Joseph Tacopina founded the Law Offices of Joseph Tacopina, P.C. in 1994. He got hired by the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office, having found his way into the legal profession after his mother, Josephine, a retired FDNY accounting clerk, set him up through a friend's relative with a job transcribing tapes for the first John Gotti trial. The work scared his father, Cosmo, an immigrant box salesman, because mobsters had put the squeeze on his family's deli.