Hiram Mendow; Defended Key Mobsters, Including Al Capone

He ate what he wanted, quit athletics at 35, stopped smoking only in his 70s, practiced law past 100 and still enjoyed his occasional glass of wine.

Hiram Z. “Judge” Mendow died May 11--at 107--in the La Jolla retirement facility where he had finally retired under pressure from his daughter a few years ago.

The son of a Romanian immigrant junk peddler, Mendow grew up and lived his first century in Minneapolis. He went to work at age 6, selling newspapers and shining shoes. Later he ferried planes about the country as an Army flier in World War I, covered Yiddish theater for a Minneapolis newspaper and, during Prohibition, wrote a book called “How to Make Wine at Home.”

He also coached high school debate, basketball and football--including one youth who grew up to be legendary San Diego Chargers head Coach Sid Gillman.

Those pursuits were auxiliary to Mendow’s stellar eight-decade career as a lawyer.

He worked his way through the University of Minnesota by making window shades, and was one of only 30 in the Class of 1915 to earn a degree from its School of Law. He later donated his detailed law school journals to the Minnesota Historical Society for its collection on early Jewish life.

Mendow co-wrote manuals on family law for his alma mater and helped develop Minnesota’s first state housing codes and housing authority legislation.

He earned the “Judge” nickname legitimately, serving for a year as a municipal judge by gubernatorial appointment in 1923. He declined reappointment, saying he’d rather defend people than send them to jail.

In his late 90s, Mendow handled quiet estate and other family law cases. But before that, he was a nationally known criminal defense attorney who represented gangsters and bootleggers, including Al Capone and Minnesota’s Isadore “Kid Cann” Blumenfeld.

“I was strictly a criminal defense lawyer. I had nothing to do with any ideology,” Mendow told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in 1989. “The mobsters, they looked to me for help. I never needed to get involved with them, and I never did.”

The attorney’s best-known case had nothing to do with mobsters. Mendow was assigned by the court to represent a Native American charged with murder during a 1935 Minneapolis riot that killed several people. The defendant had been pictured in Time magazine wielding a baseball bat above a prone figure on the ground.

With a Perry Mason flourish years ahead of television or its fictional lawyer hero, Mendow proved his client’s innocence by producing the very alive and healthy “victim.” No murder, no guilt. Mendow then sued Time and won that case, too.

Among his other high-profile cases were antitrust suits against General Electric and RCA, and fraud trials at the side of famed attorney Clarence Darrow.

Then there was the nationally publicized divorce in 1923 that Mendow sort of bungled by persuading the parties to stay married. The wife tried to hire Mendow to sue her husband for divorce because, as the lawyer recalled with wonder at age 100: “He liked the radio better than sex.”

Instead, Mendow effected a compromise, winning an agreement from the husband to limit his radio listening and stop swearing when he had trouble tuning the newfangled appliance.

Widowed in 1995 when his wife of some 75 years, Josephine, died at age 98, Mendow is survived by his daughter, Abigail Mendow Sands of San Diego.