Appellate court suspends Thomas Liotti's law license for 6 months

A retired Westbury town judge and lawyer for the wife of former Sen. Alfonse D’Amato had his law license suspended for six months on Wednesday, by order of an appellate court, after he accused a judge of being politically motivated when he kicked him off the matrimonial case.

Thomas Liotti, 76, will not be able to practice for half a year for his denunciation of Nassau Family Court Judge Joseph Lorintz, Stephen Gassman, the lawyer for D’Amato, and Mark Green, who represented the couple’s two children.

In handing down tits six-month suspension, the appellate court considered Liotti’s 30-year history as a village justice in Westbury, but also his significant disciplinary history.

He’s been hit with one letter of censure, three letters of caution, four admonitions from state court and a federal warning from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Liotti, who closed his practice last year due to health reasons, said that he sticks by his statements and called the decision “chilling.”

“As a defense attorney for 46 years, I am a zealous advocate for my clients and use whatever means possible and permitted to obtain justice for them,” he said in a statement on Saturday. “This punishment by the Grievance Committee sets an unfortunate precedent for defense attorneys and has a chilling effect on advocacy, honesty, and freedom of speech.”

The suspension stems from the acrimonious 2017 split of the ex-senator from his wife, Katuria D’Amato, and the subsequent custody battle over their son and daughter, who were 10 and 12, respectively, at the time.

Liotti was accused of chauffeuring the estranged wife and the children from the family’s Lido Beach home to the house of a friend in Plainview, because he said that the former senator hatched a plot to have his wife arrested on false charges.

Lorintz found no evidence of a plot by D’Amato and said that by driving the kids outside the company of their lawyer he had “risked influencing the children to think favorably of him and the defendant and unfavorably of the plaintiff” and had “acted against the best interests of the children.”

The judge ruled that Liotti could no longer represent Katuria D’Amato in the case.

Liotti slammed the decision as “muddled by layers upon layers of corruption, influence peddling, legal bribery, perjury and subornation of it.”

He said the disqualification hearing was a “travesty of justice” and a “tiddlywinks of a disqualification hearing.”

Liotti criticized Green and Gassman for “looking to curry the favor of the court” and accused them of donating money to the judge’s election campaign.

He called them “neophytes” who “would like nothing better than to have me disqualified from this case because in that way they can continue their charade of justice.”

Liotti also accused Lorintz of “striving to prove his machismo” by disqualifying him from the case.

For his tirade against the court and the two other lawyers in the case, he was charged with undignified or discourteous conduct in appearing before a tribunal, conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice and conduct that reflects adversely on his fitness as a lawyer.

During a hearing on the charges, Liotti admitted making those statements but denied that they were made in bad faith because he still believes them. He reiterated that he still believes the judge and the other lawyers are “inexperienced and incompetent,” according to court records.

He did admit that his words were “strong” and that he “would be more restrained today.”

Liotti has made news several times over the years. He self-published a memoir in 2012 recounting his father’s late-in-life revelation that the lawyer was adopted and his subsequent search for his birthparents.

Again in 2017, Liotti made the papers again when he charged a former client with the theft of a pet South American tree frog from his law office and gave it to another lawyer. Not wanting the frog, the new lawyer set the fragile warm-weather amphibian free in a local creek.

He did not respond Friday to calls requesting comment.

Green and Gassman declined to comment.

His suspension runs from April 12 to Sept. 12.

This story was updated Saturday after initial publication with a statement from Thomas Liotti and the fact that he had closed his practice last year due to health reasons.

CORRECTION: The appellate court suspended Thomas Liotti's law license. A paragraph in an earlier version of the online story misstated the venue.