When the plain pine casket carrying the body of Ousmane Zongo finally reached its unmarked grave in Burkina Faso, there were hundreds of men and women gathered in a large field for the funeral service, saying their prayers of mourning and wearing traditional African sandals, robes, and dresses.

Among them, however, was one guest who appeared unlike all the others.

Sanford Rubenstein was wearing a white designer suit with double breasts, gold cuff links the size of sea shells, a pair of chic, black, Libeskind-like eyeglasses, and his gray curly hair was slicked back tight with styling gel.

Mr. Rubenstein is one of New York’s most high-profile, if not arguably its most aggressive and publicity-conscious, personal injury attorneys, and he is not afraid of making bold statements. In fact, they are his specialty.

After helping to secure perhaps the largest civil settlement for police brutality against the city and the police officer’s union for Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant sodomized and nearly beaten to death inside a Brooklyn precinct house in 1997, Mr.Rubenstein, 60, has turned himself into a virtual courthouse and nightly news fixture. He represents a lengthy list of victims, from the World Trade Center attacks to the Staten Island ferry crash to a 61-year-old man who dropped dead after getting a parking ticket.

“I don’t wish tragedy on anyone,” Mr. Rubenstein said in a recent interview, “but if there’s a tragedy in New York, chances are my phone will ring.”

Two summers ago, one of those phone calls came from members of Zongo’s family, which, with Mr. Rubenstein’s assistance, is seeking $150 million in civil damages from the city for wrongful death. In May of 2003, Zongo, an unarmed craftsman from Burkina Faso, a petite, landlocked nation in West Africa where 45% of the population live below the poverty line and the average life expectancy for men at birth is 43, was shot four times by an undercover police officer in a Chelsea warehouse during a raid for bootleg DVDs.

The police officer, Brian Conroy, 26, is charged with manslaughter for a shooting that Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau has called unjustified and negligent. An attorney for Mr. Conroy, Stuart London, said the police officer only fired after Zongo, who was 43 when he died, attempted to wrestle his gun away.

While opening arguments in Mr. Conroy’s trial began Monday morning in Manhattan criminal court, the trial for Mr. Rubenstein began a long time ago: a week after the shots were first fired, to be exact, he said, when he was first retained.

Including an early morning press conference before court on Monday, Mr. Rubenstein estimates that has held about 20 press conferences or press availabilities with Zongo’s widow and members of Zongo’s family, who have made three trips to New York from their home in Zogbega Yako, a village of 3,000, and the Reverend Al Sharpton, who Mr. Rubenstein has served for the last four years as a personal, pro bono legal consigliere and who referred him the Zongo case, among other clients.

“The trial before the trial,” Mr. Rubenstein calls the Zongo press offensive. “There is a trial in the court of law, and there is trial in the court of public opinion.” The latter, he adds, is where most of his cases are won.

Sitting in his corner office high above the Brooklyn courts, surrounded by hundreds of picture frames that feature newspaper clippings of his cases and others that feature images of himself speaking on television shows, Mr. Rubenstein said he never imagined a career in the law, especially torts.

Born in a Brooklyn housing project, he scrubbed dishes in the cafeteria, flipped burgers, and acted as janitor in the dorms, he said, to pay his way through state college in the upstate town of Oswego. Before that, he sold men’s suits and, after a host of other odd jobs, managed to get a master’s degree in marketing at Baruch College. When he began taking night classes at Brooklyn Law School, he was teaching fifth grade at a public school in Harlem.

There was nothing glamorous about much of his legal career. For 15 years Mr. Rubenstein’s legal headquarters were inside a modest storefront at 243 Throop Ave. in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a neighborhood known for its fear and mistrust of police officers, a neighborhood then taking on a wave of Haitian immigrants. Among them was Mr. Louima’s cousin, Samuel Nicholas, who walked through the office doors one day after suffering a “run of the mill” auto accident. After securing a recovery for him, it was Mr. Nicholas who contacted Mr. Rubenstein when his older cousin Abner was assaulted.

Reached at his home in Florida, Mr. Louima, who secured an $8.7 million settlement from the city in 2001 and is now trying a new career in a real estate development, said of Mr. Rubenstein, “he makes you feel comfortable. He’s not your lawyer. He’s a friend. He’s there for you.”

Through Mr. Louima’s case, Mr. Rubenstein also met Mr. Sharpton, the failed Democratic presidential candidate and activist who calls him “my brother” and “brother Rubenstein.”

In December 2003, Mr. Rubenstein was able to secure a $200,000 settlement from the city for Mr. Sharpton, who claimed police officers did not do enough to protect him from being stabbed in the chest with a steak knife during a 1991 riot in Bensonhurst.

“The way I see it, Sandy is the 21st century version of William Kunstler,” Mr. Sharpton said, referring to the radical civil rights attorney and famed counsel to Martin Luther King Jr. The similarities, Mr. Sharpton said, are based on his observation that “anytime something is going down, Sandy is there. That’s how Kunstler was. He was always around. That’s Sandy. He has the same kind of presence.”

The differences, Mr. Sharpton conceded, are more distinct. He noted that Mr. Rubenstein, decked in his pinstripe suits, colorful ties, lavish cuff links, and silk pocket squares, along with his massive collection of Haitian art, his BMW sports car, and his three homes, in Bridgeport, Conn., South Beach, and a triplex penthouse on the Upper East Side, “certainly has a more urbane style and higher style of living” than Kunstler, who took on clients who were broke and who ran his legal enterprise from a modest basement office.

Despite his flash, retainer fees, and fondness for the Fourth Estate, however, Mr. Sharpton said Mr. Rubenstein’s most valuable quality as a lawyer is his ability to relate – not to reporters – but to victims. “Here’s a guy who’s right at home in Burkina Faso and right at home in the Hamptons,” Mr. Sharpton said. “He has that kind of personality.”

The director of the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, Randy Credico, called Mr. Sharpton’s comparison of Mr. Rubenstein to Kunstler “appalling, outrageous,” and as “ludicrous as comparing Mr. Sharpton to Martin Luther King Jr.” Mr. Credico noted that Kunstler never pursued civil cases or financial settlements on behalf of victims.

“I really can’t believe he would say anything like that,” Mr. Credico said of Mr. Sharpton’s comparison. “Bill Kunstler was in the civil rights movement. Sanford Rubenstein is in the civil rights business.”

Mr. Rubenstein said that while he does receive fees from settlements, to say he was in “the civil rights business” would be inaccurate because he has marched in demonstrations and rallies without any clients on retainer, and has also traveled the country giving lectures and speeches advocating for victim’s rights.

“What makes me different is that I am a personal injury attorney, but one that does civil rights work,” he said.

In theory, there is an inherent danger in wearing both hats at the same time, said the attorney representing the police officer, Mr. London, senior partner in the firm on retainer with the police officer’s union, Worth, Longworth & London. He argued that by attempting to try the merits of the case in the press, Mr. Rubenstein, who is not part of the prosecution, along with his co-counsel, Michael Hardy, the long-time general counsel to Mr. Sharpton’s group, the National Action Network, ran the risk of “distorting the accuracy of the facts” and could create a “prejudice within the jury pool.” The end result could backfire on Mr. Rubenstein’s relentless pursuit in the press for justice, Mr. London said.

“The only thing worse than a tragedy, you know, is when someone is wrongly convicted for it,” he said.