Morris Lasker, judge who sat in NYC and Boston and sentenced Ivan Boesky to prison, dies

Lasker, judge who sentenced Ivan Boesky, dies

NEW YORK — Morris Lasker, the judge who sentenced Ivan Boesky to prison in a 1980s insider trading scandal and helped eliminate horrid conditions in New York City jails, has died. He was 92.

His son Timothy said Lasker died Friday in Cambridge, Mass., from cancer. A memorial is being planned for the spring.

Lasker was appointed to the federal bench in 1967. He served for 25 years in Manhattan and 15 years in Boston.

In 1987, he sentenced Boesky to three years in prison in what was then Wall Street’s biggest insider trading case.

For more than two decades, he presided over lawsuits seeking to change brutal conditions in New York City jails, where suicides occurred weekly. He ordered changes, and the city spent more than $1 billion improving conditions.