The husband-wife legal team working on two of today’s biggest criminal cases

By Eric Levenson, CNN

(CNN) — The rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs and the suspected health care CEO assassin Luigi Mangione have decided on a similar defense strategy: Hire an Agnifilo. Or two.

Marc Agnifilo is heading Combs’ defense against racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking charges, while Karen Friedman Agnifilo is leading Mangione’s murder defense, with Marc in a support role.

For much of the past few decades, the legal power couple often found themselves on opposite sides of such complex cases – she for the prosecution, and he for the defense. Now, they find themselves representing two of the most high-profile cases in the country today.

From 2014 to 2021, Karen was the second-in-command in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which brought notable cases against defendants including Harvey Weinstein and Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization. She left the department in 2021 and has since moved into media, with a stint as a CNN legal analyst and contributor.

Marc, meanwhile, has represented many of the targets of those DA investigations, including “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, Nxivm founder Keith Raniere and former Goldman Sachs banker Roger Ng. He worked for the law firm Brafman & Associates from 2006 until earlier this year, when he split off to co-found the firm Agnifilo Intrater.

Parents to three adult children, the law is what brought them together. The two met at the Manhattan DA’s office in 1992 while working on a case in which two bagel store deliverymen got into an argument, and one cut off the other’s arm with a machete, according to The New York Times.

Their intersecting careers have at times led to legal conflicts of interest. In 2011, Karen had to recuse herself from the Manhattan DA’s case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn when the former head of the International Monetary Fund hired the law firm where Marc worked.

“It’s never been awkward,” Marc told The New York Times in 2011. “We’re pretty regimented about it. If she’s recused from a case, we really don’t talk about it.”

The Agnifilos declined a CNN request for an interview.

But that was then, and now, the Agnifilos have joined forces. Monday, when Mangione appeared in a New York courthouse for his arraignment, Karen was positioned to his left, and Marc sat on his right.

Karen spoke to the court and criticized what she called the NYPD’s over-the-top “perp walk” of her client, drawing on her years of service for perspective.

“He was on display for everyone to see in the biggest staged perp walk I’ve ever seen in my career,” she said.

From public service to defense

Karen Friedman Agnifilo has decades of experience in the legal field, primarily in the Manhattan DA’s Office. She most recently served as the chief assistant district attorney under then-District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. until 2021.

Her professional bio notes her “critical leadership role in prosecuting high-profile violent crime cases, including complex cases involving a mental health component.” She managed a team of 1,500 people with a $120 million budget and “was also integral to creating the office’s Human Trafficking Unit, Hate Crimes Unit, Antiquities Trafficking Unit, Terrorism Unit, its Cybercrimes and Identity Theft Bureau, as well as working on the creation of Manhattan’s first Mental Health Court,” according to her bio.

She left public service in 2021 – complete with a bagpipe sendoff from the NYPD and DA’s office – and moved to private practice.

In an interview with the “Shut Up Mommy’s Talking” podcast in 2022, Karen said moving into defense work was an adjustment. She cited her husband’s experience in deciding whom to take on as a client.

“My husband’s also a criminal defense attorney and he’s had some clients who just aren’t nice to him. And I don’t mean, like just not a little bit nice, I mean like abusive,” she said. “And I don’t want that at this stage in my life.”

“There’s no crime necessarily that I wouldn’t take or even set of factors that I wouldn’t take,” she added. “I do believe that everyone’s entitled to a defense and to good representation, and I’ve always believed that.”

Karen said she has also been influenced by her children. Her twin daughters took an interest in politics and the Black Lives Matter movement during the Covid-19 pandemic, changing her thinking on the topic. “I have to credit them with opening my eyes to these issues,” she said.

Her third child has autism, she told the podcast, and she had frustrating experiences trying to get them help. She then used her experiences as a “special needs mom” to implement systems in the DA’s office to help those with less money or opportunity, she said.

“That became sort of my mission at the DA’s office. It was very much into alternatives to incarceration, I pushed that very hard,” she said.

In recent years, Karen has moved into the media. She has served as the legal adviser to the long-running show “Law & Order,” worked as a CNN legal analyst and opines on legal issues as the podcast host of “Legal AF” and “MissTrial” on the MeidasTouch Network.

Her vocal media presence may offer a preview of her defense strategy. Earlier this month on CNN, before taking on Mangione as a client, she offered her thoughts on how the case could proceed.

“It looks to me like there might be a not guilty by reason of insanity defense that they’re going to be thinking about because the evidence is going to be so overwhelming that he did what he did,” she said on December 10.

“As a former prosecutor in that office, I would be concerned that you have someone who is a valedictorian of his class, he was brilliant his whole life, he comes from this great family. I mean, something changed, significantly, something changed. And they’re going to potentially have a not guilty by reason of insanity potential defense, so the prosecutors are going to try to shore that up as well in their investigation.”

Marc has repped Shkreli, Diddy

Marc Agnifilo similarly began his career in prosecutors’ offices and has since made a mark defending high-profile defendants in complex cases on the state, federal and international levels.

A graduate of Connecticut College and Brooklyn Law School, he worked at the US Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey and as a Manhattan assistant district attorney before turning to criminal defense, his website states.

He has defended some of the most publicly reviled defendants of the past decade in Shkreli and Raniere, both of whom were convicted at trial.

“You may find him repulsive, disgusting and offensive. We don’t convict people in this country for being repulsive or offensive,” he argued in Raniere’s trial on charges of racketeering and sex trafficking. “Unpopular ideas aren’t criminal. Disgusting ideas aren’t criminal.”

In recent months, Marc took on Combs’ case and has repeatedly asked the court to release the rapper on bond before trial.

Other cases, many of which are listed on his website, have been resolved without charges or with short sentences.

He told Law.com earlier this year his new law firm will focus on complex criminal litigation with an eye toward trying cases.

“I have found that people come to me when they have something to say against the government’s allegations,” Marc said. “Very often that means they want to go to trial. So we all plan to do what we’ve always done: to try a bunch of cases. That’s our supreme value.”

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