Don't mention retirement around this 97-year-old Bergen County lawyer

In what could be his 100th murder trial, Frank Lucianna stepped before the jury.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, poised to give a rousing opening statement.

Instead, the 97-year-old attorney paused, turned around and walked back toward his briefcase. “I better get my glasses.”

Adrienne Smith, the woman Lucianna is defending, stands accused of killing her husband and using her skills as a surgical technologist to dismember his body.

The details of the case will be disturbing, Lucianna cautioned the jury. Then, with flailing arms and in a voice close to tears, he asked the 12 members of the panel a question they will ultimately have to answer.

“Did she murder her husband?” Lucianna shouted three times for effect. “I’m getting all excited about it.”

Most attorneys would have conceded to hanging up the suit decades ago. Not Lucianna. He prefers to don a sharp pinstripe ensemble and pocket square and go to work, making his way down the Bergen County courthouse halls.

His 69 years as a criminal defense lawyer have elevated him to legendary status as the court’s unofficial mayor and resident nonagenarian.

“How are you, young man?” or “young lady” is how Lucianna addresses everyone from hard-nosed litigators to judicial interns. At his age, that greeting could apply to almost anyone. And those who don’t know him ought to. He’s the oldest active trial attorney in North Jersey, most likely in the state, and he has no plans of quitting any time soon.

“I love seeing the judges. I love the cases. Why would I want to leave?” Lucianna said.

Colleagues speak about him with a near saint-worthy reverence. “Statesman,” “craftsman” and “an institution” are words on the lips of fellow defense attorneys, many of whom he has mentored in one fashion or another.

Add veteran prosecutors to the list as well.

“I only hope I could be doing what he’s doing at his age," John L. Molinelli, the Bergen County prosecutor from 2002 to 2016, said of Lucianna.

Molinelli was a recent law graduate in the 1980s when, unsolicited, he knocked on Lucianna's door with a résumé in his back pocket.

“He didn’t hire me, but he took about 40 minutes out of his day to congratulate me on being a lawyer, to tell me it was the greatest profession and to wish me well,” Molinelli said. “I can’t tell you how profound that was to me.”

More than a half-century in practice has allowed Lucianna to call all walks of life his clients. Among them: an 11-year-old murderer, women who killed their husbands and vice versa, lawyers, police officers, drunks and, of course, politicians. What’s consistent across Lucianna’s cases, big and small, is the one thing he is best known for: a penchant for dramatic flair.

It’s a craft he’s cultivated his entire life, one he could easily attribute to his Italian upbringing, but was mostly born out of watching skilled attorneys early in his career.

“I’ve always been truthful and honest in expressing my emotions,” Lucianna said. “Maybe I’m different than a lot of lawyers, but that’s the way it always was.”

The Englewood Cliffs resident was raised in neighboring Englewood, the son of Italian immigrants. He captained the track team at Dwight Morrow High School and temporarily postponed college at Fordham University to volunteer in World War II as an infantryman. Later, he joined the Army Air Corps as a flight engineer on a B-29 that flew missions over Europe and North Africa.

After an unsuccessful bid to make the U.S. Olympic team as a distance runner, a friend suggested they enroll in law school to extend their collegiate running careers. Lucianna agreed and graduated from Fordham Law School in 1951 on the GI Bill.

The job market, however, was cooler than they expected upon graduation. To get a foot in the door, Lucianna sought out towns that lacked a public defender at the time and had a surplus of people — mostly African Americans — without representation, such as Teaneck, Englewood and Hackensack.

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“I took every case I could find,” Lucianna said.

The experience put him “through the mill,” but out of the grind emerged an attorney accustomed to taking risks to ensure that his clients, many of whom were underprivileged, got a fair shake.

“I had an imagination that I felt I should portray to a jury in order to help out my clients,” Lucianna said.

That imagination has lent itself to some savvy maneuvers over the years. During a trial in the 1970s, Lucianna objected when a prosecutor wore a green suit on St. Patrick’s Day — to endear herself to the jury, he argued. Lucianna was overruled but returned from lunch with a clover pinned to his lapel.

Perhaps his most noteworthy case is his 1981 defense of Dorothy Barnes Rapp, a Fair Lawn woman who shot and killed her husband in self-defense after enduring 30 years of abuse. It marked the first time in state history that a woman was found not guilty of murder through the "battered-woman" defense.

During his closing statement, Lucianna deployed a favorite tactic, getting down on his knees and begging the jury for an acquittal. It worked.

“Some lawyers think that I’m a big phony, but I’m always honest,” he said.

Rapp's case set legal precedent in New Jersey. Lucianna hasn't always been so successful, but his cases have rarely been boring.

In the 1950s, an 11-year-old boy from Bergen County who killed his grandmother with a rifle, allegedly because she refused to give him a glass of water, provoked outrage throughout the county. Lucianna took the case, but it remained in juvenile court. The boy was charged with manslaughter, was found delinquent and was incarcerated for four years.

The Record dubbed Lucianna "Bergen's Busiest Criminal Lawyer" nearly 50 years ago. At the time, he handled about 50 cases at once and averaged one or two murder trials a year. Judges, he said, would keep a separate calendar just for his clients.

Nowadays he shares the load with Frank Carbonetti, his partner and co-counsel on the Smith trial. Also on hand are Lucianna’s two daughters, Diane and Nancy, who are attorneys in their own right at his office on Main Street in Hackensack, a stone’s throw from the courthouse.

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“He still doesn’t take a day off, and he won’t leave early on Friday,” Diane Lucianna said.

Lucianna still keeps 10 or so cases on his plate. At the moment, the Smith trial is his most pressing.

Smith and her brother, Orville Cousins, have been jailed since January 2017, when police discovered her husband's body parts, mixed with concrete and stuffed into six containers, at a friend's house in Burlington. Authorities said Smith killed her husband, Randolph, at his Bergenfield apartment in December 2016 and then recruited Cousins to help dismember and dispose of the corpse.

The trial hit a snag during jury selection in January, after Lucianna publicly berated Cousins’ attorney in court for “not knowing what he was doing.” The outburst forced a judge to excuse six potential jurors who witnessed the confrontation. Prosecutors moved to dismiss Lucianna from the case, raising doubts about his mental fitness. The judge, however, allowed him to stay, provided he handle only opening arguments and a couple of the witnesses.

“My mind is clear. I just have a little trouble hearing,” Lucianna insists.

The seasoned attorney’s trademark style can sometimes get him in trouble. He once talked so much that a judge threw him in jail for 15 minutes to cool off.

But, he’s proud to note, “I’ve never been held in contempt in my career.”

The American Bar Association doesn’t keep data on the ages of its 1.3 million members, much less the oldest nationwide. Neither does the state bar or Bergen County Bar Association. But you’ll get no argument about Lucianna's seniority from Frank O'Marra Jr., the county bar association's executive director.

"By all accounts he’s the oldest in the area,” O’Marra said.

That title was formerly held by Albert Burstein, the former state assemblyman and partner at the Archer law firm in Hackensack. Burstein, however, was semi-retired in real estate law when he died in December 2018 at age 96.

The word "retirement" is taboo around Lucianna and his family. Any mention is met with an emphatic "no" from him and eye rolls from his children. The time to retire was 25 years ago, Lucianna said.

Ideally, he would prefer to die in practice. For him, it’s better than the alternative: “Retire to what?” he asked.

“I see some of these retirees and they drive their wives crazy,” he said.

Tom Nobile covers Superior Court in Bergen County for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to the most important news from criminal trials to local lawsuits and insightful analysis, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: nobile@northjersey.com Twitter: @tomnobile