Melvin Belli
| Melvin Belli | |
|---|---|
Belli in 1967
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| Born |
Melvin Mouron Belli July 29, 1907 Sonora, California, U.S. |
| Died | July 9, 1996 (aged 88) San Francisco, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Lawyer, actor, author |
Melvin Mouron Belli (July 29, 1907 – July 9, 1996) was a prominent American lawyer known as "The King of Torts" and by insurance companies as "Melvin Bellicose." He had many celebrity clients, including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Errol Flynn, Chuck Berry, Muhammad Ali, The Rolling Stones, Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye Bakker, Martha Mitchell, Lana Turner, Tony Curtis, and Mae West. He won over $600,000,000 (U.S.) in judgments during his legal career. He was also the attorney of Jack Ruby, who shot Lee Harvey Oswald for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Belli was born in the California Gold Rush town of Sonora, California, in the Sierra Nevada foothills. 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 where Belli attended Stockton High School.
Belli graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1929 and after traveling around the world for a year, attended the Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley 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.
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