Missouri courts can’t stop him. KC-area lawyer keeps ripping people off, agency says.
The notices taped to the doors and windows outside Allan H. Bell’s office served as a warning.
“Do not give Mr. Bell any further money,” they alerted former clients of the elderly North Kansas City attorney, who primarily practiced immigration law.
The signs, in English and Spanish, told visitors the office was ordered closed.
They were posted after the investigative arm of the Missouri Supreme Court filed a motion asking that Bell be found guilty of criminal contempt. It’s an unusual step for the disciplinary office, one that could land Bell in jail.
The reason for the action: Bell continued to take new clients even after his law license was suspended in April because he was accused of taking tens of thousands of dollars from dozens of clients, according to the Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel, the agency charged with investigating attorney misconduct.
A staff member at Bell’s office said Bell backdated agreements to a time before he was suspended. Bell took money from clients who did not know he was operating without a license, according to the disciplinary office.
As he had before, when The Star previously reported on the complaints against him, Bell said he could not comment on the latest allegations because he suffers from memory loss and other medical problems.
In court documents, the 78-year-old attorney denied, to the best of his memory, that he took fees from clients for new work after he was suspended.
Bell, who became an attorney in 1967, was suspended on an interim basis after an audit showed settlement funds for 40 clients were deposited into his personal checking account because he did not use a registered trust account to keep client money separate, a state requirement.
The audit, an investigator believed, showed widespread misappropriation of client funds. Other lawyers called it stealing.
Yet Bell, even after filing to surrender his law license in June, continued to hold himself out as a lawyer authorized to practice out of his second-floor office at 2022 Swift St., according to the disciplinary counsel.
In court records, the office called Bell’s actions “willful disobedience” of his suspension. There was no indication, the agency said, that Bell would comply with a disbarment order.
Chief Disciplinary Counsel Alan Pratzel said in his nearly 13 years as head of the state’s attorney discipline system, he does not believe his office has had to file for criminal contempt. He called it an “extraordinary process that we normally do not have to engage in.”
It’s the most severe action the state agency has taken against Bell after Missouri courts have given him seven official warnings since 1994.
Bell wrote in a court filing last month that he was aware of 14 new complaints against him.
Reports of new clients
The disciplinary counsel said Bell told potential clients to come to his office after common working hours so it did not appear he was conducting business. An immigration attorney who practices near Bell’s office indicated that people in the area reported seeing lines of clients outside his door after normal hours, the office reported.
A month after Bell was suspended, the disciplinary office received a report from a Missouri Department of Labor and Industrial Relations employee, who said she spoke with one of Bell’s clients who paid him for representation that week.
She went to Bell’s office to ask if he was accepting new clients. Bell was, his secretary said, but he was out of the office, according to the motion. The woman was given his business card.
More than two months after Bell’s suspension, an attorney told the disciplinary office that one of his clients had paid Bell $5,000 for an immigration case but Bell did “no discernible work.”
The office reported that Bell demanded the client pay him to continue working on the matter, saying time was of the essence and deportation could come soon.
It had for others.
One of Bell’s clients, Ibrahim Mwangi, for example, was deported after Bell provided him “egregious ineffective assistance of counsel” and accessed his funds without his permission, according to his new attorney, Kelly Hewitt. Mwangi said some of his family members hired a criminal gang to persecute him over a land dispute in Kenya, a concern Hewitt said has been recognized as a basis for asylum.
Bell accepted $2,000 to hire an expert for Mwangi. Instead, Bell kept $1,500 of it and gave $500 to an art history professor to sign an expert report Bell wrote himself, according to Matthew Hoppock, an immigration attorney based in Overland Park.
As recently as June, calls to Bell’s firm were still answered “law office,” though no other attorneys worked there, according to the disciplinary office’s motion. Those who called were then directed to Bell.
Bell denied he backdated any agreements or asked clients to come after hours. His attorney said there was nothing nefarious about the timing of visits to his office because Bell typically kept his office hours well into the evening when he was licensed, something he continued as he worked to close his 52 years of practice.
David Bandré, a Jefferson City attorney representing Bell in his law license matter, said Bell collected fees owed to him from previous clients for work he did before his suspension. Bell believed such collections were proper, Bandré said.
Bell had hired a temporary secretary to answer his phone calls, according to his response in court filings. The secretary knew Bell was suspended and was told he was not taking new clients, Bell’s attorney wrote.
Immigration attorney: ‘He’s a crook’
Many of Bell’s clients were vulnerable. Most did not speak English as their first language and were not familiar with America’s legal system, the disciplinary office wrote.
In late May, the Chief Disciplinary Counsel said it had identified more than 25 instances of Bell’s misappropriation, totaling well over $100,000, from clients who were almost all immigrants.
Bell also repeatedly accepted sums of $10,000 to $30,000 from clients to work on immigration matters he never pursued, according to the motion.
The notices at Bell’s door cautioned visitors that his law office had been closed by order of the Chief Disciplinary Counsel. Other attorneys had been appointed as trustees to distribute his clients’ files, according to the notices.
Next to Bell’s office is another door with the words “Allan Bell Charters,” a travel agency he reportedly established in the 1970s. Bell was once quoted as telling the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle of the business: “Everyone who needs an immigration lawyer needs a travel agent.”
“We help you in,” the newspaper reported he said in 2017. “We help you out.”
The agency wasn’t Bell’s only business outside of law. Before he became an attorney, Bell founded a talent agency that handled bands, and he has said he booked well-known musicians such as rock and roll pioneer Chuck Berry. He was inducted into the Kansas Music Hall of Fame in 2017.
Between the two doors at his office hung a picture of the Statue of Liberty. On one of three chairs next to the doors sat a sign that displayed the word “Mexico” on a neon green background. Attached underneath was a smaller, red sign, showing the names of resort towns on the country’s Pacific coast, such as Puerto Vallarta and Acapulco.
The sign asked: “Or?”
Law books lined the hallway nearby. At Bell’s office, the appointed trustees found dead rodents on traps and mice feces on the floor, according to another immigration attorney who described recent photographs taken inside.
Other attorneys have wondered how Bell, the subject of at least seven complaints since mid-2017, remained licensed for so long.
In addition to the complaints, Bell has received seven official admonitions, which serve as warnings but do not restrict an attorney’s license. They have accused Bell throughout the years of, among other things, incompetently representing immigrants and once appearing in Johnson County District Court despite not being licensed in Kansas.
In 2015, the state supreme court fined Bell $1,500 and placed him on an 18-month probation for refusing to refund a client’s advanced fee unless the man withdrew a complaint against him, court records show.
At least three immigration attorneys interviewed by The Star said Bell should have faced harsher punishment years ago. He always seemed to get a slap on the wrist, one said.
An immigration attorney in the Kansas City area for 10 years, Hoppock said he has heard from multiple of Bell’s clients who said he was still setting up meetings and taking money for new work after he was suspended.
Hoppock has been working pro bono with some of Bell’s former clients, whom Bell “clearly ripped off,” he said. In each case, Bell overpromised or charged clients two or three times what was agreed upon, Hoppock said.
“He makes it really hard for people to get out from under his influence,” Hoppock said. “And he makes it really expensive.”
And then it took months to get the client’s file, Hoppock said. He compared it to pulling teeth.
Another immigration attorney, Angela Ferguson, described Bell’s fees as outrageous and excessive. One client was billed 10 times what she said she would expect for an attorney to charge to handle a visa case.
Jim Austin, an attorney who works with Ferguson at their Kansas City firm, said many clients feared filing complaints against Bell. Austin called it disappointing that the recent issues that led to Bell’s suspension were related to his personal injuries cases, not the immigration matters he and other attorneys complained about “all these years.”
“All these years,” Ferguson agreed.
The recent audit determined Bell frequently overdrew his personal account, where he also kept client funds. Bell rectified the overdraws by acquiring high-interest loans totaling more than $800,000, the audit showed. He used that money to pay not only clients and third parties but also office expenses, credit payments and repayments to other personal loan companies.
Bell’s misappropriation of client funds was described by several attorneys as stealing, something they said should get a lawyer disbarred.
Michael Townsend, who represents a Sugar Creek woman suing Bell for allegedly pocketing her $25,000 insurance claim, has said Bell should be investigated criminally.
“He’s a crook,” Hoppock said Tuesday. “I’ve never seen a case like Allan Bell.”
Ongoing investigation
The Missouri State Highway Patrol assisted the state Department of Labor this week with an investigative subpoena in relation to an investigation into Bell, according to Sgt. Bill Lowe, a patrol spokesman.
Asked about the subpoena, the labor department said it could not comment on ongoing investigations.
After Bell was suspended in Missouri, the Board of Immigration Appeals suspended Bell from practicing law before immigration judges.
That landed him on the Executive Office for Immigration Review’s list of hundreds of currently disciplined practitioners across the country. Bell is one of seven in Missouri.
When he filed to surrender his law license and apologized for breaching the rules of trust accounts, Bell said he was afflicted by Alzheimer’s Disease and had been seen by a neurologist at North Kansas City Hospital. Medical records showed Bell has advanced memory deficits and attention inefficiency, his attorney recently wrote in court records.
Bell reported he was injured in four different car crashes from 2012 to 2017, one of which he described as a near-death situation. He began noticing memory problems during the last three to five years, according to court documents.
Bell provided the disciplinary board with a letter he claimed he sent clients that stated he was retiring because of health reasons. It did not, however, mention his suspension, according to the disciplinary office.
In a call with The Star, Bell said he closed his office about two weeks ago. He referred questions about the disciplinary board’s motion to his attorney, saying Tuesday: “I really have no comment.”
Bell has previously said he believed he treated his clients properly and fairly. In court records, he said he served the public “reasonably well” for nearly 50 years by obtaining, among other things, a presidential pardon and many grants of asylum in immigration court.
Bandré, Bell’s attorney, said he could not provide a full response to the motion, only a blanket denial, because the disciplinary counsel did not include specific accusations, such as the names of complainants or dates and times of alleged acts.
His response questioned if Bell’s alleged actions, if proven true, warranted criminal contempt, which could lead to jail time or a fine, or civil contempt. If the disciplinary office is seeking criminal contempt, as it requested, Bandré said, Bell is entitled to more information.
The disciplinary office said it anticipated providing sworn testimony and evidence if the state supreme court ordered a hearing. But none was submitted in the motion so the office could present the pleading in a timely matter.
Bandré hoped to reach a settlement before the case went before a judge, he said. He called the motion for criminal contempt a rare move by the disciplinary office in a lawyer license case.
“These don’t happen,” he said. “I am unaware of the Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel in Missouri ever seeking a criminal contempt action.”
Beth Riggert, a spokesperson for the Missouri Supreme Court, said Bell’s motion to voluntarily surrender his license and the disciplinary office’s motion for him to be found in criminal contempt were under review.
