The Grid

Stately Funeral, Sordid Practice
As old North Beach gathered in the mist for a funeral at Sts. Peter and Paul Church, S.F. homicide inspectors cracked the seal on a Mission Street law office. The mourners huddled on the sidewalk were awaiting the arrival of the casket. The homicide dicks converging on 1650 Mission St., Suite 500, were looking for clues to the killer of the casket's occupant, attorney Dennis Natali.

On Nov. 21, the day Natali was buried, the cameras and headlines focused principally on one of the native San Franciscan's pallbearers, District Attorney Terence Hallinan. Hallinan had spent a fair part of the previous 24 hours extricating himself from his press statements; he'd claimed a link -- as yet unsubstantiated -- between the shooting of Natali, his friend of 30 years, and the gangland slaying of a reputed Vietnamese crime boss who had been killed blocks away, just minutes apart from Natali, in the wee hours of Nov. 15. Less remarked on by the media were other close friends of Natali's, such as Angelo Quaranta, the Italian restaurateur, and Dan Addario, the DA's top investigator, who joined Hallinan in pulling the gleaming box from the hearse and hoisting it into the sanctuary of the church.

With Natali's death still a mystery, detective work settled squarely on the cases that the dead lawyer handled -- dozens of civil disputes, ranging from unpaid loans and car accidents to bitterly contested estate battles and divorces. The path ahead, drawn from case files, will take investigators far from Natali's social orbit, centered in the city's old Italian quarter and marked each week with lunch on Friday at Moose's with locally well-connected lawyers and pols. Natali's attorney-client ties were to lesser lights -- small-time bar owners and deli operators. Like Hae Pun Yun and Duk Ki Yun, whom Natali represented in 1993. The Yuns were accused of defaulting on a loan from the former owner of a Mission Street bar that they had bought and then of stripping the watering hole of its furnishings, including a liquor license, when they abandoned the property.

More was at stake, however, in Natali's most recent case, which he joined less than a month before his death. The suit grew out of a thicket of alleged deceit among siblings of a large local Palestinian family fighting over the trust of their deceased father, Saleem H. Totah. "I've been a litigator for 20 years, and this is as unpleasant as it gets," says one lawyer connected to the case, who requested anonymity. "This family is filled with hate and meanness [for each other]." The acrimony revolves around an estate with assets worth more than $2 million, including two rental properties in S.F. and several investment accounts. Even the precise worth was in dispute -- so much so that a special trustee was appointed in 1995 to calculate the value, after three of the siblings who legally control the trust had a falling out. Two of the three accused the other of sapping the estate, and vice versa. "I would walk into court, and they would be screaming at each other," the lawyer says. At one hearing, one sibling slapped another, and in another additional bailiffs were called to keep the peace.

According to a different lawyer in the case, Natali's official entrance into the matter on Oct. 18 scuttled a tentative settlement of the dispute. This lawyer says Natali, who took the case on behalf of Totah's widow, was actually working at the behest of one of the siblings, Raymond Totah. Raymond and Natali, friends of more than a decade, were often seen together in the back of the courtroom at hearings before Natali came to represent the widow. "We thought we had it resolved," says the lawyer. He adds that the "degree of loyalty was something I have never seen before," referring to Ray Totah and Natali. "It was as if [Natali] were a member of the family."

With Natali now laid to rest, his killing will create anything but peace for police -- and the litigants and lawyers whose paths intersected with his legal practice.

Lee Does the Loop the Loophole
After tearing huge loopholes into an ordinance prohibiting the city government from signing contracts with firms doing business with the despots ruling Myanmar (formerly Burma), City Purchaser Ed Lee is having second thoughts. Under pressure from the supervisor who wrote the legislation, Tom Ammiano, Lee withdrew modifications to the ordinance just five days after issuing them. "I want to make sure that my regulations reflect the wishes of the Board of Supervisors," says Lee. "We may have been premature with our rules and regulations."

The withdrawn regs exempt all real estate and construction deals, even though the original legislation was meant to cover all city business with the private sector (see "Abandoned Burma Ban," Nov. 20). Lee's retreat should attract more attention to influential lobbyists who want to shape the ordinance to benefit their corporate clients. At the same time, the purchaser's backpedaling coincided with a bit of finger-pointing inside City Hall.

Lee's aborted regs would have paved the way for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America Inc. to secure a $137 million contract to build a "people mover" at San Francisco International Airport. Mitsubishi has investment ties to Myanmar. That had Solem & Associates, the lobbyist for Mitsubishi's competitor, ABB Diamler-Benz Transportation Inc., raising hell, and suggesting Mitsubishi's lobbyist, William Coblentz, had influenced Lee -- either directly or indirectly. Lee, by attempting to exempt real estate and construction projects, would have opened the door on hundreds of millions of dollars in municipal contracts for Mitsubishi and all other companies with ties to Burma.