W. J. Michael “Mike” Cody, an influential Memphian in the fields of law and politics, died Sunday at the age of 88 at Baptist Memorial Hospital after a lengthy illness. Cody was well known as a reformer, even before his first tenure in local government as a city councilman from 1975 to 1977. He had been one of the local legal advisers to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 and had helped King strike down a ban on a second march on behalf of striking sanitation workers, mere hours before the fateful assassination of the civil rights leader. In…