Celebrity attorney Joe Tacopina’s alleged cooperation with prosecutors pursuing former police commissioner Bernie Kerik on fraud and tax evasion charges will remain secret — at least for now.
Kerik’s attorney told the Daily News Tuesday he will send a subpoena to federal prosecutors seeking sealed court documents Kerik believes show that Tacopina served as a government witness against the ex-top cop in the 2007 fraud case that sent Kerik to prison. Tacopina was most recently in the news as one of Alex Rodriguez’s lawyers in the Yankee slugger’s losing battle against Major League Baseball to overturn his drug suspension.
“Without a doubt, this is not the end of the quest to get the documents,” Kerik lawyer Tim Parlatore told the Daily News Tuesday. “We’ll use every resource possible.”
A federal judge ordered Kerik on Monday to turn over sealed records from the investigation that led to three years in prison for Kerik. But U.S. District Court Judge Loretta A. Preska did not bar Kerik from obtaining the information through other means and using it in the malpractice suit he filed against Tacopina, or in his defense against the defamation lawsuit Tacopina subsequently filed against him.
“Nothing in the protective order prevents defendant from seeking discovery of these documents in his other proceedings,” Preska wrote.
Parlatore said he will send a subpoena for the documents to the U.S. Attorney’s office in White Plains, which prosecuted Kerik, within two weeks. He said the records are necessary to pursue the malpractice case and to prepare a defense for the defamation suit.
“Mr. Tacopina is suing Mr. Kerik for defamation, claiming he made false statements about him,” said Parlatore, who said he may eventually file a motion to reconsider Preska’s ruling. “We believe these government documents prove Mr. Kerik is telling the truth when he says Mr. Tacopina was a witness against his own client.”
Tacopina’s lawyer, Judd Burstein, noted that he did not file papers opposing Kerik’s request to unseal the documents. He called Kerik’s attempts to unseal the documents a “round of self-immolation.”
“I think they will only help me,” Burstein said of the sealed records. “He is living in an alternate universe if he thinks they will help him.”
“If that’s true,” Parlatore said, “The government has no legitimate interest in protecting the identity of their witness.”
Kerik has accused Tacopina, who represented him early in his legal ordeal, of cooperating with the feds behind his back, a claim Tacopina forcefully denies. Kerik filed a bar complaint Dec. 27 accusing Tacopina of fraud and deceit, and in January sued Tacopina for negligence and malpractice. Tacopina sued Kerik for defamation in February. (He had also sued the Daily News for defamation in the same lawsuit, alleging that it had improperly colluded with Kerik. However, Tacopina withdrew the suit against the Daily News and its reporters after concluding that there had been no collusion with Kerik and that the Daily News’ reporting was therefore privileged. The Daily News denied all of Tacopina’s allegations at the time.)
On Monday, Preska denied Kerik’s motion asking her to lift the protective order. Preska also ordered Kerik to turn over the documents in question, which he acquired exploring his post-conviction legal remedies, to the U.S. Attorney’s office.
“There is a public interest in enforcing confidentiality agreements, such as the protective order,” wrote Preska. “They encourage cooperation and communication between the government and third-party informants.”
Kerik’s lawsuit and bar complaint accuse Tacopina of secretly meeting with federal prosecutors after having represented Kerik in a New York state criminal case in which Kerik pleaded guilty in 2006.
Tacopina does not deny that he met with prosecutors, but has said the meetings were primarily about financial records that the feds had subpoenaed from him that dealt with another matter. Whatever the nature of Tacopina’s cooperation, by December 2007 his name was on a short list of witnesses the U.S. Attorney’s office had aligned to testify against Kerik.
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