AUDASE

Stylish, Tenacious Defender

Character Study

By COREY KILGANNON NY Times

Photo

Mario F. Gallucci, 51, outside the Richmond County Courthouse in St. George on Staten Island. Credit Nicole Craine for The New York Times


Mario F. Gallucci was at it again, throwing a curveball at a witness on the stand in a Staten Island courtroom.

“Objection,” said the prosecutor, rising to her feet.

“She’s right,” a smiling Mr. Gallucci said in response to the prosecutor’s protest, which was not over a point of law but rather of Mr. Gallucci’s complimenting the suit worn by the detective on the stand, whom Mr. Gallucci was trying to cross up.

Mr. Gallucci, 51, was defending a local teenager charged with four others in the beating and robbing of another teenager. Mr. Gallucci lowered his usual $20,000 retainer to take the case on good faith, although it is hardly the high-profile type of case he is known for on Staten Island.
Questioning the arresting officers and hoping to elicit discrepancies, the other defendants’ lawyers read from notepads at a lectern. But Mr. Gallucci paced around theatrically, circled the prosecutor’s desk and adopted a jocular tone borrowed from the “My Cousin Vinny” legal playbook.
He is known for his courtroom theatrics and his sartorial style.

“People know Mario Gallucci for the way he dresses,” said Mr. Gallucci, narrating his own profile.

He keeps 150 ties on a rotating rack at home next to his array of nearly two dozen designer suits tailored to fit his 5-foot, 6-inch powerlifter’s build.

Today’s suit was a charcoal Hickey Freeman, which he wore over a custom-made shirt with monogrammed cuffs.

During the hearing, Mr. Gallucci got one detective to admit hiring his client repeatedly in the past, to serve as “filler in a lineup” for unrelated arrests, at $20 an appearance.

Afterward, he walked through the courthouse, fist-bumping court employees, who enjoy the Christmas cannolis that Mr. Gallucci is known for distributing each December.

In other circles, he is reviled for defending accused wife-killers, husband-killers, baby-killers and, in the current case of Eric Bellucci, an accused parents-killer. Mr. Bellucci is accused of stabbing his mother and father to death in their Staten Island home in 2010.

Mr. Gallucci, who was assigned the case by court officials, advised Mr. Bellucci to plead insanity. Mr. Bellucci objected and told Mr. Gallucci in open court that he would have him shot unless Mr. Gallucci helped him argue self-defense instead. Nevertheless, the case is proceeding, with the Bellucci-Gallucci pairing still intact.

Then there is the New Jersey police officer charged with driving drunk and getting into a wrong-way crash last March that killed two passengers, after the group left a strip club.

Mr. Gallucci is demanding a blood test to determine whether strippers may have slipped the defendant a dose of a date-rape drug before he got behind the wheel.

Addressing his critics, Mr. Gallucci smiled broadly and said that even the most heinous of defendants “didn’t kill anybody till the jury convicts them.”

“Fifty percent of the people hate what I do, and the other 50 percent respect the fact that I defend the Constitution,” he said. “But even that first group, I’m the first person they call when their loved one gets into trouble.”

Mr. Gallucci lives in Marlboro Township, N.J., with his wife and three teenage children.

Originally from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, he moved with his family to Staten Island when he was 4. He went to Monsignor Farrell High School there and attended the State University of New York at Brockport, where he played second base on the baseball team and took Staten Island Italian cooking to his upstate dormitory, preparing his mother’s lasagna and baked ziti dishes for dorm-mates.

After attending Vermont Law School and working as a prosecutor for the Staten Island district attorney, he practiced civil litigation and then criminal law, and joined a pair of high school pals to form Helbock, Nappa & Gallucci, whose office is on what else but Victory Boulevard.

His love of the gourmet and pampered life helped land him and a law associate, Lou Gelormino, a reality show, “Partners in Crime,” for the USA Network in 2014.

Mr. Gallucci gets regular manicures and pedicures. He is proud of his legal record and his cooking, noting that his meatballs finished second only to those of Big Ang, another Staten Island fixture, in a charity meatball challenge.

He was once so obsessed with finding out where his father, John, bought his lauded cannolis that he had his private investigator tail his dad on a pastry run.

Not every legal defense happens in court, he said, recounting the time in 2014 that he helped a client who had been partying with a group at the Hilton Garden Inn. A woman in the group wobbled away wearing the red ruby replica slippers from the “Wizard of Oz” on display in the lobby. Mr. Gallucci brokered their prompt return with no arrest.

Mr. Gallucci also represented Michael Mastromarino, a New Jersey dentist who masterminded the harvesting of body parts from more than 1,000 corpses in the early 2000s, including the body of Alistair Cooke, the British journalist and former host of “Masterpiece Theater.”

Mr. Mastromarino pleaded guilty in 2008, after which Mr. Gallucci allowed that his client “decided to cut corners” after starting the practice legally.

Mr. Mastromarino wound up dying of bone cancer, which Mr. Gallucci noted as irony. Before that, Mr. Gallucci would visit him upstate in prison and would take Italian food to correction officers to help ease access to his client.

“I’d bring Italian heroes, capicola, prosciutto,” he said. “They don’t get that stuff upstate.”