But seeing Belli's return address was a special fright. He was, after all, the "King of Torts," who claimed to have won more than $600 million in lawsuit awards for his clients. His return address led one to believe that his share of the awards was enough to buy his own building, which took up the entire northeast quadrant of San Francisco.
And he was not beneath going after relatively small fish like me. One of his Hawaii cases involved a piddling $2.5 million Big Island auto accident.
Most alarming was that my address on the letter was actually typed in. If it was a mailing label, I could write it off as a mass mailing. But Belli had business specifically with me.
When I opened the envelope, it was worse than I feared. He wasn't writing on behalf of a client. His beef was personal: What did he do, he wanted to know, to cause the Honolulu Star-Bulletin to describe him as "infamous?"
I rushed to my stack of newspapers and, sure enough, a story about the local class-action lawsuit filed by victims of the Marcoses - some of whom Belli represented - called the attorney "infamous."
I was aghast. I was sure the reporter meant "colorful" or "flamboyant" and didn't intend to condemn Belli with the same word Franklin Delano Roosevelt reserved for Japanese invaders in his "Day of Infamy" speech. But she did.
I don't know how many times I've warned reporters about the dangers of labeling people with superfluous adjectives. Why did we have to prove my point on a guy who had won more than half a billion dollars in damage suits?
I turned to the dictionary for salvation. Sometimes a word doesn't mean what it seems or has a second meaning that bails you out.
"Infamous," according to Webster's, means, "having a very bad reputation; notorious; in disgrace or dishonor."
Not much help there. It's a word you would apply to John Dillinger, Jesse James or Pol Pot, not to one of the nation's most distinguished attorneys. I could only be grateful she didn't call him "heinous."
Getting desperate, I looked up "notorious." One of the meanings is "well-known; publicly discussed." Now there was something I could work with. I put on my best tap-dancing shoes and wrote him back.
ALL our reporter meant, I explained to Belli, was that he was world-famous - his name on the tips of the most influential tongues around the globe. I apologized if her choice of words caused him any misunderstanding.
His reply came quickly. Very clever, he said, but not clever enough. Did I think I was dealing with an amateur? He let me squirm for a while longer before magnanimously letting me off the hook. He was only pulling my leg all along, he said. He accepted my apology and said he would buy me a drink the next time he was in Honolulu.
And so ended my brief encounter with courtroom greatness. I guess with Belli's death Tuesday, the statute of limitations ran out on the unintended insult we delivered upon him. I only regret that we never had that drink. I expect it would have been a very enjoyable couple of hours.
