Bergstrom, Robert W

Chicago lawyer.

Robert Bergstrom was born in Chicago in 1918. In 1940, he was admitted to the Illinois bar and began his practice in Chicago, specializing in representing entertainment corporations. In 1959, Bergstrom took a case representing Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, Darryl F. Zanuck Productions, and fifty-seven motion picture theaters that had exhibited the film Compulsion. The film was based on the book of the same name by Meyer Levin, which was a fictionalized account of the famed "Crime of the Century", the 1924 kidnap/murder case of Leopold and Loeb. Nathan F. Leopold Jr., the surviving partner of the criminal duo, brought suit for an accounting for profits (approximately $2,900,000) for the use of Leopold's crime and trial. After several trials and appeals, the decision was finally made in favor for the defendants (Meyer Levin et al.), in 1970. Bergstrom died June 4, 2006.