For more than 20 years, Howard Slusher was an enemy of National Football League and National Basketball Association owners, who found his relentless, aggressive style difficult to abide. He was known as “Agent Orange” for his tough tactics on negotiating players’ contracts as well as his red hair. Mr. Slusher, who went on to a second career as a consultant for Nike, died on July 13 at a hospital in Portland, OR. He was 85. [...]

Steven Hoffenberg, a brash New York debt mogul who spend 18 years in federal prison after admitting to running a fraud scheme that prosecutors said was then among the largest such crimes in U.S. history, was found dead on August 23 in the modest apartment in Derby, CT, where he had lived for about two years. He was 77. Mr. Hoffenberg pleaded guilty in 1995 to conspiracy and fraud charges arising from a Ponzi scheme [...]

Kurt Gottfried, as theoretical physicist who barely escaped the brutal reality of one war and devoted his career to preventing another as a co-founder of the influential Union of Concerned Scientists, died on August 25, in Ithaca, NY. He was 93. Dr. Gottfried, who fled Nazi-controlled Austria when he was 9, became an outspoken opponent of nuclear weaponry, a champion of politically dissident scientists in the Soviet Union and South America, and a critic of [...]

Marc Lewitinn, who spend 850 days on a ventilator, struggling with long COVID, died of a heart attack on July 23 at Palisades Medical Center in North Bergen, NJ. He was 76. Mr. Lewitinn was an ardent supporter of Israel and Jewish causes. He raised money for Ethiopian Jews fleeing their country as refugees, and won praise from the Nazi hunters Simon Wiesenthal and Charles Kremer for helping to persuade the U.S. government to deport [...]

Earl J. Silbert, who led the federal prosecution of the botched Watergate burglary, which secured the convictions of all five burglars and two of the break-in’s planners, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, died on Sept. 6 in Keene, NH. He was 86. The break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington on June 17, 1972, set off a chain of events that led to the resignation of President [...]

Art Rosenbaum, a painter and folk musician acclaimed for a half-century of field recordings of American vernacular music, including old-time Appalachian fiddle tunes and ritual music imported from Africa by enslaved people, died on Sept. 4 at a hospital in Athens, GA. He was 83. His passion was to document a broad range of American musical traditions passed down and performed at work camps, church gatherings and rural living rooms. An important inspiration was Pete [...]

Melvin Sokolsky, a photographer who pushed boundaries by creating fantastical tableaus that seemed to defy gravity and logic, died on August 29, at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 88. His career in fashion photography imbued cool couture style with high-art surrealism. Later, he moved on to directing and shooting television commercials, collecting more than 25 Clio Awards. Many of his images were later shown in galleries and museums, including the Louvre in Paris, [...]