Kerik lawyer wants Tacopina’s talks with feds released
CELEBRITY DEFENSE attorney Joe Tacopina has spent the past nine months denying that he helped federal prosecutors send his former client, ex-New York police commissioner Bernie Kerik, to prison. Now Kerik wants Tacopina to join him in asking a judge to release documents that detail the brash attorney’s conversations with the feds before Kerik was indicted in November of 2007 on fraud and tax-evasion charges.
In a letter to U.S. District Court Judge Loretta Preska sent Thursday, Kerik’s attorney, Tim Parlatore, called for Tacopina attorney Judd Burstein to join him in requesting for the release of the documents.
“The records at issue will quickly and easily prove which side of the story is correct,” Parlatore wrote in the latest round of Kerik’s brutal legal battle with his former friend and business partner. “It stands to reason that if Tacopina were telling the truth, he would be the first in line to ask that the records be released.”
The federal prosecutors who secured Kerik’s 2009 guilty plea requested a conference earlier this week to determine if Kerik violated a protective order. Kerik has asked the court to lift the protective order on records describing five secret proffer sessions in which Tacopina met with prosecutors prior to the 2007 indictment that led to Kerik’s three-year prison hitch.
“If Mr. Tacopina were actually telling the truth then I would expect Mr. Burstein to come into your courtroom and stand shoulder to shoulder with me to join in my application to release these documents,” Parlatore said.
Burstein, told The News last month that his client would welcome the publication of the files in the Kerik case. But when details about Tacopina’s meetings with prosecutors surfaced in Kerik’s court filings, Burstein called for a criminal probe of Kerik and Parlatore. He said last month that Kerik’s attempts to access the documents amounted to “self-immolation.”
“I think they will only help me,” Burstein said. “He is living in an alternate universe if he thinks they will help him.”
Burstein continued to pull his punches on Thursday.
He told the Daily News he sent a letter to Preska asking the judge to review the documents behind closed doors to determine if Tacopina, who represented Kerik when he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges in a Bronx court in 2005, revealed privileged information with federal prosecutors that later led to the ex-top cop’s felony indictment.
“I have absolutely no objection to Your Honor reviewing any notes of meetings between the Government and Mr. Tacopina to determine whether Mr. Tacopina revealed any privileged communications of documents concerning Mr. Kerik to the prosecutors,” Burstein wrote.
Burstein said in the letter that he is no longer calling for a release of all the documents because he does not trust Parlatore. “I never signaled my agreement to a partial release of the file,” he said.
Parlatore said Thursday that Preska “certainly should look at the material and see what’s in there. But Mr. Burstein is trying to limit the issue — there’s a lot more to it, including whether Tacopina lied to prosecutors to bolster his credibility, or whether he’s even truthful with what he said about Kerik. I’d be happy to brief those issues for Judge Preska and the other judges involved.”
Parlatore’s letter to Preska also notes that Burstein’s history of defamation litigation includes a pair of libel complaints Burstein filed on behalf of boxer Shane Mosley against BALCO mastermind Victor Conte regarding doping products Conte supplied to Mosley. Burstein’s letter to Preska claims Mosley never told the BALCO grand jury in 2003 that he knowingly took illegal performance-enhancing drugs.
Mosley, however, told the grand jury that he received and injected EPO, the oxygenboosting drug that has been banned by the Olympic movement for decades. In a 2009 videotaped deposition in his suit with Conte, Mosley acknowledged that he knew he took EPO in 2003.
“Mr. Burstein is falling back into the same bizarre behavioral pattern of attacking anyone who had a hand in exposing the truth,” Parlatore writes.
Tacopina and Lanny Davis, the Washington insider who represented the brash celebrity attorney when he represented Alex Rodriguez’s legal team during the Yankee star’s disastrous effort to avoid a year-long steroid ban, have repeatedly said that no proffer sessions took place.
“The U.S. Attorney’s Office has admitted that Mr. Tacopina was a Government witness against Mr. Kerik, but has declined to disclose the full nature of his cooperation,” Parlatore wrote. “The records at issue will quickly and easily prove which side of the story is correct. It stands to reason that if Tacopina were telling the truth, he would be the first in line to ask that the records be released.”
Kerik has sued Tacopina for racketeering, fraud and malpractice — claims that Tacopina denies. Tacopina has sued Kerik for defamation, and is also fighting a complaint Kerik lodged in December with the disciplinary committee of the New York state bar.