Melvin Belli, an impresario of a lawyer who pioneered new techniques and huge settlements in personal injury cases and who defended Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, died on Tuesday at his home in San Francisco. He was 88.
Mr. Belli had a stroke last week brought on by pancreatic cancer, and he developed pneumonia last weekend, his wife, Nancy Ho Belli, said.
In a profession storied as much for its histrionics as for its seriousness of purpose, Mr. Belli was a superstar. With his square-jawed portly good looks, flowing mane and scarlet-silk-lined suits, he was at once leonine and bearish. He delivered his lines in court with an oleaginous voice whose resonance suggested entombment in his generous frame, a voice that for more than half a century seemed always to discharge its burden of quotable phrase quickly, incisively, almost hypnotically.
But even when he failed, even when his eloquence became grandiloquence, Mr. Belli beguiled jurors and journalists alike.
Such was the case in 1964 when he defended Ruby, who had gunned down Oswald in Dallas police headquarters as millions of Americans watched on television that Sunday in November 1963, two days after Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy. Indeed, after the Ruby trial, which he lost, Mr. Belli became a national celebrity, a distinction that had eluded him after the earlier cases he so ably won.
Harold Scarlett, who covered the Ruby trial for The Houston Post, wrote that Mr. Belli "played that voice like a symphony."
But the jury quickly found Ruby guilty of what a nation had seen him do; Mr. Belli was unable to persuade Dallas jurors that Ruby should be treated with leniency and compassion because of his mental state. Although Ruby's conviction later was overturned on appeal, he died in 1967 before he could get a new trial.
Mr. Belli, who later was dismissed and left largely unpaid by the Ruby family, exploded in rage when he heard the verdict and publicly accused Dallas of being "a sick, sick, sick city" and said that Ruby, a Jew, had been the victim of discrimination.
With Maurice C. Carroll, a journalist who had covered the trial for The New York Herald Tribune, he wrote a book called "Dallas Justice -- The Real Story of Jack Ruby and His Trial."
Mr. Belli's courtroom display was found unseemly by both the American Bar Association and the Texas Bar Association. It was only one of many criticisms that were directed against Mr. Belli in the course of his career. And the level of esteem by which he was held by his fellow lawyers was not enhanced when he suggested that the prestige he got from membership in the American Bar Association was rather the same thing he got from membership in the Book-of-the-Month Club.
In 1966, Mr. Belli was even banned from the convention program of the American Trial Lawyers Association, the very group he had helped found as something of an alternative to the bar associations filled with corporate lawyers. The trial lawyers association said the ban was approved for reasons of "propriety."
A Gallery of Clients That Was Never Dull
Propriety was sometimes hard to find among Mr. Belli's more famous clients, who were hardly the choirboys and choirgirls of their time. Among the notables were Mickey Cohen, a gangster who gambled, and Errol Flynn, an actor who gamboled. Others included the comedian Lenny Bruce, the actress Mae West and Mario Savio, the most vocal of the Berkeley student protesters of the late 1960's.
Another client was Winnie Ruth Judd, declared insane and sent to a mental hospital for the 1931 murders of two people who were stuffed into a trunk in Phoenix. Mr. Belli met her in 1969, seven years after she had escaped from the Arizona State Hospital. He managed to get her sentence commuted to time served.
There were also Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, the television evangelists. The Bakkers were so taken with Mr. Belli that they gave him a gilt-edged Bible as a band played "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Mr. Belli, never to be outdone by such gracious gestures, gave the Bakkers the use of the deck of his yacht to plan their moves. It did no good; in 1989 Jim Bakker was convicted of 24 counts of fraud and conspiracy, sentenced to 45 years in prison, and fined $500,000. His wife, now Tammy Faye Messner, was not charged. Mr. Belli called Mr. Bakker the "finest client" he had ever had in 53 years of practice.
Such associations may have ruffled some of Mr. Belli's more conservative colleagues. Certain aspects of his personal life, of which he made no secret, may have ruffled them even more, for Mr. Belli was both a lawyer and a lover.
He made no secret of his friendship with Errol Flynn and that the two of them liked to go on the town together; that he once had his pet greyhound listed in the San Francisco telephone directory; that he drank prodigious amounts of port; that he was so much the actor that he began to do in front of cameras what he earlier had done only in court. Thus he portrayed an extraterrestrial creature on television's "Star Trek," and appeared in such Hollywood productions as "Devil's Dolls," where he played an army colonel, and "Wild in the Streets," in which he was a lawyer.
"Am I romantic?" Mr. Belli asked in his 1976 autobiography, "My Life on Trial." He answered: "Of course I am. Show me a good trial lawyer who isn't. Good trial lawyers have a zest for life, a penchant for all good things bright and beautiful, kinky and flawed, for good wines, great tables, wide travels and beautiful women."
All of this may have overshadowed some of his stunning triumphs: the $19 million settlement his firm helped win for 16 families of American servicemen who died in the Christmas 1986 air crash at Gander, Newfoundland; the $32 million it got from California crematoriums that mishandled the disposal of the remains of the deceased; the many people who got substantial settlements because of the damages they suffered through accidents, and his more than 60 books that he wrote or co-wrote, some of them consulted by lawyers to this day.
A Growing Fame From Audacity
Melvin Mouron Belli was born July 29, 1907 in Sonora, Calif., the son of Caesar Arthur and Leonie Mouron Belli. The family surname is Italian, but the Bellis originated in Switzerland. The name was pronounced "bell-eye," apparently because if said the Italian way, it would sound like "belly."
Mr. Belli was valedictorian of the class of 1925 at Stockton High School, then went to the University of California at Berkeley in 1929, where he got only average grades. Still, he gained admission to Boalt Hall, the prestigious law school of the University of California. But he did not make law review and received a mere "C" in torts, the legal label for any injury for which damages can be sought and the area of law where he would become a legend.
He began to attract attention in 1941 because of his aggressive representation of people who had been damaged in some way and his considerable creative skill in developing courtroom techniques to present their cases. A case in point in the early 40's was his representation of Katherine Jeffers, a young mother whose leg was severed by a San Francisco trolley. A jury awarded her $65,000, but lawyers for the trolley company appealed because, they said, the award was too high.
On appeal, Mr. Belli appeared in court with an L-shaped package wrapped in cheap yellow paper, tied with soft white string. The judge and the opposing lawyer stared at it; the jurors suspected that the woman's severed leg was wrapped up in the package. After a couple of days, Mr. Belli began to move the package around on his desk. He did not open it, however, until he was in the midst of his summation. He held up Mrs. Jeffers' artificial leg. The defense lawyer started to object, then fell silent.
"Ladies and gentleman of the jury," Mr. Belli said, moving to the jurors, "this is what my pretty young client will wear for the rest of her life. Take it."
And with that, he dumped the leg on the lap of the first juror.
"Feel the warmth of life in the soft tissues of its flesh," he said, "feel the pulse of the blood as it flows through the veins, feel the marvelous smooth articulation at the new joint and touch the rippling muscles of the calf."
This time, the jury deliberated for only 20 minutes and awarded Mrs. Jeffers $100,000 -- $35,000 more than she got the first time and 10 times the going rate for the loss of a limb in those days.
"There may be better lawyers than I," Mr. Belli once said when he was in his prime, "but so far I haven't seen any of them in court."
A Showcase Office Tailored to His Style
As his fame spread and his practice grew -- in 1954 Life magazine called him the King of Torts -- the Belli office at 722 Montgomery Street developed a look not normally associated with the staid offices of proper lawyers. Mr. Belli's office seemed transmogrified, the story went, into the parlor of a bordertown bordello at the turn of the century.
Once his clients moved through a courtyard filled with wisteria, geraniums and small-leaf ivy and past the wrought-iron gate at the front door, they were surrounded with brocade and velvet, lavender-tinted windows, royal red Persian carpets and mahogany paneling. Above, four crystal chandeliers hung from a white ceiling flecked with gold trim that carried four gold cupids ariding.
On his desk he kept a jeweled crown (to hold paper clips and play "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" whenever it was moved) and to one side there was a skeleton, a female mannequin, some braids of garlic, apothecary bottles from Mr. Belli's grandmother's drug store, a splendid wet bar, a ship's wheel and hundreds of books. The west wall was of glass, so passing tourists could see the Great One at work. He loved it when they waved, and if he saw them, he always waved back.
In his later years, Mr. Belli's firm maintained a huge caseload. Some lawyers and disappointed clients claimed that he had accepted too many cases and that he was personally making mistakes he never made in his prime.
In 1988, for example, Mr. Belli and a colleague were fined $5,000 by a Federal judge in San Juan, P.R., because after fire had destroyed the Dupont Plaza Hotel there, they had filed a damage suit on behalf of the widow of a man they thought had been killed in the fire. In fact, the man had died 12 years earlier.
Mr. Belli steadfastly denied he was taking on too many cases and estimated in 1987 that he had won more than $350 million for clients through cases either won or settled.
In 1995, however, Mr. Belli announced that he was filing for protection under the bankruptcy laws. He said he had had a falling out with some of his former partners and was further made impecunious because of a divorce settlement. He said his expected cash flow from a major national breast implant case, in which he represented several clients, had been delayed.
But he added, "Any legitimate creditor will not lose a dime by our reorganization."
Mr. Belli's four previous marriages, to Elizabeth Ballantine Belli, Toni Nichols Belli, Joy Turney Belli, and Lia Triff Belli, ended in divorce.
In addition to his wife, whom he married on March 29, Mr. Belli's survivors include his children, Richard R., of Palo Alto, Calif., Johnnie Ballantine, of Littleton, Colo., Jeannie Belli, of San Francisco, Suzi Coffman, of Bangor, Me., Melvin Caesar Belli, of Sausalito, and Melia Belli, of New Delhi, and 12 grandchildren.
Photo: Melvin Belli. (The New York Times, 1993)