Spector’s N.Y. lawyer softens tone for L.A.

As a New York lawyer best known for defending the boss of the Gambino crime family, Bruce Cutler is used to brash clients and bold words. So it was really no surprise that he opened Phil Spector’s local murder trial alternately bellowing against police officers with “murder on their mind” and offering a polite thanks to the jury for making him “feel at home in a strange, new and different place.”

“I make rhetorical flourishes, I know,” he said almost apologetically over pizza in Manhattan a few weeks before coming to Los Angeles. “I want to be judicious in my courtroom style. It doesn’t mean you have to be stilted, but you can be controlled.”

The first week of Spector’s trial provided a glimpse of how that style will play in Los Angeles.

Although the loquacious Cutler is well known in New York, catapulting to fame 20 years ago when he won the first of three acquittals for mob boss John Gotti, the 59-year-old defense lawyer has rarely ventured west of Chicago for cases. His only other local client was John Wayne’s son-in-law, convicted 15 years ago of plotting to assault his wife and her boyfriend.

“This is a good case for him,” said Ed Hayes, Cutler’s longtime friend.

To begin with, Hayes said, the defense has a “nice, simple theory” about how actress Lana Clarkson was shot four years ago in Spector’s Alhambra mansion. “They were fooling around with a gun and it goes off.”

Perhaps most important, Hayes said, Cutler is energized by the challenge of overcoming years of bad publicity for Spector and predictions that the wispy 67-year-old will be convicted.

Cutler and Hayes met as young prosecutors, and Hayes still regards his friend as fearless, a quality he has shown for decades.

In 1979, Hayes said, Cutler was assigned the racially charged prosecution of two Hasidic Jews accused of beating a black teenager into a coma in the Crown Heights area of Brooklyn.

Day after day, Cutler, who is Jewish, decried vigilantism and was taunted by the defendants’ friends and family.

“They would yell at him, ‘You’re not a Jew. You’re prosecuting your own people,’ ” Hayes said. “They were really nasty to him.”

Finally, one afternoon, Cutler had enough.

“He stood outside the courtroom and told them, ‘OK, line up. I can’t fight you all at once. But I’ll fight you one at a time. Two at a time. Just line up. I’ll take you all on,’ ” Hayes said.

No one stepped forward.

Cutler, a standout athlete in college who still has the look of a linebacker, chuckled recently at the memory of that courthouse confrontation. “They were egging me on,” he said in his raspy Brooklyn accent, “and I stupidly got angry.”

As a deputy district attorney, Cutler was known as a workhorse.

“When he was a prosecutor, there was no one better liked by the cops in Brooklyn than Bruce,” said Mark Feldman, who worked with Cutler in Brooklyn and later became chief of the organized crime and racketeering section for the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York.

“When he would try a case, we would go to court to watch,” Feldman said.

In those days, Feldman and others recall, it was not unusual for a prosecutor to handle eight to 10 murder cases a year. By Cutler’s own estimate, he took about 50 murder cases to verdict in six years as a prosecutor -- far more than he has handled in 25 years as a defense lawyer.

Though proud of his work as a prosecutor, Cutler said he did not grasp the challenges facing his adversaries until he left the government. “When you become a defense attorney, you realize how difficult it is ... defending a client whose life is on the line.”

Born in Brooklyn, Cutler is the oldest of three children and the son and brother of lawyers. His younger brother, Rich, is a federal prosecutor in San Francisco.

From childhood, Rich Cutler said, their father instilled the notion that there were few things more noble than defending people against the vast resources of the government. It was a lesson that had been particularly poignant for his father, Murray Cutler, a longtime criminal defense attorney who, as a New York police officer, had been tried and acquitted on charges that he took a bribe.

That event, Bruce Cutler said in his autobiography, taught him “that just because the government says it doesn’t make it so.”

Over the years, Rich Cutler said, his brother also has demonstrated an ability to “identify with the positive attributes of people he was defending.”

So, in Bruce Cutler’s world, the notorious Gotti was not an alleged murderer or mob boss. “He saw him as a good family man who the government was after,” Rich Cutler said. “While that is not something I would do or others might do, it is something Bruce does.”

Bruce Cutler explained it differently.

“I have been fortunate to represent people who had a cachet about them, whether it be underworld figures or a musical genius,” Cutler said. “I am better off representing people who are different than the rest.

“John Gotti was a special person to me,” he said. “And he fought the cases on his own terms, he didn’t knuckle under. You might say there are similarities between Phillip and John. There is a similarity in courage and to live your life as you see fit.”

In 1987, during his first successful defense of Gotti, who had not yet ascended to the top of the Gambino crime family, Cutler dramatically slammed a copy of the grand jury indictment into a courtroom trash can to illustrate his point: The government’s case was garbage.

(After the acquittal, a juror was found guilty of accepting a bribe from the Gambino family.)

In 1993, Cutler’s sharp criticism of the government’s continuing prosecution of Gotti led authorities to take the extraordinary step of prosecuting him for violating a gag order. Cutler eventually spent 90 days under house arrest and was intermittently barred for two years from practicing law in Brooklyn.

Over the years, his withering style of cross-examination became legendary -- to be grilled by Cutler, it was said, was to be “Brucified.”

Witness the handwriting expert who had done his work over lunch.

In a case 20 years ago, the expert testified that Cutler’s client’s signature matched one used with a stolen credit card.

When had he compared the signatures? Cutler asked the witness.

Over lunch, the witness replied.

“Over lunch?” Cutler asked, incredulous.

Yes.

From that moment on, the phrase “over lunch” came to mean unreliable.

“The acquittal literally took 12 minutes,” Rich Cutler recalled.

Gotti, dubbed the “Dapper Don,” was finally convicted in 1992 in his fourth prosecution -- after a judge removed Cutler from the case, deciding he was more of a consigliere than a defense lawyer.

To this day, Cutler scoffs at the idea that he was in-house counsel to Gotti. “Some people thought I was,” he says. “John Gotti never thought I was.” They remained friendly until Gotti died in federal prison in 2002.

Approaching the Spector case and a Los Angeles judge and jury that may not enjoy his brawling style, Cutler knows that he will have to tone it down.

“I just tried a matter in Las Vegas and we won, but I had to be a non-New Yorker,” said Cutler’s onetime partner, Barry Slotnick. “You become softer and you look into the eyes of the jury.... They want to see somebody who is friendly.”

Cutler’s brother agrees. “I can tell you from personal experience,” Rich Cutler said, “that the New York-type personality just doesn’t play well in California. That much-more-aggressive style tends to put people off a bit, especially native Californians.”

But don’t expect Bruce Cutler to tiptoe.

As he himself acknowledged: “I can’t walk on eggshells. It’s not my style.”

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Times staff writer Peter Y. Hong contributed to this report.