Brooklyn-born attorney Thomas P. Puccio (left) died on Monday at the age of 67 from the effects of leukemia. Puccio, a former prosecutor and defense attorney who represented notorious clients, was perhaps most known for winning the acquittal of European aristocrat Claus von Bulow (right), charged in the early 1980s with trying to kill his wife and poisoning her into a coma. Puccio attended the now-defunct Brooklyn Preparatory School in Park Slope, and graduated from Fordham Law School in 1969, becoming an assistant U.S. attorney in Brooklyn. After over a decade as a prosecutor, Puccio went into private practice in 1982.
Puccio also made headlines in 1995, when he and his 16-year-old son whom he was teaching to drive plunged into a Connecticut yacht basin in their Mercedes-Benz; Puccio survived, but his son Matthew got trapped behind the steering wheel and drowned. Matthew Puccio lived in Brooklyn Heights with Puccio’s first wife, former Brooklyn Law School associate dean Carol Ziegler. Thomas Puccio had remarried to Kathryn Thayer in 1992, and the couple lived in Weston, Conn. She is his only immediate survivor.
—Ryan Thompson
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
