Mohamed Hadid's neighbors awarded $2.6million in mega-mansion legal battle trends now

Neighbors who forced the demolition of celebrity real estate tycoon Mohamed Hadid's notorious Los Angeles mega-mansion have been awarded $2.6million toward the cost of the legal fees they ran up during almost five years of bitter court battles with the maverick developer.

'I feel vindicated,' the neighbors' leader, 81 year-old Joe Horacek, declared to DailyMail.com. 'Now I just want Hadid to pay up and go away.'

But Hadid, 74, angrily denounced the decision by LA Superior Court Judge Craig Karlan to make him pay his opponents' attorney charges, telling DailyMail.com, 'This is a joke – it's crazy,' and threatening to counter sue the neighbors 'for two or three hundred million dollars.'

The saga over the giant house in ritzy Bel Air, that Hadid hoped to sell for $100 million, began in 2015 when he was criminally prosecuted by the City of LA for refusing to comply with 'stop work' orders issued because the structure grew to twice its originally permitted 15,000 sq ft, earning it the nickname 'Starship Enterprise'. 

The City ordered Hadid – father of supermodels Bella and Gigi Hadid and star of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills – to reduce the size of the house to meet planning regulations or tear it down. But by 2018, neither of those orders had been obeyed.

So residents directly below the huge, hilltop mansion, accusing the City of dragging its feet enforcing its orders, filed a civil lawsuit, claiming that the massive, illegally-built 'monstrosity' tottering above them, complete with its own 70-seat IMAX theater, could come crashing down the hill and destroy their homes.

In November 2019, after hearing from engineers and architects, Judge Karlan agreed with the suing neighbors – Horacek and his wife Bibi, plus John and Judith Bedrosian – and declared Hadid's mansion a 'clear and present danger' to the local community, ordering it to be torn down.

The neighbors' battle with the Palestinian-American entrepreneur came to a climax two years later in September 2021 at the end of a six-week trial when the jury in Judge Karlan's Santa Monica court room awarded the Horaceks and the Bedrosians a total of $2.9million in damages.

Hadid claimed victory because that award was just a fraction of the $26million the neighbors were seeking in damages.

Also, the $2.6million in legal fees Judge Karlan awarded this week – the judge's last decision before retiring from the bench aged 56 – didn't come close to matching the $9million the neighbors estimated they spent on lawyers.

Still, Horacek, a retired entertainment lawyer whose clients have included movie star Michael Douglas and TV's Dr. Phil, told DailyMail.com that he feels 'vindicated' by the judge's ruling to grant the neighbors' motion for legal fees, even though they won't cover the sum he and his fellow residents shelled out.