James Mulvaney James Mulvaney

Prominent lawyer and longtime Garden City resident James Mulvaney, 79, died Saturday in Sacramento, CA.

He was born and raised in Queens, graduated from Xavier High School in Manhattan and St. Peter’s College in Jersey City. He was managing editor of the Cornell Law Review and received a doctorate in law from Georgetown University School of Law.

He was a longtime resident of Locust Street (Garden City) and a member of the Cherry Valley Club. For three decades between the 1970s and the turn of the century, he produced revue-like shows at Cherry Valley where members would show off their singing and dancing skills and gently barb their fellow members with Broadway show tunes Mulvaney had rewritten to embellish personal peccadilloes.

He and his wife, Eileen O’Keefe Mulvaney, Ed.D., held their wedding reception at her parents home on Hampton Road in 1953. He practiced law with his brother-in-law, Vincent McInerney, formerly of Nassau Boulevard.

He was a prominent New York attorney whose criminal trials were covered on the front page of metropolitan newspapers over the course of several decades. Although many of his trials produced stories in the New York Times his most infamous case resulted in the immortal New York Post headline: “Headless Body in Topless Bar.” Mulvaney’s client, a licensed mortician, had been captured and forced at gunpoint to remove the head of a murder victim. Charges against the woman were eventually dismissed.

He had a fondness for gin and straw boater hats, and cut an imposing figure along t he links at Cherry Valley or the byways of Queens with the fellow characters of the later-day Runyonesque troupe made famous by Jimmy Breslin: Marvin the Torch, Fat Thomas, Shelly the Bondsman and a chorus of flamboyant pre-Knapp commission cops who didn’t regard crime fighting as an impediment to profit. His alter-ego appeared as a shady globe trotting criminal defense lawyer in Exclusive, a novel published by Bantam Dell and written by his daughter in law Barbara Fischkin.

Both of his sons are graduates of Garden City High School. James Jr. is

Deputy Commissioner for External Relations at the New York State Division of Human Rights. Patrick, a prominent chef and caterer, owns Mulvaney’s B&L Restaurant in Sacramento, CA. Other survivors include daughters in law, Barbara Fischkin of Long Beach, and Bobbin Cherrington Mulvaney of Sacramento as well as three grandchildren.

Beyond the booming voice and perpetual red face Mulvaney was a gentle man who was a founding members of GASAK, a local group for grandparents of children with autism (his grandson, Daniel, has profound autism). He joined with is wife, a special education teacher and Adelphi University faculty member who died in 2005, as fearless advocates for changes in programs for the disabled. He was also a “hockey grandpa” to Jack Mulvaney, touring the northeast for nearly a decade visiting rinks with a variety of Long Island teams. He said the highlight of his hockey duties was to see Jack skate as captain of the Nassau County High School All-Star “Lighthouse” team at the Coliseum in 2008.

A memorial service will be held in Rockaway Beach in April. Interment will be in Jamaica Bay.