Melvin Belli

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Melvin Mouron Belli (29 July 1907, Sonora, California – 9 July 1996, San Francisco, California, death due to pancreatic cancer, stroke and pneumonia[1]) was a prominent American lawyer known as "The King of Torts" and by detractors as 'Melvin Bellicose'. He had many celebrity clients, including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Errol Flynn, Chuck Berry, Muhammad Ali, Sirhan Sirhan, Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye Bakker, Martha Mitchell, Lana Turner, Tony Curtis, and Mae West. He won over USD $600,000,000 in judgments during his legal career.[2]

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[edit] Early life

Belli was born in the California Gold Rush town of Sonora, California in the Sierra foothills. His father was born in Nevada of Italian Swiss ancestry, and his mother was born in California of French-German Swiss ancestry. By the 1920s, the family had moved to the city of Stockton, California where Belli attended Stockton High School.

[edit] Education and early career

Belli graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1929 and after traveling around the world for a year, enrolled in and subsequently graduated from Boalt Hall School of Law in 1933. After graduation, his first job was posing as a hobo for the Works Progress Administration and riding the rails to observe the Depression's impact on the country's vagrant population. His first major legal victory came shortly after graduation, in a personal injury lawsuit representing an injured cable car gripman. Over insurance lawyers' objections, Belli brought a model of a cable car intersection, and the gear box and chain involved in the accident, to demonstrate to jurors exactly what had happened.

[edit] "King of Torts"

Besides his notorious personal injury cases, which earned for him his byname "King of Torts," Belli was also instrumental in setting up some of the foundations of modern consumer rights law, arguing several cases in the 1940s and 1950s that formed the basis for later lawsuits and landmark litigation by such figures as Ralph Nader. Belli argued (in cases such as Escola v. Coca-Cola, in 1944, which arose from an incident in which a restaurant manager from Merced, California was severely injured by an exploding Coca-Cola bottle) that all products have an implied warranty, that it is to be foreseen that products will be used by a long chain of people, not just the direct recipient of the manufactured product, and that negligence by a defendant need not be proven if the defendant's product is defective. Belli also was one of the first major attorneys to prominently use demonstrative evidence and courtroom exhibits (such as graphics, charts, photographs, and films). In his book Ready for the Plaintiff, he noted examples of negligence cited by himself and other personal-injury lawyers to win in court--for example, a colleague in Florida, who showed how a builder violated a building code in Miami Beach concerning the use of wooden shims in construction of outside walls (forbidden by the municipal code because of the effect of the ocean salt and air). The facing was a slab of Carrara glass, whose adhesion was eventually weakened by the climate; it fell off the side of the building and injured a passerby, who sued the builder.

After winning a court case, Belli would raise a Jolly Roger flag over his office building and fire a cannon, mounted on his office roof, to announce the victory and the impending party.[3]

In his best known case, Belli represented Jack Ruby, for free, after Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald. Belli attempted to prove that Ruby was legally insane and had a history of mental illness in his family. On 14 March 1964, Ruby was convicted of 'murder with malice', and later received a death sentence. However, in late 1966, Ruby's conviction was overturned, on the grounds that he did not receive a fair trial and a retrial was scheduled outside of Dallas, but Ruby died of a stroke before the retrial could take place. Belli became very critical of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover; the agency compiled at least 367 pages of evidence about Belli's activities.[4]

[edit] Film and television roles

Belli as Gorgan
Belli as Gorgan

Belli appeared in numerous films and television shows, frequently as himself, and was played by Brian Cox in the 2007 film Zodiac (Belli received a letter from the Zodiac Killer in 1969).

In perhaps his best-known role, other than as himself, Belli appeared in a 1968 Star Trek episode, "And the Children Shall Lead". In it he played Gorgan, an evil being who corrupted a group of children. (The children turned on him after the bridge monitor at Spock's station showed pictures of their parents' graves.)

In 1970, he appeared in The Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter, which featured his representation of the Stones and his facilitation of the disastrous decision to stage the rock group's Altamont Free Concert. Belli enjoyed his frequent television and movie appearances; in 1965, he told an interviewer for Playboy that he "might have been an actor" if he had not become an attorney.

He played himself in an episode of the series Hunter as well.

[edit] Author

Belli was the author of several books, including the six-volume Modern Trials (written between 1954 and 1960) which has become a classic textbook on the demonstrative method of presenting evidence. Belli's unprecedented -- and some thought undignified -- use of graphic evidence and expert witnesses later became common courtroom practice. His autobiography, My Life on Trial is an account of his life and the noteworthy events he was involved in during his career.

[edit] Personal life and finances

Belli was married five times. His marriage to the former Lia Triff ended with a scandalous, acrimonious and bitter divorce proceeding in 1988, in which Belli was fined $1000 for calling his wife "El Trampo", accused his wife of throwing their pet dog off the Golden Gate Bridge, and was ultimately compelled to pay her an estimated $15 million. She subsequently married a Rumanian prince, Paul Lambrino. Belli married his fifth wife, Nancy Ho, eleven weeks before he died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 88.

Belli's firm filed for bankruptcy protection in December, 1995, not long before his death. Belli was representing 800 women in a class action lawsuit against breast implant manufacturer Dow Corning. Belli won the lawsuit, but when Dow Corning declared bankruptcy, Belli had no way to recover the $5,000,000 (USD) his firm had advanced to doctors and expert witneses.

In June, 1996, two weeks before his passing, Melvin Belli recited the oratory to David Woodard's brass fanfare setting of Mark Twain's "The War Prayer", at San Francisco's Old First Church.

Belli is mentioned briefly in Monty Python's 1982 concert film Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl. While Walking off stage at the end of the Poofy Judges sketch Eric Idle utters the line: "As I was telling Melvin Belli the other day, you can put it in the hand of your attorney, but it will never stand up in court!"

[edit] Quote

“ There may be better lawyers than I, but so far I haven't come across any of them in court. ”
“ A lawyer's performance in the courtroom is responsible for about 25% of the outcome; the remaining 75% depends on the facts. ”

[edit] Bibliography

  • 1950, The Voice of Modern Trials
  • 1951, The Adequate Award
  • 1952, The More Adequate Award
  • 1952, The More Adequate Award and the Flying Saucers
  • 1954, Modern Trials (6 volumes)
  • 1955, The Use of Demonstrative Evidence in Achieving the More Adequate Award
  • 1955, Medical Malpractice
  • 1956, Blood Money Ready for the Plaintiff
  • 1956, Ready for the Plaintiff: A Story of Personal Injury Law
  • 1959, Modern Damages (6 volumes)
  • 1960, Belli Looks at Life and Law in Japan
  • 1963, Belli Looks at Life and Law in Russia
  • 1964, Dallas Justice: The Real Story of Jack Ruby And His Trial
  • 1967, Trial Tactics
  • 1968, Criminal Law
  • 1968, The Law Revolt: A Summary of Trends in Modern Criminal and Civil Law
  • 1968, The Law Revolution
  • 1971, Angela: A Revealing Close-Up of the Woman And the Trial
  • 1976, My Life on Trial: An Autobiography
  • 1983, The Belli Files

[edit] Filmography (as actor)

  • 1968, Star Trek (as Gorgan in the episode "And the Children Shall Lead")
  • 1968, Wild in the Streets (as himself)
  • 1970, Gimme Shelter (as himself)
  • 1973, Ground Zero (aka The Golden Gate Is Ground Zero)
  • 1978, Lady of the House (TV, as Mayor Jim of San Francisco)
  • 1979, Whodunnit?" (TV series, as himself)
  • 1984, Guilty or Innocent (TV Series, as himself)
  • 2000, "American Justice: Divorce Wars" (TV documentary)

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ IMDb.com profile [1]
  2. ^ IMDb.com bio [2]
  3. ^ Shaw, Mark (March 25, 2007). Melvin Belli: King of the Courtroom. Barricade Books, excerpt at Amapedia. ISBN 1-5698-0324-2. 
  4. ^ Federal Bureau of Investigation - Freedom of Information Privacy Act

[edit] External links

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