Lawyer Spends Uncomfortable Days in Court : Trial: A defender of lost causes finds himself the defendant in seven felony counts stemming from a messy paternity suit.

SANTA ANA —  William Yacobozzi Jr., diminutive, unassuming, with a bulldog face and a rich bass voice, wears his grin in the courtroom like the neighborhood runt who just outsmarted the local bully.

Yacobozzi loves taking on hard-nosed prosecutors in cases that seem lost causes--and winning them.

A pawnshop owner admits shooting his wife and her divorce attorney in front of witnesses; Yacobozzi wins him an acquittal. A gang leader is identified by witnesses in a killing, then flees to Mexico; Yacobozzi wins him an acquittal. A lawyer is accused of malfeasance; again, Yacobozzi gets a hung jury, and all but one of the charges is eventually dropped.

“A lawyer is what I always wanted to be,” Yacobozzi said.

But now, the tables have turned. Yacobozzi, 49, finds himself the defendant instead of the defender.

The Newport Beach lawyer is accused of committing seven felonies stemming from a messy civil paternity suit in which he is also a defendant. The criminal and civil cases are proceeding simultaneously.

Two weeks ago, Yacobozzi was bound over for trial on five counts of perjury, one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice and one count of falsifying evidence. Not only could he go to prison, but he also could lose his license to practice law--for Yacobozzi, a more severe penalty.

Last month, another judge found Yacobozzi in contempt for refusing to pay temporary child support in the pending civil paternity suit against him. The penalty: $45,000.

“If I finally manage to get past this mess, it’s going to make me a better defense attorney,” he said. “You definitely see the system from a different perspective.”

Yacobozzi’s troubles began two years ago, when Coleen Walters, the daughter of a former client, accused him of being the father of her 3-year-old son. Yacobozzi, who is married and has a daughter, denies that he and Walters ever had a sexual relationship, let alone a child.

Yacobozzi said Walters and the rest of her family have long been upset with him because he handled her father’s will, and the results were disappointing.

But so far, the courts have sided with Walters. Yacobozzi was ordered to pay $1,450 a month in child support until the lawsuit is settled. Yacobozzi refused.

“It’s not my child,” Yacobozzi said.

As part of the civil suit, Yacobozzi took a blood test from the Parentage Testing Center at Long Beach Memorial Hospital in June, 1988. The test was unfavorable to Yacobozzi and showed a strong likelihood that he could be the father.

But Yacobozzi asked for, and was granted, a second test--a DNA blood test that is supposedly more detailed and accurate. It was administered March 5, 1990. The results showed that Yacobozzi could not have fathered the child.

But, prosecutors allege, it was not Yacobozzi who took the March 5 test.

He sent a substitute to take the test for him, they allege, and gave the man his driver’s license for proof of identity.

The five perjury counts stem from Yacobozzi’s statements to the court, either oral or written, that he took the second test.

The lab technician who administered the DNA test, and a second technician who witnessed it, both testified that Yacobozzi is not the man who took it. As standard procedure, they photographed the man who took the test and took his thumbprint.

It is not Yacobozzi in the picture and it is not his thumbprint, prosecutors allege.

The photograph shows a man with short, gray hair, just like Yacobozzi, and of about the same age, although heavier. Prosecutors allege that Yacobozzi found someone who looks enough like him that lab technicians would not question whether the man in front of them was the man pictured on Yacobozzi’s license.

In fact, however, that very issue was raised, the technicians testified. One of them noted that the man did look different from the picture on the license.

“But we thought,” said Margaret Faulkner, one of the technicians, “well, sometimes people do look different from their driver’s license, especially if the picture on the license is an older picture.”

The technician who administered the test, Nancy Rafi, said she remembers that the man was nervous--so nervous that he was shaking--and that she worried whether she could draw his blood.

“He asked me why we needed to take his picture,” she said.

Yacobozzi said he is the person who asked her that question, because he had already been photographed during the first blood test.

“When I took the first test, I knew they take your picture,” he said. “I knew they take your thumbprint. I knew they compare you to your driver’s license picture.

“It doesn’t make any sense at all that I would send someone in to take the test, knowing he’d have to have his picture and his prints taken.”

He added that there is a possibility that someone else placed the other man’s photograph in his file, because the file cabinet at the hospital was not locked.

In fact, Yacobozzi alleges, Walters and her attorney, Jeri R. McKeand, may have substituted a fake picture and placed it in the file to set him up.

McKeand called that accusation “ridiculous.”

During the paternity hearing, she said, Yacobozzi could not remember that the picture was taken during the second blood test.

“So now why is it that he remembers that he asked (the lab technician) why his picture had to be taken again?” McKeand asked.

Prosecutors said Yacobozzi’s own motive for faking the test is substantial. “He knows the first test shows he’s the father,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Wallace J. Wade said. “He knows he has to do something about it. That’s motive.”

One thorny issue no one has solved: Who is the man in the picture, if it is not Yacobozzi?

Wade said he would like to know that answer too. His investigators have interviewed Yacobozzi’s relatives and friends in a bid to find out the alleged impostor’s identity.

But Wade does not have to prove who the man is. His task is to convince a jury that Yacobozzi faked the DNA test, using another man as a substitute.

It’s not a task that Wade said he relishes: “It’s not a fun job to go after an attorney, knowing that if you convict him he’s going to lose his license. But do you pass on an attorney, then go after a plumber who does the same thing? It can’t work that way.”

Yacobozzi does not relish being prosecuted either. He said he fears that years of hard work that saw him rise from a gang member to a successful lawyer are in jeopardy.

As a youth, Yacobozzi said, he was in a gang in a tough Chicago neighborhood. After moving to California, he went to work as a clerk at Rockwell International. After 13 years, he worked his way up to middle management. At the same time, he was putting himself through college at night.

“My bachelor’s, my master’s, my law degree, all came from going to college at night,” he said. “It took me 13 long years to do it too.”

During his 15 years practicing law, Yacobozzi’s income grew substantially. He owns a $2-million home in Big Canyon in Newport Beach, clear of mortgage. Court papers in the paternity case show his net income at $11,000 a month.

“But now I could lose it all,” he said. “It’s not fair, really.”

But Yacobozzi is convinced that he will be exonerated.