Lawyer Guilty of Sending Impostor for DNA Test : Courts: The conviction could mean an end to his legal career and a four-year prison term.

A prominent attorney and onetime congressional candidate was convicted Friday of sending an impostor to take a blood test in his place so he could defend himself in a paternity suit.

A Superior Court jury found William Yacobozzi Jr., 50, guilty of five counts of perjury and one count each of falsifying evidence and conspiring to obstruct justice. Because they are felonies, the convictions could bring an end to his 15-year legal career and send him to state prison for as long as four years.

“I’ve lost everything,” Yacobozzi said outside the courtroom. “I stood by my principle and I was right. The jury saw it another way, and it cost me a lot.”

The members of the eight-man, four-woman panel said afterward that they sorted through the evidence by acting out scenes from the trial testimony. During almost four days of deliberations, they reconstructed for themselves what happened on March 5, 1990, the day prosecutors say Yacobozzi sent a still-unidentified man to take a DNA test in his place.

“We walked through what happened that day . . . and made up two scenarios” as presented by the defense and the prosecution, jury foreman Bart Blakesley said. “We could not find the evidence to support (Yacobozzi). . . .

“It took us several hours to reach that point, but we do not believe he presented himself” at a Long Beach testing laboratory.

Yacobozzi said he intends to “take the next couple of days to think about” whether he will file an appeal. He said the case has already caused him to lose about 75% of his law practice and forced him to sell his $2-million Big Canyon home to pay legal fees.

“It’s been a long process,” the lawyer said, “and I just want to have some time to myself.”

Yacobozzi, a Newport Beach resident who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in the 1988 Republican primary, is scheduled to be sentenced on March 6 by Superior Court Judge Ragnar R. Engebretsen.

He also faces the suspension of his license to practice law, pending a disciplinary review by the State Bar of California, according to legal experts.

Yacobozzi can appeal his conviction to the State Bar court and later to the state Supreme Court, but a felony conviction is tantamount to a loss of license to practice in California.

Yacobozzi’s criminal charges stem from a messy paternity suit filed against him in 1988 by Coleen Walters of Huntington Beach. In that suit, which was settled last February, Walters claimed Yacobozzi fathered her son, now 6.

During civil trial in that case, Yacobozzi was ordered to take a blood test at the Parentage Testing Center at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center. That test found that there was a 99.3% chance that Yacobozzi was the boy’s father.

Yacobozzi testified, however, that he never had a sexual relationship with Walters and therefore could not have fathered her child. He asked for and was granted a chance to take a DNA test that would precisely determine parentage. He eventually submitted results from a March 5, 1990, test that purported to prove he could not have fathered the child.

When Walters’ attorney, Jeri R. McKeand, saw the test results she began to suspect that the man who had presented Yacobozzi’s driver’s license and been fingerprinted and photographed by hospital officials appeared to be someone else.

The photograph shows a man similar in appearance to Yacobozzi although heavier, wearing a suit and tie, with gray hair that was cropped short, and the same style of eyeglasses.

McKeand then filed a complaint with the district attorney, leading to the charges behind Friday’s verdict.

Throughout his criminal trial, Yacobozzi and his attorney, Grover Porter, insisted that the lawyer took the DNA test and that either the hospital employees were careless in their handling of the file, or else, someone--presumably Walters and her lawyer--set him up by switching his file with that of the impostor.

He also claimed that prosecutors targeted him because of his prior successes in defending cases against prosecutors.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Wallace J. Wade dismissed the accusation as “an additional lie in a long list of lies.”

“According to Mr. Yacobozzi, everybody is out to get him,” Wade said in an interview before the verdict. “The people at the lab, the court, Ms. Walters, us. . . . He’s the only one who’s not out to get” himself.

Wade said he receives no personal gratification in successfully prosecuting another attorney.

However, what Yacobozzi did “undermines the system,” Wade said Friday. “Hearing bad things about an individual attorney can create an impression with the public that all attorneys are rotten scoundrels.”

Even with the jury verdict, at least one thorny issue remains: Who and where is the man who took Yacobozzi’s place at the testing center?

“I wish I knew who he was and where he was,” Wade said, shaking his head. “We have a lead or two . . . (and) one of these days, we’re going to find him and we’re going to prosecute him.”