Daniel Neal Heller, 83, Lawyer Who ‘Beat the IRS’
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
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Daniel Neal Heller, who died August 3 at 83, was a Miami lawyer involved in many high-profile cases, but the best-known was his protracted tax-evasion dispute with the Internal Revenue Service that ended with his winning a $500,000 settlement from the agency. He later boasted of being called “the man who beat the IRS,” and said he donated the money to charity.
Pugnacious and driven, Heller served as general counsel for Miami newspapers, and was credited with winning the first Florida “Sunshine Law” case when he defended a reporter who’d been kicked out of a Miami Beach City Commission meeting and was then arrested. In 1990, he won a Florida-record $17.5 million divorce settlement for Bettina Batchelor, wife of aviation mogul George Batchelor, after threatening to contest a prenuptial agreement the couple had signed.
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