722 Montgomery Street |
It's fitting that
the Montgomery Street office building of Melvin Belli,
the King of Torts, is mired in a seemingly unending morass of lawsuits brought
by Belli's survivors, former business associates, neighbors, and the City.
The flamboyant and influential Belli was a pivotal figure in today's litigious
society as an innovator in the area of personal injury law. He took on big
corporations and controversial clients. Belli's clients included Errol Flynn,
Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, Lana Turner, Mae West, Muhammad Ali, and Jack
Ruby. The Gold Rush era building at 722 Montgomery Street is a historical
landmark and the offices where the renowned attorney held court. Eventually
reduced to a ramshackle, the offices were once a monument to Belli's $60
million success. Belli died in 1996 at the age of 88, just a few months
after filing for bankruptcy. Parties involved in acrimony over the landmark
property and/or a fortune in unfinished legal cases include Belli's son
Melvin Caesar Belli, the senior Belli's wife of three months Nancy Ho Belli,
the City's Building Inspection Department, and others. Particularly galling
to San Franciscans is the fact that Mrs. Belli, who announced the ground
breaking for a Belli museum on the site in 1997,
sat on the San Francisco Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board while she
allowed the Belli building fall into ruin.
Detail
I
Detail
II
Detail
III
More
about the Bellis |
