Legal troubles: Attorney discipline, month by month

Attorney discipline, month by month

January:

David Murdick‘s disbarment came after he pleaded guilty in January to involuntary manslaughter in relation to a drunk driving accident.

The Kansas City attorney struck an employee of the Missouri Department of Transportation while driving under the influence of alcohol. The worker, Clifton Scott, was trying to divert traffic from eastbound I-70 after an accident and was within an area blocked off by traffic cones and flares.

Murdick sped through the barriers and struck and killed Scott. He was sentenced to nine years in prison.

February:

Robert Mintz didn’t face any criminal charges, but he did admit to altering the scene of his girlfriend’s death.

Mintz and the woman, a recovering alcoholic and former attorney, had gone on a drinking bender the night before, which was just over a week after the woman was released from rehab. Mintz attended her graduation from the inpatient program.

After a night of drinking, Mintz carried the woman into her apartment as a “romantic gesture” and left her at the bottom of the stairs. The next morning he returned and discovered she was dead. A medical examiner would later conclude her death was caused by a fall down the stairs.

After finding the body, Mintz walked to the bar where they had been drinking, drove the woman’s car back to her apartment and placed her keys and phone inside. He also deleted text exchanges on both of their phones and made false statements to the police, though he later corrected himself.

The Kansas Supreme Court in February suspended Mintz indefinitely, and the Missouri Supreme Court followed with a reciprocal 32-month suspension of his Missouri license. The woman’s family settled a wrongful death suit against Mintz for $300,000.

March:

Daniel Whitworth, a Joplin attorney, embezzled almost $600,000 from 22 of his legal clients over the course of nearly a decade.

He got caught after Mid-Missouri Bank informed state authorities of a potential forgery on a $60,000 check, and an investigation followed. Whitworth pleaded guilty in March to forging the check, saying he used half the money to pay a tax debt and put the rest in his personal account. The investigation revealed the other money Whitworth had stolen over the years.

Whitworth was sentenced to two years in federal prison — he had faced up to 33 years for his crime. He was disbarred after voluntarily surrendering his law license.

April:

Jeffrey Witt pleaded guilty this summer to federal felony charges that included aggravated identity theft. The most heinous part of his crime is the identity he stole — his mother’s.

Witt took out a $100,000 line of credit under his mother’s name, using a second deed of trust on her house as collateral. The bank issued $60,000 of the loan in a treasurer’s check in his mother’s name, which was then deposited into Witt’s law firm bank account.

He was also involved in other schemes, including cashing legal client settlement checks without client knowledge.

He sought to flee the country last year, but by April Witt was standing in front of a federal judge after federal agents arrested him at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The Missouri Supreme Court disbarred him in June, he pleaded guilty to three felonies in July and was sentenced to 44 months in prison in October.

May:

A disciplinary panel recommended suspending Kansas City attorney Allison Bergman‘s license for two years, but the Missouri Supreme Court has yet to decide what punishment, if any, to impose.

Bergman is in the hot seat because of allegations stemming from her personal relationship with a client company’s ex-president. After a hearing in May, the panel found that she had a conflict of interest when she served as outside counsel for Kansas City Terminal Railway while she was having a sometimes sexual relationship with one of its then-top executives, Charles Mader.

The disciplinary information also said Bergman billed KCT for work she did for a corporation it did not own, but was partly owned by Mader.

The Supreme Court isn’t yet scheduled to hear Bergman’s case.

June:

OCDC got a notification of an overdraft of Joseph Masterson‘s trust account in October 2013, part of that 2010 rule, and an investigation revealed a history of problems.

Masterson was disbarred once before, after he was sentenced to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to battery and drug charges. The Missouri Supreme Court reinstated his license in 2002, but he continued to deal with issues, including losing legal jobs because of poor performance and drug use. OCDC ordered hair follicle drug testing, which revealed use of methamphetamine, amphetamine and cocaine within the previous month.

The Supreme Court disbarred Masterson again in June.

July:

Former Jackson County Circuit Court Administrator Teresa York‘s saga started in 2012, when she was asked to resign from the court, where she had worked since 1984, after allegations of embezzlement.

Court documents revealed that between January 2009 and June 2012, York used her court-paid credit card to purchase items for personal use. Some of her purchases included $46,535 for Apple computer products, $35,356 for gift cards and $6,446 for “personal items such as clothing and make-up.”

In July, York was sentenced to two years in federal prison for fraud. Two months later, the Missouri Supreme Court disbarred her.

August:

Anthony Cipriano represented the family of a man who was strangled in prison in a wrongful death suit.

According to court documents, Cipriano withdrew from the case because of a conflict of interest, but he still collected $48,666 in fees for administering the man’s estate and $200 for probate court cases after the wrongful death case settled for $146,000, even though the court had not approved those fees.

Cipriano surrendered his law license in August, which the Supreme Court quickly accepted. A criminal case against him is still pending.

September:

The Missouri Supreme Court suspended the license of former St. Louis Mayor Freeman Bosley in September over allegations that he mishandled client money.

The chief complaint was that Bosley frequently mingled client and firm money.

Perhaps the more unusual part of the case, aside from Bosley’s high-profile from time as mayor, was that Pratzel diverged from a disciplinary panel’s recommendation for a two-year suspension and asked for the suspension to be put on hold, which would have allowed Bosley to keep practicing.

The Supreme Court met the two parties in the middle with a six-month suspension.

October:

With a disguise of sunglasses, a baseball hat and a scarf wrapped around his face, Warren Gladders robbed three Missouri banks, and got away with the first two.

His third and final robbery ended with a shoot-out with a Missouri State Highway Patrol trooper in which the trooper was struck with a bullet, but survived. Gladders was shot in the leg, and then arrested.

Gladders, 65, was sentenced in October to a total of 70 years in prison for his crimes. The Missouri Supreme Court disbarred him after he pleaded guilty to crimes that included robbery, assault, armed criminal action and discharging a firearm in “furtherance of a violent crime.”

November:

Richard Turner, the Harrison County prosecutor-elect, admitted to stealing more than half a million dollars from an elderly client in federal court last month.

Turner, of Bethany, became the attorney-in-fact for an elderly client in 2004, but later overstepped his bounds when he created a trust for her, naming himself the trustee and had the woman, who had short-term memory impairment, sign the document that he then notarized.

He then started embezzling money from the trust into his personal account, ultimately obtaining $540,803.86. He tried to take more than $728,000. He also didn’t pay taxes on the embezzled fund, and now owes $154,453.

He pleaded guilty in November to wire fraud, which comes with a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, and false statements on a tax return, which comes with a maximum penalty of three years in prison and a $100,000 fine. His case is still pending and the Missouri Supreme Court has not yet taken any disciplinary action against him.

December:

James Wirken‘s problems also started in 2012, when he surrendered his law license after state authorities accused him of stealing money from clients.

Wirken pleaded guilty to the charges, admitting he wrote six checks totaling $116,730 from his law firm’s trust account, which he used to pay personal debts. A press release from the U.S. attorney’s office also said that Wirken engaged in a long-term “unethical, unsustainable Ponzi-type business model” that led him to borrow more than $800,000 from a several clients from 2007 to 2012.

Earlier this month, he was sentenced to 13 months in prison.