Dick Lapidus was an attorney by profession and an adventurer by nature.

In his law practice, he fought overdevelopment, and was among the first to spot corrupt CenTrust banker David Paul as a bad guy.

A member of the venerable Explorers Club since he dived the Red Sea in the 1970s, Lapidus wrote guides to the trails near his North Carolina vacation home, ran four marathons and cycled.

“He was a driven, aggressive lawyer ‘inside,’ ’’ said daughter Liz Lapidus. “ ‘Outside,’ he had a childlike passion for birding, hiking, running.’’

At 79, Lapidus kept in shape and still practiced law part time. On Friday, he fell getting out of the University of Miami Wellness Center pool, hit his head and died on Saturday at Jackson Memorial Hospital’s Ryder Trauma Center.

His daughter said he had “just battled non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and won.’’

Born Richard Lewis Lapidus in Brooklyn on Dec. 27, 1932, he was the son of Modernist architect Morris Lapidus and his wife, Beatrice. He was an avid scuba diver, watercolor artist and duck-decoy carver, a former Tropical Audubon Society vice president and Coast Guard Auxiliary member.

A track star at Brooklyn’s Midwood High School, Lapidus graduated from the University of Vermont. He attended New York’s Columbia University, then graduated from UM’s law school after his family moved to Miami in 1956.

Three years later, Lapidus co-founded WAFM, Miami’s first FM classical music station. He recalled the effort in a 2000 letter to The Miami Herald.

“Our offices and broadcasting studio were in the penthouse of the old Congress Building downtown. Our antenna transmitted from the top of the building. Miami then was a different city. The tallest building downtown was the courthouse. There were no western suburbs, no I-95 and Kendall Drive was called ‘the road to nowhere...’ ’’

In 1964, Lapidus married the former Wendy Rubin, of Detroit, and opened his own practice. By then, he had worked for Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Irving Cypen, and at the firm of Stone & Bittel.

In 1970, Lapidus, on behalf of the Audubon Society, helped spearhead a campaign against the Saga Bay development, a proposed 3,000-acre, mixed-use site south of Eureka Drive on Biscayne Bay that would have brought in 125,000 sewage-producing residents.

Such projects present “a grave danger to the county unless something is done to stop the unfettered development of our great natural assets,’’ he told The Miami Herald.

Saga Bay foundered, but was revived years later on a smaller scale.

In 1980, Lapidus hired a young law graduate named Robert Frankel for his firm, then named Lapidus & Stettin (with former Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Herbert Stettin). Soon after, Lapidus tangled with the extravagantly wealthy David Paul for the first time, and according to Frankel, saw him instantly “for what he was: a phony.’’

The firm represented late builder Al Sakolsky in a lawsuit against Paul’s Westport Co., over a Sakolsky hotel project. The case settled.

“When this man [Paul] came into town and people kissed his rear end, Dick knew he was not to be trusted,’’ said Frankel, who now heads the Miami firm Robert P. Frankel & Associates.