Johnnie Cochran, who died yesterday at 67, was among the best-known attorneys in America, a dapper defender of the poor and disadvantaged who found his greatest fame during the O.J. Simpson murder trial, which many considered to be a travesty of his other important cases.

Cochran died of a brain tumor at his home in Los Angeles, his family announced.

Cochran was himself somewhat loath to trumpet his performance as lead defense attorney at the Simpson trial, in which the former football great was accused of murdering his wife and a friend. Speaking during his summation about a crucial piece of evidence, a blood-stained glove, he famously told the jury, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” The jury acquitted. Last year, suffering from the brain tumor that would kill him, he told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, “I’d like to have an epitaph other than that.”

Already well known in Los Angeles, Cochran’s fame exploded in the wake of the Simpson acquittal. He began hosting a nightly cable talk show. Soon, he opened a new branch of his firm in New York, where he became involved in racially charged cases, such as those of Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo, one brutalized and the other killed by police. Cochran also represented Sean Combs – the rap star known as P. Diddy – who faced weapons charges, rapper Tupac Shakur on a weapons charge, and rapper Snoop Dogg on a murder charge.

Earlier, Cochran made a name for himself by winning large judgments on behalf of clients alleging police brutality. By the time he took Mr. Simpson’s case, Cochran had won $45 million in compensation for clients from the Los Angeles Police Department. Among these was the family of Ron Settles, a student athlete at California State University at Long Beach who had been arrested for speeding in an L.A. suburb in 1981. He was subsequently found hung in his jail cell, and the death was ruled a suicide. At Cochran’s urging, the family agreed to have the body exhumed, and a jury ruled that Settles “died at the hands of another.” The family was awarded $760,000.

He insisted that the bulk of his clients had been “no-Js” rather than O.J.s, but Cochran did represent his share of celebrities. When another star running back, Jim Brown, was charged with attempted rape in 1985, Cochran persuaded prosecutors to drop the charges. In 1990, Cochran won an acquittal for Todd Bridges, a star of the television series “Diff’rent Strokes,” who stood accused of shooting a man in what prosecutors said was a drug deal gone bad. Perhaps Cochran’s most notorious pre-Simpson case involved negotiating a multimillion-dollar settlement in a child molestation case involving Michael Jackson.

Cochran was born October 2, 1937, in Shreveport, La., the great-grandson of slaves, grandson of a sharecropper, and son of an insurance salesman. He moved to Los Angeles with his family in 1949, and in the 1950s he became one of two-dozen black students integrated into Los Angeles High School. He said he idolized Thurgood Marshall, the crusading attorney who successfully argued to outlaw school segregation in the Brown v. Board of Education case before the Supreme Court in 1954.

“I didn’t know too much about what a lawyer did, or how he worked, but I knew that if one man could cause this great stir, then the law must be a wondrous thing,” Cochran wrote in his autobiography, “A Lawyer’s Life.”

After earning a law degree at Loyola University, he worked for a few years for the Los Angeles City Attorney’s office and then began building a practice specializing in police brutality cases. He suffered two early high-profile losses. One came in the case of a black man rushing his pregnant wife to the hospital. The couple was pulled over for speeding and in the ensuing confrontation the unarmed driver was killed by an officer. Cochran brought suit against the city for wrongful death. In a racially charged atmosphere, just months after the Watts riots, the jury decided the shooting was justified.

Cochran also lost in his defense of Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, a Vietnam veteran and leader of the Black Panthers who was accused of murdering a schoolteacher. When Pratt’s alibi was not confirmed by other members of the Panthers, with whom he was embroiled in disputes, Pratt was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. When he finally helped Pratt win freedom in 1997, Cochran called the moment “the happiest day of my life practicing law.”

Of his early losses, Cochran once said they “taught me that you can work within the system and believe in it, but if the government wants to get you, they can certainly go out and get you.” He was further embittered when he took a job as a deputy district attorney, only to find himself pulled over for no apparent reason other than he was driving his Rolls-Royce down Sunset Boulevard.

Noted for his flashy courtroom style and preternatural ability to recall detailed testimony verbatim, Cochran exuded charm and was expert at winning over juries. But when he faced legal action himself, as during his 1978 divorce from his first wife, he seemed less smooth. It emerged that he was supporting a second family, including a son, in addition to his two daughters and his wife. He eventually settled a palimony case with his mistress as well.

Within the black community, he remained extremely popular, a near-iconic figure who funded scholarships at UCLA and a New Jersey legal academy, as well as various other philanthropies.

“People recognize if you want a good lawyer, a great lawyer, you hire Johnnie Cochran,” a member of Cochran’s O.J. Simpson “Dream Team” of lawyers, Barry Scheck, said. “It seems to me the most effective lawyer in the United States is African-American. Whether you’re white or black, you’d hire him, and I think that’s a pretty big statement.”