Bruce Cutler

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Bruce Cutler is a criminal defense lawyer based in New York City who gained notoriety in the 1980s for defending reputed mobster John Gotti. Cutler won three acquittals for Gotti, centering his legal strategy on the Lifestyle Defense to combat the RICO charges against his client. Cutler's signature courtroom technique was his vigorous cross-examination of prosecution witnesses, who agreed to testify against Gotti only in exchange for lighter sentences. These cross-examinations, nicknamed "Brucification", exposed selfish, illegal, psychopathic and downright bizarre behavior in the prosecution witnesses which undermined their credibility to the jury. It should be noted that at least one of the jurors, George Pape, in a Gotti trial accepted a bribe in order to find Gotti not guilty.

When Gotti was indicted in 1990 for the murder of Paul Castellano, the court disqualified Cutler from representing Gotti, based on the prosecution's allegations that Cutler was "in house counsel" to the Gambino crime family. It was used by Law and Order in the season 5 episode House Counsel with Ron Liebman playing the lawyer inspired by CutlerThe Goodfather</ref>, ^[1], ^[2]

Cutler graduated from Hamilton College where he was captain of the football and lacrosse teams. He then obtained his law degree and graduated cum laude from Brooklyn Law School. Cutler then worked as an Assistant District Attorney in Kings County (Brooklyn), New York where he ultimately became the top homicide prosecutor in the office. Cutler's father, Murray Cutler, was a former NYPD Detective who later worked and became a well known criminal defense attorney in New York for 47 years until his death in 1994. When Cutler was a child, he spent many summers at Camp Ma-Ho-Ge.

Cutler appeared in the Robert DeNiro and Ed Burns thriller, "15 Minutes," where he played a defense attorney named Bruce Cutler. He also had his own interview TV show on the Court TV network entitled "Cutler and Hayes" in which he and attorney Ed Hayes discussed criminal cases and current events. Cutler's autobiography, entitled "Closing Argument," was published in 2003.

Currently, he is serving as the defense attorney for music producer Phil Spector. ^[3]