981 oral history, 'it converted into an act of friendship.'