Judge Milton Pollack, who died Friday at age 97, adjudicated some of the most notorious and difficult cases on the federal docket in recent decades, including the bankruptcy of Drexel Burnham Lambert and the prosecutions on securities charges of financiers Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken.

A self-described “compulsive worker” who insisted that retirement leads only to death, the Federal District Court justice continued to sit on cases far past the normal retirement age. He heard arguments in his final case on Friday, hours before undergoing surgery related to an illness, said his stepdaughter, Phyllis Asch.

In a prominent case for New York City, Pollack issued the decision in 1977 that forced the Port Authority to allow the Concorde supersonic transport jet to land at Kennedy International Airport.

Throughout an extremely lengthy career – he was admitted to the New York bar in 1930 – Pollack specialized in cases related to finance, but as an active judge he had to take whichever cases were assigned to him, including criminal cases involving narcotics and murder; such cases he professed not to like.

Later, when he had become a senior judge with the power to pick and choose his cases, he mainly heard suits related to finance. But where most judges use senior status as a kind of semiretirement, Pollack continued to handle a heavy caseload.

Pollack was already more than 80 when he began hearing the massive civil litigation surrounding the collapse of Drexel, in 1990. Pollack had at times an acrimonious relationship with Drexel’s attorneys, who tried at one point to have him removed from the case on conflict-of-interest charges.

However, by 1992, Pollack oversaw a settlement. “There’s no way we can adequately describe the large and small prods the court used to keep the process going,” a Drexel attorney told the Los Angeles Times. Without Pollack’s intervention, “you would have seen litigation going into the next century.”

Later, Pollack oversaw the actual distribution of the $1.3 billion in settlement funds to creditors ranging from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to individual investors who purchased junk bonds through Drexel.

In 2003, Pollack dismissed a class-action lawsuit brought by customers of Merrill Lynch who claimed they had been defrauded when they bought Internet securities that later tanked. Pollack said the plaintiffs took “unjustifiable risks” and then petitioned the court for “cost-free speculators’ insurance.” It was a typically direct statement for a jurist of forceful opinions. “I’m not easy,” he once said. “I’m known as a tough judge.”

He was especially qualified to com ment on the Internet bubble because he had seen the greatest bubble of the 20th century first-hand: Milton Pollack began practicing securities law in Manhattan two weeks before the stock market crash of 1929.

Pollack grew up in Flatbush and attended Columbia for both his undergraduate and law degrees. He joined the Wall Street firm of Gilman & Unger and was made a partner in 1938.

In 1942, he brought a stockholder suit against General Motors, charging that senior executives had been given improper bonuses in cash and stock of more than $4.3 million. Eight named executives were forced to return the bonuses, plus $2 million in interest. Flushed with success, Pollack opened his own firm in 1945.

Although he still concentrated on finance, Pollack also accepted other cases. In 1952, he won a verdict in a case of wrongful dismissal brought by the longtime music director of the New York City Opera Company, Laszlo Halasz.

In 1955, he unsuccessfully defended the World-Telegram and Sun in a libel action brought by a former congressman, W. Kingsland Macy, after the newspaper reported that Macy had at tempted to blackmail Governor Dewey to give Macy the Republican nomination for senator.

In 1957, he successfully defended Joan Crawford in a suit brought by her Manhattan neighbors, who were complaining that Crawford was too noisy.

When an opening on the Southern District of New York’s federal bench appeared in 1967, Senator Robert F. Kennedy recommended Pollack, who had most recently been representing the Committee for a Reasonable World Trade Center, which contended that the project would compete with private enterprise.

He later said that he found it frustrating that the job paid only $30,000, less than he paid members of his own law staff.Yet the work suited him; he stayed on the job for more than 35 years.

Milton Pollack

Born September 29, 1906, in Brooklyn; died August 13 after undergoing surgery; married first in 1932 to Lillian Klein, who died in 1967; second in 1971 to Moselle Baum Erlich, who died in February; survived by two children, Phyllis Asch and Daniel Pollack, four step-daughters, and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.