Joseph Corozzo Jr., the lawyer for boxer Goran Gogic, says he shouldn’t be spiked from the pugilist’s drug trafficking case based on “baseless” jury tampering and witness intimidation allegations — arguing that the feds have been trying to get him since the 1990s.
Corozzo Jr. — son of the late reputed Gambino crime family consigliere Joseph (Jo Jo) Corozzo — laid out his argument in a court filing Friday, two weeks after federal prosecutors called him a “subject” of a criminal investigation and moved to have his firm disqualified from Gogic’s case.
Corozzo’s co-counsel Angela Lipsman pushed back in a letter to Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Joan Azrack Friday.
“If being the subject of a criminal investigation barred Mr. Corozzo from representing defendants, his decades-long legal career would have been stunted in its infancy as the FBI’s fruitless attempts to find evidence of him engaging in racketeering date all the way back to the 1990s, when [law firm] Rubinstein & Corozzo was only a few years old,” she wrote, in a letter co-signed by Corozzo.
“We know perfectly well that there is no love lost between us and the U.S. attorney’s office and, given the government’s stated posture here, there is none to be cultivated,” she wrote.
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have repeatedly sought to prevent Corozzo from representing mob defendants over the decades.
Prosecutors in 2005 tried to spike Corozzo from the murder and racketeering trial of Gambino captain Dominick Pizzonia, citing his status as Gambino “house counsel,” his loyalty to his father and his uncle, Nicholas “Nicky” Corozzo, and contending he was a subject in two separate criminal probes.
The feds contended in court filings that Corozzo was once proposed for induction into the Gambino crime family in 2000, but then-Bonanno family boss Joseph Massino, who famously turned cooperator, “withheld his approval on the grounds that he believed attorneys should not be permitted to become full-time members of La Cosa Nostra.”
Robert Sabo / New York Daily News
Robert Sabo / New York Daily News Reputed gangster Joseph Corozzo (center) is pictured in custody in Manhattan in 2008. (Robert Sabo / New York Daily News)
Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Jack Weinstein kept him on the case.
Pizzonia was found guilty in 2007 of racketeering and conspiring to murder a husband-and-wife stickup team who targeted Mafia clubhouses, but the jury acquitted him of charges he actually killed the couple.
Weinstein also denied prosecutors’ attempts to prevent Corozzo from representing reputed Gambino associate Michael Scarpaci in a 2010 fraud case.
The government managed to get Brooklyn Federal Judge John Gleeson to agree to block Corozzo from representing reputed Gambino soldier Gaetano Napoli Sr. at trial in a 2010 fraud case, after the lawyer faced a witness-tampering probe. Napoli pleaded guilty before the case went to trial, though.
“Neither the FBI’s prior investigation of Mr. Corozzo for racketeering nor the alleged ongoing investigation for obstruction of justice is going to impair our zealous advocacy of Mr. Gogic in any way,” Lipsman wrote.
AP
Ex-Bonanno family boss Joseph Massino reportedly blocked Corozzo’s induction into the Gambino family in 2000 because he is an attorney. (AP)
Gogic’s trial was cast into disarray in November, when the FBI uncovered an alleged plot to bribe a juror with $100,000 the weekend before opening statements.
After a probe, the feds said they found protected legal documents, including a photo of a witness’s daughter, in Gogic’s cell in the MDC Brooklyn jail, and detailed instances of apparent witness intimidation in the runup to the trial, according to court filings.
The defense team contended that it didn’t intentionally leave any protected documents with Gogic, though some pages might have inadvertently been mixed in with the reams of nonprotected documents the law firm brought during jail visits.
“While none of us intended to leave any protected materials with Mr. Gogic, we acknowledge that the materials were not kept in our sight at all times,” Lipsman wrote. “For instance, we would not have taken voluminous materials with us into the bathroom or when visiting the vending machine, And, there being so many documents, it would have been difficult to discern if any
were missing after the visit.”
Gogic faces charges he played a key role in an operation that trafficked more than 20 tons of cocaine through U.S. ports.