Longtime Sullivan & Cromwell partner Gandolfo “Vince” DiBlasi, who helped redefine the Wall Street firm's “white-shoe” reputation, passed away on Jan. 14 due to complications from pneumonia. He was 64.

In his nearly four decades at the firm, DiBlasi earned a reputation as a hard-nosed litigator who handled some of Sullivan & Cromwell's most important matters for high-profile current and former clients such as Bankers Trust Co.; BP plc; Cox Communications Inc.; First Boston Corp.; Kidder, Peabody & Co.; Oxford Health Plans Inc.; Phillips Petroleum Co.; and The Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

“He was an unusual combination of Brooklyn street smarts and Yale brilliance,” said Robert Giuffra Jr., a fellow Yale Law School graduate and partner in Sullivan & Cromwell's litigation group.

DiBlasi, son of the late Rudolph DiBlasi, a former Family Court judge, New York City councilman and New York state assemblyman, was born in Brooklyn in 1953. He went on to attend Yale University and Yale Law School.

In 1978, DiBlasi joined Sullivan & Cromwell, where he would remain for the next 40 years. He made partner at the firm in 1985 and joined its management committee in 1998. In early 2014, DiBlasi became of counsel at the firm.

“I'll never forget I had a brunch with him on a Sunday and he persuaded me to come to the firm,” said Giuffra, who joined Sullivan & Cromwell in 1989 followings clerkships with former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Judge Ralph Winter of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. “He was my mentor, as he was the mentor for most of the current Sullivan & Cromwell partners.”

In addition to mentoring generations of lawyers at Sullivan & Cromwell, Giuffra said DiBlasi was also responsible for redefining the firm's litigation prowess.

“When you look at the modern Sullivan & Cromwell litigation group, it was really built by Vince,” Giuffra said.

In the 1980s, many of the so-called white-shoe firms stayed away from white-collar work, but Giuffra noted that DiBlasi changed that at Sullivan & Cromwell.

The firm began picking up white-collar defense and investigations work and taking over litigation matters for its financial service industry clients. In addition to leading the Sullivan & Cromwell litigation team, DiBlasi was Goldman Sach's principal litigator for close to 20 years and handled some of the most important cases for the financial services giant.

DiBlasi was a savvy, forward-thinking and strategic litigator who covered a vast number of areas in the law, said Sullivan & Cromwell chairman Joseph Shenker. But beyond that, what amazed Shenker in the years he worked alongside DiBlasi was his ability to relate to others, including adversaries.

“He was an unusually good person, which informed all his relationships,” Shenker said. “He had an amazing ability to connect with people on the other side.”

Nowhere was that better illustrated than DiBlasi's handling of the hundreds of initial public offering allocation class actions stemming from the “dot-com” boom of the late 1990s. DiBlasi represented Goldman Sachs and was selected by his peers to serve as liaison counsel to 55 investment bank defendants in the class actions, which were aggressively litigated from 2001 to 2009.

“[Vince] had an outstanding relationship with the class action lawyers on the other side and was able to bring home a deal that worked for everyone, having first prevailed in the Second Circuit in a landmark ruling on class certification,” Shenker recalled.

DiBlasi also had lead roles on some of Sullivan & Cromwell's other highly publicized cases, such as his representation of David Duncan, the lead partner on Arthur Andersen's Enron auditing team following the Big Four accounting firm's obstruction of justice indictment in 2002.

“Vince was someone who always instilled a great deal of confidence in clients and also younger lawyers, so you always knew everything would turn out all right if Vince was in charge,” said Giuffra, who worked with DiBlasi in representing Duncan.

The former Arthur Andersen partner, who did not immediately return a request for comment, withdrew a guilty plea in 2005 and ultimately settled civil charges related to Enron in 2008.

DiBlasi's funeral will be private with a memorial service to follow in the coming weeks. His death comes almost a year to the day of the passing of his elder brother, Joseph Vincent DiBlasi, who died at 67 on Jan. 15, 2017, following a two-year battle with cancer. Joe DiBlasi had worked as a chief of homicide for the Queens County District Attorney's Office before heading into private practice in Kew Gardens.