[4][better source needed] He was also the attorney for Jack Ruby, who shot Lee Harvey Oswald days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

[7][8] Following his admission to the California bar, 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.

In his book Ready for the Plaintiff, Belli notes legal cases of negligence cited by personal-injury attorneys, like himself, to win in court.

The facing was a slab of vitreous marble, whose adhesion was weakened by the climate; it fell off the side of the building and injured a passerby, who sued the builder.

After winning a court case, Belli would raise a Jolly Roger flag over his 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.

[11] In 1969 a man called San Francisco police, identifying himself as the serial killer known only as The Zodiac, and agreed to call talk show host Jim Dunbar on Dunbar's morning television talk show A.M. San Francisco if either Belli or attorney F. Lee Bailey were present on air.

[16] Belli enjoyed his frequent television and movie appearances; in 1965, he told Alex Haley, interviewing him for Playboy, that he "might have been an actor" if he had not become an attorney.

[17] He appeared in the Albert and David Maysles documentary Gimme Shelter (1970), which featured his representation and facilitation of The Rolling Stones' staging of the disastrous December 6, 1969, Altamont Free Concert.

[4][better source needed] In 1996 Belli recited the oratory to David Woodard's brass fanfare setting of Mark Twain's "The War Prayer" at Old First Church in San Francisco.

Belli was the author of several books, including the six-volume Modern Trials (written between 1954 and 1960) which has become a classic textbook on the demonstrative method of presenting evidence.

Belli accused his ex-wife of having an affair with archbishop Desmond Tutu and of throwing one of his dogs off the Golden Gate Bridge.

[5] He was remembered as, "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.