Joe Tacopina could be the most hated lawyer in New York.
After securing an improbable acquittal in the rape case against ex-NYPD Officer Kenneth Moreno, following unlikely triumphs for accused cop-killer Lillo Brancato and alleged girlfriend-bashing pol Hiram Monserrate, the dapper smooth talker is facing a new round of barbs.
“I can’t stand him,” said one prosecutor, pointing out that Tacopina also sprung Natalee Holloway suspect Joran van der Sloot and Thomas Wiese, an Abner Louima cop.
“He’s slick, he’s got a big ego, and he’ll represent any scumbag.”
Tacopina, 44, has heard it all before.
“In high-profile cases, every move is scrutinized, and I’m comfortable with that,” he said, though he admits even friends have questioned why he would defend Moreno, who faced 25 years in jail.
“I’m feeling a little bit of that in my circle,” he said. ” ‘I’m mad at you because you got that guy off’ . . . ‘Are you proud of that?’ ”
Actually, he is.
“I ask them how much they know about the case, if they heard all the evidence. I talked to the jurors, and they pretty much all agreed that Ken was baffled that the woman was alleging sex. He was confused and shocked by her impression of what happened.”
To his critics, Tacopina is the devil’s advocate, an Italian-American version of Johnnie Cochran, down to the flashy style.
He wears window-pane suits and a $6,500 Panerai watch. He’s on TV more than Jeff Probst. He loves Italian soccer. He drives a Maserati. He sails his own 49-foot yacht.
And why not? To the victor go the spoils.
“If you look at the scorecard, I don’t think anyone’s had as many wins as I’ve had over the last three years,” said Tacopina, who charges $750 an hour. “I don’t ever quit.”
The Moreno case was one of his toughest.
The client faced allegations he raped a drunken woman while his partner, Franklin Mata, acted as lookout. Moreno admitted he faked a 911 call to return to the woman’s apartment and, later, when she showed up outside his East Village precinct house wearing a wire, told her he had worn a condom.
“Everyone thought they were guilty,” Tacopina said. “There were huge obstacles.”
The cops were convicted of official misconduct and still could go to jail, but Tacopina got the jury to throw out the rape charges by questioning the woman’s memory and delivering a four-hour closing during which, he recalled, “I almost broke down.”
The key, he said, was presenting a very different interpretation of the prosecutors’ best evidence — that secretly taped conversation in which Moreno denied forcing himself on the fashion executive before apparently confessing.
“I listened to that tape 20 times. And I said, ‘This is going to be good for us.’ It showed this guy had no idea what she was talking about.”
Tacopina has long been attracted to lost causes, starting from his first days as a lawyer.
He got hired by the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, having found his way into the legal profession after his mother, Josephine, a retired FDNY accounting clerk, set him up through a friend’s relative with a job transcribing tapes for the first John Gotti trial. The work scared his father, Cosmo, an immigrant box salesman, because mobsters had put the squeeze on his family’s deli. (Later, Tacopina worked on the murder trial while still at the University of Bridgeport Law School.)
Still, he was only a junior as sistant DA — not good enough for an ambitious former high- school hockey star from working-class Sheepshead Bay. Tacopina had a clear idea about how to get ahead as a prosecutor.
“Any piece of garbage lying around that no one wanted to try, I’d say, ‘Let me have it.’ I would find the area of vulnerability and exploit it.”
“In three and a half years, I did more than 30 trials and had only one acquittal,” he said.
His personal life was no less successful. He met his wife, Tish, in the Bridgeport cafeteria, quickly got married and fathered the first of the couple’s five children. Then he started his own practice. Two months after he set up shop in 1994, he was squaring off with former colleagues.
The client was Richard Sanfillipo, a cop in the “Morgue Boys” gang in Brownsville accused of rip ping off drug dealers and divvying up their haul at a former morgue refrigerator factory.
“They were cops I’d worked with in the DA’s office,” Tacopina said.
The feds tried Sanfil lipo twice in 1995, re sulting in a hung jury, then an ac quittal.
Tacopina shrugs off crit icism of his client choices, noting he won’t defend just anyone. (Mobsters, for example, are out.) What’s most important, he says, is having a client who is credible.
“I have to believe it in my soul — that’s a prerequisite for me. The only way I’m good is if I’m passionate. I don’t know if it’s a formula you can bottle up, but it’s an elixir that has several ingredients. You have to really care,” he said.
What about those who did, in fact, do the crime?
“Have I represented people I believe are guilty? Absolutely. But people who have made mistakes in their lives are entitled to a defense, too,” he said. “Prosecutors overcharge. Sometimes people do deserve a break. The system is based on us challenging the government. I’ve also represented my share of purely innocent people, and that scares me.”
He works with four other lawyers in cozy but well-appointed offices on Madison Avenue near 40th Street, his space decorated with courtroom sketches of him in action — a small sample of the nearly 100 cases he’s brought to trial.
Tacopina also represents a number of crime victims in civil cases, including the family of Imette St. Guillen, who was killed by ex-con bouncer Darryl Littlejohn, in a suit aimed at forcing the feds to alter how they handle paroled felons.
And a woman who was drunk and sexually assaulted by New Jersey Transit cops in 2006.
“I had women’s groups behind me on that,” he said.
Tacopina says he enjoys the behind-the-scenes successes as much as his headline grabbers.
“Most of the cases are anonymous,” he said.