Puccio for the Defense

Two mornings after a Providence jury acquitted Claus von Bulow, his defense lawyer, Thomas Puccio, arrived at his brand-new office in the Wall Street firm of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan. He was just in time to settle a dispute between his secretary and a decorator over where to put the black leather sofa and chair in relation to his black lacquer desk and bookcase. The firm's partner of two months should be greeting many a new client from behind that desk. For in the wake of his Von Bulow victory last week, commentators across the country are suddenly ranking him among the best U.S. criminal-trial attorneys.

While Puccio is being showered with public accolades, however, some of his legal colleagues in New York City have private reservations. Says one old Puccio foe: "There is no limit to which he wouldn't go to get an advantage." A former courtroom opponent who on the record calls Puccio "a very aggressive, very able lawyer," adds confidentially, "I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw a grand piano." Puccio, the former chief prosecutor of Abscam, knows he rubs many in the legal Establishment the wrong way. "I'm very noninstitutional," he acknowledges. "I'm uncontrollable."

Also "indefatigable," says Lawyer Stephen Kaufman, who once lost to Puccio. "There is a saying that 'litigation is more perspiration than inspiration.' He excels at perspiration." Puccio and his four-member defense team began sweating over the Von Bulow case in late 1984. Earlier that year the Rhode Island Supreme Court had reversed the Danish-born aristocrat's 1982 conviction on charges that he twice tried to kill his socialite wife Martha ("Sunny") von Bulow with insulin injections; since 1980 she has lain in a coma from which she is expected not to recover. Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz had argued the successful appeal. Now the ball was Puccio's.

During the second trial's opening statements in April, the prosecution told the jury it would show that Von Bulow had sought to murder the heiress so he could inherit the millions he was promised in her will and marry his then mistress, former Soap Opera Actress Alexandra Isles. But some of the promised proof was never introduced. With carefully crafted motions, raising such issues as relevance and prosecutorial failure to lay necessary legal groundwork, Puccio persuaded Judge Corinne Grande to exclude Sunny von Bulow's will, testimony from her financial adviser and evidence that Von Bulow knew how to use hypodermics.

After performing those feats of damage control, Puccio narrowed his own case to one clear, pointed counterpunch. No crime had been committed, he declared, because Mrs. Von Bulow had never been given any insulin. A series of medical experts backed his contention that there was no firm proof of insulin injection. With much of the circumstantial evidence against Von Bulow in tatters, most lawyers agree that the jury had little choice. But some disparaged Puccio's performance. "What victory?" snorted one former colleague. "Against a prosecutor with little experience and a judge who leaned his way?" Others were more impressed. Said Susan McGuirl, half of the prosecution team that convicted Von Bulow in 1982: "Puccio made his own case very forcefully and challenged the state to prove otherwise. He tried the defense case like a prosecutor. I've never seen that before."

The prosecutorial posture is understandable. Puccio served in the U.S. Attorney's office in Brooklyn from 1969 to 1982, winning national attention during Abscam as the Justice Department's principal architect of the sting operation that convicted six U.S. Representatives and one Senator. Complaints about the methods he used in the investigation and trials have stuck to him, though he counters that the techniques have been upheld by every appellate court that has looked at them. Even before he went into private practice in 1982, Puccio had been criticized in the legal community for courting the press, an approach he used to good effect in the Von Bulow case. "The press is very important in any trial situation," he argues. "With Claus, I didn't want it to seem that he was a guilty guy who got off."

A lifelong Brooklyn resident from a working-class family, who earned his undergraduate and law degrees at Fordham University, Puccio, 40, recognizes that "there is an Establishment and I'm just not part of it." Nor will he change, despite his new Wall Street affiliation. "People pay me, people come to me because I can win, not because I go to the right clubs," he argues. "The best defense is a good offense." Or perhaps a good offensive lawyer.