Maybe Mark Melchiori’s big mistake was picking the wrong guy to rip off. It’s not clear who the right person might have been, but in hindsight, it most definitely was not Hollywood director Robert Zemeckis, famous for such blockbusters as Forrest Gump and Back to the Future.
Halfway into an $8 million home addition job on Zemeckis’s Montecito estate, the movie director got wind that Melchiori, then running one of Santa Barbara’s flagship construction companies, had not paid any of the subcontractors. At that time — it was June 2012 — Zemeckis had just written Melchiori a check for $350,000.
As Zemeckis would testify in Judge James Herman’s courtroom last week, he called Melchiori “hundreds of times,” demanding an explanation. Not once, he claimed, did he ever get a call back. “He disappeared like a thief into the night,” Zemeckis testified.