The Lure of Fame, Fortune : Bruce Cutler Defended a Mob Don; Now a High-Profile Case Brings Him West

SANTA ANA — Bruce Cutler is ticked off. For one thing, he figures he’s the subject of a federal investigation. For another, his former client, convicted Mafia leader John Gotti, is likely to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Then there’s the problem of his current client, Thomas Gionis, who has just gone on trial for a second time for allegedly ordering the beating of his ex-wife and her boyfriend.

But right now what Cutler is really steamed about is the no-smoking rule in the Orange County Courthouse.

“What is it here with this not being able to smoke in the corridor? Where are you supposed to pace and smoke?”

Grumbling all the way, Cutler walks out onto the 11th-floor balcony and lights up a True.

It’s just one of the differences between California and his native New York that’s making the 43-year-old defense attorney feel like a Cadillac in a world of Jaguars. This is a guy who is as New York as a Central Park mugging.

So when he’s stuck in sprawling, skyscraper-less Orange County for nearly a month, he thinks, “This is like . . . Suffolk County (Long Island), way out there. Like Hauppage or someplace.” Nowheresville, in other words.

Then why is he here?

Try money and fame.

Money, because Gionis, 38, is a Pomona orthopedic surgeon who can afford high-priced legal talent. Fame, because Gionis’ ex-wife is Aissa Wayne, a woman who, as the prosecutor put it, is “the daughter of the actor, the late, great John Wayne.”

Gionis, who faces eight years in prison, is charged with two counts of conspiracy and two counts of assault in 1988 on Wayne, 35, and her then-boyfriend, Roger Luby, 56. The prosecution contends Gionis ordered an attack through a private investigator he was using to gather evidence in a battle for custody of his and Wayne’s daughter, who was little more than a year old at the time. The surgeon’s first trial ended with a jury hung in favor of conviction.

Cutler freely admits he wouldn’t be in Santa Ana if there were no connection to John Wayne. He says he’s turned down other wealthy defendants. This case, though, comes with built-in news coverage.

The assault got so much publicity that even today, nearly all the potential jurors remembered hearing about it. The new Courtroom Television Network, which broadcasts trials like the Rodney King beating case and the William Kennedy Smith rape case, is covering its first Orange County trial--because of John Wayne . . . and Cutler.

The lawyer says Gionis “came to me from Day 1” when he was being investigated for the attack. Gionis “said he’d read about me, he liked my style, he liked the way I fought the John Gotti trial.” But Cutler then was busy defending Gotti in another trial.

Gionis says he wanted Cutler “because he’s the best,” though he won’t say how many dollars he threw at Cutler to lure him westward. Cutler, grinning, contends that it’s “not much.”

Still, Cutler and an associate have been staying in the pricey Four Seasons Hotel in Newport Beach since the beginning of April. Gionis also provides a car--often a stretch limo--and chauffeur to get them to and from court each day.

Somehow the limo seems appropriate for Cutler. He wears custom-made shirts--he does have an 18 1/2-inch neck--suits with price tags over $1,000, ties close to $100. The lighter, though, is a 99-cent Bic.

A while back, he gave up fighting baldness and now gets what little hair he has left clipped to a Marine Corps stubble.

The clothes and the strut make him look a lot like his most famous client, Gotti--”the Dapper Don,” “the Teflon Don,” the head of the Gambino organized-crime family, acquitted all three times Cutler defended him but now in jail after he was convicted of 13 counts of murder and racketeering. A judge had refused to let Cutler defend him any more.

Cutler first represented Gotti at a 1985 arraignment. At the time, Gotti was unknown to the public, a lesser figure behind Aniello Dellacroce. But Dellacroce died, the next head of the Gambino family was shot to death outside a Manhattan steak house in December that year, and Gotti became head of the family. Cutler stayed at his side, inside court and sometimes outside.

Cutler calls himself Gotti’s “counselor, confidant and friend,” adding: “That’s what I feel a criminal lawyer is supposed to be.”

He and Gotti “had a meeting of the minds and a symbiosis with regard to fighting the government,” Cutler says. Gotti “has got a great deal of personal integrity and strength of character, which is something that I like. He’s self-educated, grew up dirt-poor, one of 11 children. We got along very well from the start and have remained that way.”

According to testimony at his trials, Gotti has also taken part in, directed or at least sanctioned murder, extortion, burglary, robbery and savage beatings.

Cutler says Gotti has always “denied any participation or membership in what the government calls La Cosa Nostra” or the Mafia. “That’s always been our position and I guess it always will be.”

But on secretly recorded tapes played at Gotti’s trial this year, Gotti is heard saying there is a Cosa Nostra, and it will last long after he’s gone. (He’s also heard complaining about his lawyers’ fees and calling them “high-priced errand boys.”)

Cutler replies that Gotti’s statements “were taken totally out of context. . . . My interpretation of the tapes was not the same as the government’s interpretation.”

Cutler, like Gotti, grew up in Brooklyn. His father went to law school but became a New York policeman when he couldn’t get work as an attorney after graduation. Eventually, he did practice law and still does, Cutler says.

Cutler was an undefeated wrestler in high school, then went off to Hamilton College, in Clinton, N.Y. Next came Brooklyn Law School, where he graduated cum laude and prosecuted cases for the Brooklyn district attorney for nearly seven years.

Even after he went over to the defense, new prosecutors said they were regaled with tales about his fierce courtroom style.

In their book on John Gotti, “Mob Star,” New York Daily News reporters Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci say that “like Gotti, Cutler was a stout dynamo out of Brooklyn, and good at what he did, which was to take the prosecution’s evidence, spin it, scuff it, twist it and pound it to a pulp, until it was nothing more than a lumpy pile of reasonable doubt. . . . “

His method of cross-examining witnesses spawned a new word in New York: Brucify. It rhymes with crucify.

“He’s a relentless cross examiner, and he’s like a tiger: Once he gets the smell of blood, watch out--he dives in,” says Robert F. Simone, a Philadelphia lawyer who has represented numerous mob defendants over the years.

Outside court, “he’s a totally different person . . . kind of shy,” says Simone, who finished a five-month trial with Cutler in Chicago in March. “He’s gentlemanly and unassuming. But once he goes into the courtroom, it’s some kind of metamorphosis.”

Cutler is good with the press, willing to talk, generally willing to stand still for photographs. He does draw the line at being photographed working out or in his hotel room or puffing on a cigarette. But he chats with reporters, gives interviews and does the subtle things designed to establish a bond.

One day he asks, “How am I gonna cross-examine John Wayne’s daughter here in John Wayne County? You got any advice?”

Reporters don’t offer advice unless they want to get fired, and Cutler quickly says he didn’t mean it anyway. He knows what he has to do.

But he has indeed touched on a crucial point in the case. Will New York be boffo in Santa Ana? Will the “in-your-face” style of law win votes here?

Inside court, Cutler usually speaks in one of three volumes: loud, louder and threshold of pain. Yet when he cross-examined Aissa Wayne last week, for example, Cutler was more pussycat than tiger. He agreed that he was forced to walk “a fine line” between trying to stop her testimony from hurting Gionis and attacking her so much that he created a backlash among jurors who might feel sorry for her.

“Hey, I’m being nice to her,” Cutler said at one break. “You should see me with some government informant.”

Some questions Cutler tried to put to Wayne were challenged by the prosecutor, Jeoffrey Robinson, a rising young star in the district attorney’s office who has won several high-publicity cases in Orange County.

At one point, Robinson accused Cutler of “raking her through the mud” and later of an “attempt to slime a witness.” Cutler howled his denials.

The legal back-and-forth led Judge Theodore E. Millard to declare that both lawyers “have a habit of asking a lot of irrelevant garbage.” Millard also came down on Cutler for repeatedly violating the judge’s order to keep farther away from the jury as he paced around the room. Cutler apologized, but claimed that “the courtrooms in New York are bigger, Your Honor.”

From corridor comments, it was clear that many potential jurors knew who Cutler and Gotti are. Robinson took pains to contrast himself to the outsider in the courtroom. The prosecutor told jurors that one Cutler speech was so good that “I kind of feel like the guy standing behind Mother Teresa on Judgment Day.”

Cutler used a “lifestyle defense” in the Gotti trials, arguing that while the defendants might be heavy gamblers, avoiding 9-to-5 jobs, sleeping late and staying out till all hours of the morning, those were not crimes. Here, he’s reversing the role.

So far he has tried to indict the lifestyle he paints for Aissa Wayne: privileged daughter of a famous star; jobless adult who flits from Mexico to Hawaii to Arizona, living “to get a vacation from a vacation.” Wayne, however, has held her own so far, getting in the fact that she had her first job at 15, worked in Gionis’ medical clinic and is now attending law school.

The trial is expected to last at least another two weeks, after which Cutler heads back to New York and more trials.

He says he’s not too worried about a possible federal investigation of him and other lawyers barred from representing Gotti at the trial that ended April 2.

He claims Gotti’s most recent lawyers “did a great job” and stops short of boasting he could have won an acquittal for the don. “I would have liked to have been there,” he says simply.

And like all lawyers, he does lose some, including his most recent case, in Chicago. Although his defendant was acquitted of murder, “my client was convicted of racketeering and some extortions,” he says.

Cutler spends most of his time out here in court, a law office or his hotel room preparing for trial. But as for switching coasts: “I can’t work out here. The weather is too nice. Look at this place.”