Eliot H. Lumbard, Who Investigated the Apalachin Mob Meeting, Is Dead at 88 Eliot H. Lumbard, a New York prosecutor and law-enforcement leader who helped expose organized crime through his investigation of the infamous Apalachin meeting of mob leaders in 1957, died on Nov. 6 in Nashua, N.H. He was 88. His death was confirmed by his son, John. Mr. Lumbard held a number of prominent positions in New York State law enforcement and advised Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller and Scotland Yard. But none of his work generated larger headlines than his pursuit of the mob more than a half-century ago. In the late 1950s, as an assistant United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, Mr. Lumbard had been prosecuting corruption inside the Internal Revenue Service when he joined the newly formed State Investigation Commission, created by Gov. W. Averell Harriman to fight organized crime and improve policing. The commission was in part a response to what happened on the night of Nov. 14, 1957, in Apalachin, a rural town in south-central New York not far from the Pennsylvania border. More than 60 organized crime leaders were gathered there at the hilltop home of one of them, Joseph Barbara, when state troopers, tipped off to the meeting, joined with officers from other agencies and descended on the house. As they began writing down license plate numbers of the cars in the driveway, many of them expensive models, the officers caught the attention of Mr. Barbara's guests. Startled, many of the crime bosses fled into the woods nearby in their fedoras and topcoats. Some had come from as far as Cuba and Italy. Most said that they had come to visit Mr. Barbara because he was ill, and that it was a coincidence that they were all there at the same time. The commission, with Mr. Lumbard as chief counsel, charged 20 of those in attendance with conspiring to commit perjury and obstruct justice when they refused to explain the purpose of the meeting. When some defendants challenged the constitutionality of the charges, Mr. Lumbard said in court, "They have a simple, proper solution: to tell the truth." In November 1960, the convictions were thrown out on the ground that no illegal activity had been proved. But the exposure of the Apalachin meeting and the subsequent investigation drew new attention to organized crime from J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which had previously denied that it was widespread. Many of those initially detained were later convicted of serious crimes. Others were victims of mob violence. Mr. Lumbard went on to become a fervent advocate of improved training for police officers and better communication among law enforcement agencies. Law enforcement, he maintained throughout his career, was too often inefficient and anachronistic. "The structure of our criminal justice system dates back to the 17th centuries," he told The New York Times in 1968. Crime was then a neighborhood problem. Everybody in small towns knew everybody else. People often prosecuted their own cases. Today that same system continues in an entirely different world - the world of modern, urban America, where everyone is a stranger to everyone else. The basic American assumption is that system, if not perfect, is at least pretty good simply because it is ours; but, in fact, it may be inefficient and inept and unable to cope with current problems. In the 1960s, under Governor Rockefeller, he helped establish what became known as the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Albany and helped create an early information-sharing system for New York law enforcement agencies. Scotland Yard enlisted him as an adviser when it sought to create a similar system. In 1972, he became the first chairman of the New York City Police Foundation, a nonprofit organization he had helped conceive. It raises money for the department to pursue goals beyond those in its normal budget. Eliot Howland Lumbard, the second of three sons, was born on May 6, 1925, in Fairhaven, Mass. His father, Ralph, was a foreman in glass and tack factories in the New Bedford area. Mr. Lumbard entered the United States Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, N.Y., in 1943, and served as a cadet and midshipman during World War II. He received a bachelor's degree from the academy in 1945, another bachelor's degree, in economics, from the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce in 1949, and a law degree from Columbia in 1952. Mr. Lumbard also investigated corruption in local New York police departments, harness racing and other gambling activities, and in school construction. While working with Governor Rockefeller, he led meetings at Oyster Bay on Long Island that brought together organized crime experts from across the country - an Apalachin meeting for law enforcement, some called it. He went into private practice in the 1960s, pursuing much of his later work in public service part time. In addition to his son, John, survivors include his daughters, Susan Lumbard and Ann Alexander; four granddaughters; and a brother, Alden. His marriage to the former Jean Ashmore, the mother of his children, ended in divorce, as did his second marriage, to Kirsten Dehner. During the investigation of the Apalachin meeting, Mr. Lumbard was living in an apartment in Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan with his first wife and young children when someone knocked on the door in the middle of the night. It was an associate of one of the accused, bearing a message. "The guy sent muscle to the house at 2 a.m., telling him to back off," John Lumbard said. He did not back off.