Melvin Belli, ‘King of Torts,’ Dies at 88

Melvin Belli, the flamboyant San Francisco lawyer called the “King of Torts” for his pioneering courtroom tactics and big money awards on behalf of “the injured little guy,” died Tuesday at his San Francisco home. He was 88.

Belli had suffered an incapacitating stroke and was ill with pancreatic cancer and pneumonia when he died, said his wife, Nancy Ho Belli. The couple had wed March 29.

Once the top litigator in one of the nation’s most lucrative practices, Belli more recently was enmeshed in battles with former partners, faced an array of malpractice suits and owed a mountain of debt, including hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes. He filed for personal bankruptcy in December and last week, when he returned home from the hospital, a federal bankruptcy judge declared the once-feisty barrister “unfit” to run his law office.

For Melvin Mouron Belli, one of the nation’s best-known courtroom lawyers, this was an ignominious end to a colorful career that included clients from Mae West and Errol Flynn to Jim and Tammy Bakker.

“I can remember, even as a child, that I already knew I’d be a lawyer someday,” Belli wrote in “My Life on Trial,” his 1976 autobiography. “There was no particular trial lawyer or trial that inspired me, just the profession of lawyering itself.”

It was in civil cases, winning unprecedented monetary awards, that Belli first earned his reputation. “He’s a superb craftsman in the courtroom,” lawyer F. Lee Bailey once said. “Because of him, the price of a leg went up 300%.”

Worldwide recognition came when Belli defended Jack Ruby, who fatally shot Lee Harvey Oswald on national television in 1963. Oswald had been arrested for the murder of President John F. Kennedy.

In trial after trial, Belli relied on a legal precedent he established in a 1944 victory over Coca-Cola. The principle of absolute liability--in which manufacturers are automatically liable for injury caused by their products--set the stage for later consumer protection litigation.

Belli’s other major pioneering tactic was the use of demonstrative evidence--huge photos and mock-ups of an accident scene, crumpled cars, scale models or a client’s artificial leg wrapped in butcher’s paper. One favorite was a human skeleton named “Elmer” that he used to impress juries.

Belli hit upon using such graphic evidence by accident when he was a neophyte lawyer defending Ernie Smith, a San Quentin inmate accused of murdering another prisoner.

Belli was trying to prove that Smith had acted in self-defense after the other man pulled a knife on him. To counter prosecution claims that inmates don’t have such weapons, Belli subpoenaed a drawer full of confiscated knives.

Carrying the covered drawer toward the jury box, Belli tripped, and the knives clattered to the floor. The shocked jury acquitted Smith.

“I learned,” Belli said later, “that jurors learn through all their senses, and if you can tell them and show them, too, let them see and feel and even taste or smell the evidence, then you will reach the jury.”

The timing of these dramatic turns, such as having a bald lady involved in an injury case snatch off her wig at the end of her testimony, produced the kind of moment “when you can hear the angels sing and the cash register ring,” Belli once said.

Such demonstrations soon became commonplace in civil cases involving personal injury or death, as well as in criminal cases.

Belli was born July 29, 1907, in Sonora, Calif., the only child of banker Caesar Arthur Belli and Leonie Mouron Belli. He haunted his grandmother’s Rexall Union drugstore, learning about the contents of her apothecary jars and wondering at the surgical instruments that had belonged to his physician grandfather.

Moving to Stockton with his family, Belli found his oratorical voice in a high school public speaking class. He enchanted his classmates and later compared the heady experience of public speaking to “swimming in a pool of warm oil.”

He went on to UC Berkeley, earning extra money as an undergraduate by performing such stunts as eating moths and “streaking.” After graduation in 1929 he worked his way to Europe on a freighter, got a job as a blackboard marker in a San Francisco brokerage, and sailed to the Orient as a seaman with Dollar Steamship Lines.

In the fall of 1930, Belli enrolled at UC’s Boalt Hall and graduated 13th in his law school class. He found work during the Depression as an undercover investigator for the federal National Recovery Administration, developing his sympathy for the underdog and the outcast.

Craving both publicity and paying clients, the new lawyer with the theatrical bent staged his first news conference in 1936. He sat on a campstool behind an orange-crate desk and told reporters how he had just persuaded British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden to make a transatlantic phone call on behalf of his client. The man he represented was a British subject who had been involved in a San Quentin prison break.

But the call didn’t help, and his client was convicted and executed. “I had my whole practice wiped out,” Belli ruefully reflected years later.

He was only slightly more successful when he won a reduction in the sentence of Frank Avilez, known as the “black-gloved rapist.” Through Belli’s efforts, Avilez’s term was cut from 440 to 220 years.

In both his criminal and civil cases, Belli turned the courtroom into theater, complete with props, wardrobe and stentorian oratory. He soon could be identified by his costume, tailored Western cut charcoal gray suits lined in red silk with a red silk handkerchief and black calf-high snakeskin boots.

In his heyday, Belli was a master of timing and elocution. The Houston Post described his summation to the jury in 1963 when he defended Ruby on grounds of temporary insanity thus:

“Gifted by nature with a velvety, hypnotic voice that could charm cobras out of their baskets . . . he played that voice like a symphony. It was by turns a Stradivarius, a bugle, an oboe, a snare drum racing at breakneck speed through the key pages of the trial testimony.”

Nonetheless, Ruby went to prison and died there.

To celebrate a major legal victory, Belli would hoist the Jolly Roger over his opulent San Francisco office--said to resemble “a Gold Rush whorehouse”--and fire off a cannon.

“It was like hitting a seven at the crap tables in Harrah’s Club in Reno and letting my winnings ride while I threw another seven” is how he once described a victory. “And I felt good because I had elevated the injured little guy to the economic level of stocks and bonds, a prize Hereford, a yacht, old paintings and prized violins.”

Belli wrote in his autobiography that he had “a penchant for all good things bright and beautiful, kinky and flawed, for good wines, great tables, wide travels and beautiful women.”

And he did love fine things, including his Rolls Royce, his yacht and spacious homes. But mostly, he loved the law.

“You can’t have more fun than practicing law,” he once told The Times. “I love to try cases, and I love to do research. If I were a dentist, I wouldn’t be down at the office on Sundays. . . . If I were disbarred or weren’t able to go to court, I think I’d just fade away.”

The author of 62 books, including the six-volume “Modern Trials,” Belli had a successful sub-career on the seminar circuit, training young lawyers to emulate his courtroom image. He vowed never to retire, and many critics, including some clients and employees, believed that he stayed too long.

Accused in his later years of senility and inattention to both his cases and to the parade of young lawyers working for him, he was sued dozens of times for malpractice. He lost a $3.8-million judgment in 1985.

That same year, after Belli lost the first civil case tried against a tobacco company for allegedly causing a smoker’s death, the Santa Barbara judge who handled the trial criticized him for caring more about publicity than his client.

“In his opening and closing statements, he was as ill-prepared as anyone I’ve ever seen,” said Superior Court Judge Bruce Dodds. “I don’t know what he was like before, but Mr. Belli was not competent as a lawyer in my courtroom. He stumbled and mumbled. It was embarrassing.”

American Lawyer magazine ran a scathing article titled “Use of This Once-Great King of Torts May Be Hazardous to Your Case.” In 1988, the National Law Journal, a weekly paper for the legal profession, dropped Belli from its list of America’s 100 most powerful lawyers.

In 1992, he and his partners squabbled over the direction of the firm. They filed a number of suits and countersuits against each other. The dispute grew so bitter that a color-coded plan had to be drawn on the floor of the law offices to keep the warring factions away from each other.

The five colleagues eventually dissolved the firm out from under him in 1993.

Belli married six times, with the dissolutions more highly publicized than the weddings.

His first wife was Betty Ballantine in 1933. Their divorce after 18 years was so bitter that she had the surnames of their four children--Richard R., Melvin Mouron, Jean and Susan--changed to her maiden name and never spoke to Belli again.

Second was magazine photographer Toni Nichols, whom he married six months after his divorce and divorced after two years and a 2 a.m. fight in their Telegraph Hill apartment that left her with a black eye.

Third was airline attendant Joy Turney in 1956, the mother of his son Caesar Melvin. She got an uncontested divorce after 10 years.

His fourth wife, San Francisco society hostess Patt Montandon, wed him in Japan in a traditional Shinto ceremony. The marriage was annulled after 34 days and much public bickering over the validity of the rites and his finances.

Fifth was Lia Triff, whom he wed in 1972, when she was a 23-year-old art history and anthropology student at the University of Maryland and Belli was 65. That marriage, which produced one daughter, Melia, ended after 16 years in another scandal-racked divorce. Belli accused Triff of extramarital affairs with, among others, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Triff accused Belli of abusing her and trying to have her shot.

The six children survive him, as do many grandchildren.

Times staff writer Miles Corwin contributed to this story.