Background
Melvin Belli was born in Sonora, California, United States, on July 29, 1907. His parents were of Italian ancestry from Switzerland. His grandmother, Anna Mouron, was the first female pharmacist in California.
Melvin Belli was born in Sonora, California, United States, on July 29, 1907. His parents were of Italian ancestry from Switzerland. His grandmother, Anna Mouron, was the first female pharmacist in California.
By the 1920s, the family had moved to the city of Stockton, California where Belli attended Stockton High School. Melvin Belli graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1929. After traveling around the world, he received his Bachelor of Laws from the Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley in 1933.
He was a famous attorney and author. Mr. Belli rose to fame as the legal defender of famous and notorious people as well as the premiere attorney in personal injury cases — known in legalese as torts — that brought Plaintiffs more than $350 million in damages and earned Belli the nickname “King of Torts.” His flamboyant style, theatrical courtroom antics, red silk-med suits, and snake-skin cowboy boots earned him a reputation that often stood apart from his numerous lrial victories. Belli became interested in law in his teenage years.
ln 1933 Melvin Belli worked as an undercover investigator for me National Recovery Administration, which was a government-sponsored program established during the feat Depression. He worked for a series of law firms before cofounding Belli, Ashe, and Gerry in 1940, he would be a senior partner in firms such as Belli, Ashe, Ellison, Choulos, and Lieff as Welt as Belli, Weil, and Jacobs. Mr. Belli also established Belli Seminars in Law in 1950, and was president of Belli Foundation Lectures, beginning in 1960. During his career, he represented clients such as entertainers Mae West, Errol Flynn, and Tony Curtis. Among his more controversial clients were television evangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker, who were on trial for fraud, and Jack Ruby, who was tried and convicted for the murder of President John F. Kennedy’s alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
His courtroom theatrics included dropping an artificial leg into the lap of one of the jurors. His client, a woman who had her leg severed in a trolley mishap, won her case.
Melvin Belli also represented the families of American service personnel who were killed in a 1986 airplane crash; the interests of people harmed by the 1984 Union Carbide disaster in India; and those suing Dow Corning due to problems suspected to have arisen from silicon breast implants. Mr. Belli often celebrated his legal successes by flying the Jolly Roger flag over his office and firing a cannon. Toward the end of his career, Mr. Belli ran into a number of difficulties, ranging from bankruptcy problems to disputes with his law partners. In 1995, a judge deemed him “unfit” to practice law. Melvin Belli was a prolific author. Some reports say the number of his works totaled more than sixty.
Mr. Belli died of complications from pancreatic cancer, at his home in San Francisco, on July 9, 1996, aged 88. His death came suddenly and in the presence of his wife Nancy. The New York Times' quoted his publicist Edward Lozzi saying "He was sitting; he just stopped breathing". He is buried in Odd Fellows Cemetery in Sonora, California, his birthplace.
Melvin Belli won over $600 million in judgments during his legal career. Mr. 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. Mr. Belli's unprecedented — and some thought undignified — use of graphic evidence and expert witnesses later became common courtroom practice.
(What are your rights if the car you bought is useless? If...)
(In this unique, one-stop guide, the alternating voices of...)
(A timely work that considers the interrelated legal and e...)
(A timely work that considers the interrelated legal and e...)
(McKinney's New York Civil Practice Law and Rules provides...)
(A noted and provocative trial lawyer offers an incisive a...)
Mr. Belli was married six times and survived five divorces. His marriage to his fifth wife, the former Lia Georgia Triff, ended with a scandalous and acrimonious divorce proceeding in 1991. Melvin Belli accused his ex-wife of having an affair with Archbishop Desmond Tutu and of throwing one of his dogs off the Golden Gate Bridge. He was fined $1,000 for repeatedly calling her "El Trampo". At one point, Mr. Belli was ejected from the courtroom after accusing the judge of sleeping with his former wife's lawyer. He was ultimately compelled to pay her an estimated $15 million. She later married a self-styled Romanian prince, Paul Lambrino. Melvin Belli married his sixth wife, Nancy Ho, on March 29, 1996. His youngest child, Melia, from fifth wife Lia, became an art history scholar and is currently an assistant professor of Asian art history at the University of Texas at Arlington. He had three sons, three daughters, twelve grandchildren, and two dogs.
