Portal:San Francisco Bay Area/Selected biography/19

Melvin Mouron Belli (July 29, 1907 – July 9, 1996) 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, the Rolling Stones, 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. 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 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 Stockton, California where Belli attended Stockton High School.

After winning a court case, Belli would raise a Jolly Roger flag over his Montgomery Street office building in the Barbary Coast district of San Francisco (which Belli claimed had been a Gold Rush-era brothel) and fire a cannon, mounted on his office roof, to announce the victory and the impending party. (more...)