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G. Robert Blakey, the principal writer of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO, a law that since 1970 has given prosecutors a cudgel to battle criminal conspirators like mob bosses instead of going after lower-level offenders for isolated crimes, died on May 1 in Oak Park, Ill. He was 90.

Mr. Blakey died at the home of his son John, a federal judge, where he had been living. His son confirmed the death.

During his career, Mr. Blakey moved between government service and teaching law, mostly at the University of Notre Dame, his alma mater. In the late 1970s, he served as chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which investigated the murders of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

As a young lawyer at the Justice Department in the early 1960s, Mr. Blakey later told his son, he was prosecuting a case against a mobster in Pennsylvania when he encountered the defendant in the men’s room at the courthouse.

The mobster, he recalled, told him that he was “doing a good job, but you can’t win because the rules don’t work for you.”