Miami litigator Andrew Hall, who took on eclectic cases like battling Sudan for damages in the USS Cole bombing and defending Nixon White House aide John Ehrlichman, died Monday on his 75th birthday.

The managing partner of the eight-attorney Hall, Lamb, Hall & Leto was born Andrzej Horowitz in a Warsaw, Poland, basement in 1944 when his Jewish father was posing with forged papers as a gentile and his mother and 9-year-old brother hid in an office closet. They escaped through sewers to Krakow and then to Germany in 1946, were separated and reunited, and took the Hall name in an Ellis Island-style change. His challenging early years would frame his legal career.