Casus Belli

'He has made a lot of legal history. For the last 20 or 30 years he's been there when a lot of people haven't, with ideas that a lot of people didn't have or were too timid to try.'

Paul Sugarman, former president

of the Massachussetts Bar Association

Will the real Melvin Belli please stand up?

Is it Belli, "the King of Torts," counselor to Errol Flynn, Martha Mitchell, and the Rolling Stones and as colorful as all of them, the Muhammed Ali of the bar--a superstar of the courtroom-as-theater, with credits that include Star Trek and Gimme Shelter;

Or Belli, the maker of new law, a Darrow of civil law who creatively brought demonstrative evidence to torts, who introduced the concepts of warranty and the adequate award and made ambulance chasing socially acceptable;

Or Belli the lawyer with an instinctive allegiance to the underdog, whose sense of justice and compassion led him to "torts"? literally, "wrongs,"--that had to be righted, to individuals who had to be helped against insurance companies and pharmaceutical conglomerates?

Belli is old now; his hands and face are covered with age spots. But he continues to be King of Torts. We met at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York for breakfast. Belli was typically attired in a Savile Row suit and accompanied by a stunning platinum blonde. The following is our conversation:

What are today's trial and torts trends?

It's become a much more businesslike thing...We don't waste as much time getting to the issues. We have pre-trial, where we cut the issues down...so when you're ready to go to trial, you know everything they've got, and they know everything you've got, and you go right to work and you don't waste a lot of time sparring. Then you have pre-trial settlement conferences, which settle a lot of cases. If you didn't have those, your calendars would get completely out of line...

Do you think we're finally seeing adequate awards in personal injury cases?

Yeah...there's still a discrepancy, in some cases in the same city, and there's still a terrible discrepancy between cities. Like, for example, in California, the verdicts in the far south and the far north are atrocious. They can't compare to San Francisco and Los Angeles. San Diego in the far south and Eureka in the far north, your verdicts are a third of what you'd get in Los Angeles. It's just the people haven't been educated--they're stingy. There's been no good trial lawyer who has raised the awards...I think you see some cities with pockets of high awards and they are attributable to one or two damn good trial lawyers, and that's unfortunate.

What do you think of the Burger Court?

The Burger Court is horrible...The one conservative you're going to have there for a long time is Rehnquist, who's a horrible conservative, and a dangerous conservative because he's sharp...Burger and Blackmun just don't have an appreciation of what the law's all about...They weren't brought up in the law. It's shocking to have a guy like Burger as Chief Justice, wanting to do away with jury trials and a lot of other things that he just doesn't understand.

What about Burger's disparagement of the American trial lawyer?

He was probably right that 50 per cent or 70 per cent of the lawyers that go to court aren't prepared or equipped.

I heard you're taking on the cigarette companies.

I tried one of those cases and lost it, in New Orleans about ten years ago. The cigarette companies paid the other side over a million dollars...Then I had a fucking judge, I think that he couldn't wait until five o'clock so he could water his tobacco plant in his window box...

The judge said, "Mel, if you get by with this...what's to prevent you from suing Elsie the Borden Cow for giving too thick cream and causing cholesterol, or suing Jim Beam for giving cirrhosis of the liver?"...[In the current case] what I'm trying to do is prove to a jury that cigarettes do cause cancer, period. Then if people want to smoke, it's up to them...I don't think my client had any choice, I think she was addicted.

What about the case in which the Ford company was ordered to pay $128 million to a man whose Pinto gas tank exploded? (The punitive judgement was overturned on appeal.)

I thought the punitive should've stood. In punitive damages you're allowed to show the wealth of the defendant...it doesn't hurt if you penalize a billion dollar company $50,000, you have to penalize them in the millions of dollars, in order to make them change, change their goddamn gas tanks...The judge compared it with his salary and he dropped it.

How about the Hearst case?

Bailey's a damn good lawyer, but he did a lousy job...just execrable...It's pretty hard to sue a lawyer for malpractice, for an error in judgement...He made the worst mistake in the world when he got into a spitting contest with his client; a lawyer never can win that. There are some things people won't forgive you for saying about your former client. But he's one of the best in the country.

Why didn't you ever go into politics

I never wanted to be responsible to anyone, really. I wanted to be thoroughly independent.

Do you think there are too many lawyers in government?

No, I think that's a good place for a lawyer.

Do you think the new crop of lawyers is different?

Yeah...they come in and they ask me if they're going to have time on their own to do pro bono work, bail bond projects or whatever. I find a lot of fellows who are interested in doing something for individuals...more interested in doing that then they are in making money. When I got out of school in 1933 I think the accent was on making money...the hell with going out and doing pro bono stuff.

What would you advise someone just out of law school to go into?

Well, of course, I'd go into trial work, any kind of trial work. I think a hell of a future's in patents and copyrights, if you've got a bent for engineering...

The thing to do, if you can, when you get out of law school, is to get a job in the District Attorney's office, or the public defender's office, where you can start going right in, trying them day in and day out.

Who was your most interesting client?

I represented once Muhammed Ali...I met him over at a hotel in New York here, the Hilton. And he knocked on the door and said, "Quick, open up, close it." I opened the door, and just as I closed it, there were about five gals chasing him down the hallway, black and white, and he says "They'll tear me to pieces." He came in and we talked for about two hours. He's very intelligent, and not at all flamboyant...I had it worked out that they were going to dismiss [the draft evasion charges] if he would go around and talk to youth clubs...and also do some work for Nixon...Mitchell turned it down...Two years after that I got back at poor John when I was representing Martha for a divorce.

Martha Mitchell was one of 'em...She was just a hell of an interesting gal, and she was with all the power and everything. She was very strong in the White House--Nixon was taking a lot of her advice when he was really down and out.

Do you ever wish you had gone to Harvard?

Sometimes, yeah...I would've had more East Coast friends and more East Coast orientation...But as I look back now, Cal, or Boalt Hall, was the best law school in the country, even better than Harvard.

What do you think of Harvard lawyers?

I think that they get good training. You get good background; I think that's awfully important, because you don't know what the hell you're going to do till you get out of school. I never thought that I'd go into as much personal injury work as I've gone into. I thought I wanted to do all criminal work. Then when I got out of law school, I saw that criminal work was dangerous...The things lawyers had to do to survive, you were just on the same level as the criminal, and you'd end up in the bucket with your client.

Which of your cases was the most fun?

I guess the one that was the most fun was when we sued the Giants for having a cold ball park, and we got the price of a season ticket back. I remember they didn't pay so I executed [a lien] on Willie Mays...The jury was out in one minute...I got some soldiers who were on the icecap up at the North Pole, with the Arctic Survival Team, who came in wearing their arctic survival gear, and they said they had been out to Candlestick Park a couple of nights before watching a night game, and they were colder at Candlestick Park than they were on the icecap...I argued the case with a parka on...

You're probably best known at Harvard for your role in Gimme Shelter.

Oh, really? God, I've forgotten that one...They cancelled the place that they [the Rolling Stones] were going to do it, so they had to get another place...I remember they had to fly the outdoor toilets by helicopter from the one place to the other. We looked out the window, there were about five helicopters and five of these great big johns flying across San Francisco Bay.

Who's the best trial lawyer in the country?

If I had a choice, I'd like to represent myself.

If I were Melvin Belli, I'd agree.