A-Rod lawyer bombshell
Ex-top cop: Dissolve celeb firm He tells of sex, drugs and lies A ‘pattern’ of criminal activity
Through his attorney Lanny Davis, Tacopina denied last year that he’d signed such proffer agreements in the Kerikcase.
Kerik claims in the lawsuit that Tacopina “was abusing prescription pain medications, which he obtained from various physicians.”
The suit says Tacopina engaged in “countless” extramarital affairs, including with TV personalities and even the wife of a client. Kerik says these affairs were part of “a public relations campaign.” (Individual names are withheld in the complaint.) The affairs are relevant, too, the suit says, because Tacopina lied to prosecutors “regarding his numerous extramarital affairs. While he admitted to several (including Individual A), he omitted countless others. This includes, but is not limited to other TV personalities and at least one former client.”
“Individual A was married to a man who was an acquaintance of Tacopina’s,” the suit says. “The two began their illicit liaisons at the Heldrich hotel in New Brunswick, N.J.”
In 2002, the suit says, a man named Joseph, whom Tacopina represented in a criminal case, hired a private investigator to track his wife to a New York City hotel. The suit says Tacopina kept fraudulent business records that were “structured in a manner that would allow him to engage in expensive trysts, while concealing the costs from his wife.”
Kerik filed a complaint with the New York bar against Tacopina in December, claiming the lawyer voluntarily provided the feds information against the interest of his client while concealing that he himself had become a subject or target of a federal criminal investigation.
Last week, Kerik released a recording of a phone call he said Tacopina made to him in 2007 after Tacopina’s name had appeared on a government witness list in the case that destroyed Kerik’s reputation as a law enforcement official and caused him to suffer “immense damages.” Both men had been explicitly forbidden from contacting each other at thetime.
Before Kerik released his recorded phone call, Tacopina had denied to the Daily News that it had occurred. The transcript of the call — allegedly placed on Dec. 9, 2007 — appears to show Tacopina disregarding instructions from Kerik’s attorney at the time, Ken Breen, that Tacopina not call Kerik.
“Ken called and said you can’t call me, because uh, you know, I’m on this f---ing witness list,” Tacopina says in a panic. Tacopina then promises Kerik he will collect a finder’s fee the men ex- pected to share in a business venture with Raffaello Follieri, an Italian businessman who was the fiancé of actress Anne Hathaway.
Thesuit claims that Tacopina was poised to collect a $2.5 million finder’s fee while having represented the sum to Kerikas $1.5million.
Kerik’s complaint accuses Tacopina’s current attorney, Burstein, of going to the same federal prosecutors Tacopina cooperated with originally and asking them to arrest Kerik on “phony perjury charges.”
The suit also lists instances of Tacopina allegedly using the threat of lawsuits to intimidate and silence reporters in 2008, 2010 and 2014. Tacopina sued The N News,
along with Kerik, about Kerik’s initial complaint against Tacopina, alleging that The News improperly colluded with Kerik. The News denied all of Tacopina’s allegations at the time, and Tacopina withdrew the suit against The News and its reporters, but not Kerik, after concluding that there had been no collusion with Kerik and that The News’ reporting was therefore privileged. Kerik’s suit calls the claim against The News a “frivolous and retaliatory” act.
Tacopina’s defamation suit, Kerik claims, “sought to send a message to all other reporters that if they printed any negative material about Tacopina, or made any attempts to shed the light of truth on his falsely inflated reputation, that they would face similar economic harm.”
“Tacopina knew betterthan anyone the extent of his cooperation with federal prosecutors,” Kerik claims.