Left-Wing Lawyer Carves Niche as Radio Radical

Ron Kuby knows about death threats.

When you’re a radical lawyer spewing incendiary sound bites, when you represent cop shooters and drug-dealing gangstas, when your mentor was eternal leftist William Kunstler--hey, the postman knocks often. And then runs away, quickly.

But this latest threat--the one delivered by Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, Mafia killer of 19--blindsided the ponytailed lawyer. Kuby, representing the families of 12 Gravano victims, had sued for a piece of the underboss’s take from a best-selling book.

Gravano, unwilling to share, wanted to whack Kuby.

“Most of the threats are crackpots--guys at pay phones, messages on the answering machine,” Kuby says. “This guy is a killing machine.”

The threat was uncovered by the FBI, but word first filtered to Kuby through an Arizona reporter. Kuby, labeled a national security risk in 1996 over his legal work, was not surprised.

“My friends in the federal government,” he says with a smirk, “never took the time to call.”

It’s vintage Kuby, his sense of humor intact in the face of a mob killer. At 43, his politics and personal style still smack more of a late night at the Fillmore East than a morning in front of the bench.

He’s a former tugboat hand and grill cook, the spiritual successor to the late Kunstler, a Bolshevik employed as a talk radio host by the capitalists at Disney--sort of the eighth dwarf, Commie.

“People say, ‘How can you be a communist and yet be a bought and paid-for shill of the Disney Corporation?’ ” Kuby says, referring to the owners of WABC-AM. “They have a point. I don’t presuppose to resolve the contradictions; I just don’t try to hide them.”

Kuby, fresh from his morning drive-time program opposite Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, appears quite unlawyerly in greeting a guest to his Manhattan office: collarless flannel shirt, faded jeans, graying hair flowing down his back.

Life--death threats excepted--is terrific, Kuby says.

“Most of my business is the same business I’ve always had: the dispossessed, the dissidents, the spit-on, the crazies, the damaged,” Kuby says. “That’s my clientele.”

Other things have changed.

Kuby moved to his Broadway office after a 1996 falling-out with Kunstler’s widow, who lived above his old digs. His hopes of carrying on beneath the banner of Kunstler & Kuby, as Kunstler himself wanted, were crushed in a court fight.

The office walls are lined with mementos of his legal career: a signed photograph from Kunstler; a framed picture (and summons) from Kuby’s arrest at a protest over the police shooting of Amadou Diallo; a courtroom artist’s rendition of Kuby in action. There’s other artwork too--drawings by his daughter, Emma, cover a cabinet.

The biggest change is Kuby’s lucrative new radio career on 50,000-watt WABC, which provides the freedom to take cases on merit rather than for profit.

A photographer suing the city to stage nude outdoor photos? Kuby won the case, which reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

Twenty-six Lower East Side residents fighting the city over their community garden? Kuby’s in.

May Day protesters busted under an arcane 1845 law for wearing masks? These are his people.

“I finally have the practice that Bill and I always dreamed of having: a practice that doesn’t rely on fees to do legal work,” Kuby says.

It’s courtesy of Kuby’s unlikely radio career, launched in 1996. He and Sliwa shifted into morning drive time this May and immediately improved ratings. The weekday show features Kuby on the left and Sliwa on the right, debating anything from the mayor’s mobbed-up dad to a baseball subway series.

A recent discussion of gays in the Boy Scouts featured Sliwa inviting a conservative politician aboard, introducing him as “the soul of Queens.”

The guest bragged about his five grandchildren before Kuby interrupted.

“That’s great,” he said brightly. “If you have enough children and grandchildren, the chances are one of them should be gay.”

Kuby has won admirers for his work both in and out of court, including ex-Mayor Edward Koch and New York Civil Liberties Union head Norman Siegel.

“He is a real New York character,” says Siegel, who first met Kuby after a 1988 riot in Tompkins Square Park. “His ability to present the liberal position with strength and wit is a huge plus for the civil liberties movement.”

In court, “Ron is very quick on his feet,” Siegel continues. “He’s a champion of the underdog, of controversial people and issues.”

The courtroom has long been Kuby’s milieu, but the studio was a new challenge. Kuby, already as fluent in Arbitron numbers as with case law, settled right in.

“Disney pays me a prodigious amount of money for doing what people usually tell me to stop doing --talking,” Kuby says. “My whole life, people have been telling me, ‘Just shut up!’ ”

Kuby never listened. He was nearly expelled from junior high school for publishing an underground newspaper. Administrators at Kansas University once branded him condescending and arrogant.

The insults inspired Kuby to enroll at the Cornell University law school, where he graduated third in his class. He joined Kunstler in 1982--”my partner and alter ego,” Kunstler called him in his autobiography.

They became Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with yellow legal pads, representing clients from Malcolm X’s daughter to Marlon Brando’s son to Gambino family godfather John Gotti.

No client seemed too extreme: There were also Arab terrorists and Long Island Rail Road killer Colin Ferguson.

Kuby proved as comfortable before a camera as his mentor was. Kunstler’s 1995 death ended their run and left Kuby scrambling.

The pair’s inattention to finance left the firm deeply in debt ($150,000, by Kuby’s estimation). An ugly spat with Kunstler’s widow, Margaret Ratner, followed; the resulting court fight ended with rejection of Kuby’s bid to continue as Kunstler & Kuby and Ratner’s winning control of the firm’s files.

Kuby and Ratner still don’t speak.

Kuby bounced back with his April 1996 civil suit victory against Bernhard Goetz, winning a mostly symbolic $43-million judgment for a paralyzed victim of the subway gunman. (Goetz couldn’t pay, and Kuby never expected to collect much.)

Kuby’s surgical questioning of an unrepentant Goetz exposed the gunman’s chilling attitude toward the December 1984 shootings, helping turn the case.

“You made the decision to kill when you saw Troy Canty’s shining eyes?” Kuby asked pointedly.

“And his smile,” came Goetz’s damning reply.

Kuby’s work on more profitable cases soon returned the firm to solvency. After his courtroom success, the radio offered Kuby an opportunity to reinvent his public persona.

The left-wing lawyer soon became more interested in speaking with the right than spitting at it: “We on the left have spent years talking to ourselves, to no discernible effect.”

Surprisingly, Kuby found the station’s conservative audience was listening.

Rather than a left-wing nut job, Kuby says with a laugh, listeners now view him as “Uncle Ron--the unreconstructed Bolshevik at the table, a valued but quirky member of our family.”

Not everyone agrees.

The Jewish Defense Organization has blasted Kuby as “a bootlicking traitor” for representing some of the World Trade Center bombers. The NYPD was outraged by his successful defense last year of a cop shooter and by his repeated condemnations of the four police officers--later acquitted--in the Diallo shooting.

“I question the claim that he’s a civil libertarian,” says Pat Lynch, head of the city Patrolmen’s Benevolent Assn. “In every incident, he prejudges New York City cops. Aren’t they entitled to the same civil rights as the people he defends?”

Kuby shrugs off such rips. And he insists his radio career won’t interfere with his caseload. The legal work remains a passion.

“It’s great fun,” says Kuby, a true believer still. “You have to make sure the work that you’re doing genuinely brings joy to your life. You have to like waking up in the morning and getting to work.

“And if you don’t like that,” he concludes, “you’re dead.”

Despite Sammy Gravano, Ron Kuby lives.