Bruce Cutler, a combative New York criminal defense lawyer who won acquittals three times for the mob boss John J. Gotti, and whose intimidating cross-examinations of witnesses became known as a “Brucification,” died in Brooklyn on Oct. 6. He was 77.

Bald, stout and barrel-chested — The New Yorker once said he resembled Telly Savalas crossed with Jesse Ventura — Mr. Cutler embraced a pit bull approach to jurisprudence. “It’s my whole life,” he said in an interview with New York Magazine in 2005. “It’s Brooklyn, it’s policemen, it’s reputed gangsters, it’s government witnesses, it’s federal prosecutors, it’s Brooklyn D.A. people, it’s detectives, it’s the F.B.I., it’s the D.E.A. Everything.”