Steele claims malpractice by his lawyers

BOISE (AP) — A northern Idaho attorney convicted in an unsuccessful murder-for-hire scheme has filed a malpractice lawsuit aimed at the lawyers who represented him in his federal trial.

Edgar Steele, 68, was convicted of four felonies in 2011 after authorities said he tried to have his wife and her mother killed by a handyman he hired to plant a car bomb. Steele, who called himself the “attorney of the damned” for representing clients like the founder of the Aryan Nations, was sentenced to 50 years for the murder plot.

The bomb did not explode, and Cyndi Steele has supported her husband, proclaiming his innocence and saying he was targeted for his anti-government views.

In a lawsuit filed in Ada County, the Idaho Statesman reports that Steele complains his trial defense was impaired specifically by the malpractice of Robert McAllister of Denver.

One month after Steele’s conviction, McAllister was disbarred and convicted on fraud charges.

“McAllister’s representation of Edgar Steele was clouded, distorted and diminished by the conflict of interest arising from his concerns about his own pending disbarment and prosecution,” Steele’s attorney, Wesley Hoyt, wrote in the court complaint.

Prosecutors said McAllister, himself a former federal prosecutor and once considered one of Denver’s top criminal defense attorneys, stole more than $1 million from a client whose assets had been frozen by a judge. The client hid money the government hadn’t seized by depositing it with McAllister, according to the charges against him, and then McAllister allegedly used the money to buy a house, creating phony documents to make it appear the funds were in a savings account.

McAllister ultimately pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit financial fraud and one count of bankruptcy fraud, and was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison.

Co-counsel Gary Amendola, of Coeur d’Alene, who declined to comment for this story, is being sued over claims that he failed to bring McAllister’s inadequacies to the court’s attention.

Steele, who claims his attorneys’ negligence led to a “wrongful conviction,” said he was never told McAllister was under investigation or that he was going through a bankruptcy.

“McAllister was ‘asleep at the switch’ and so distracted by his personal problems that he could not function properly and thus was not effective in any way,” Steele wrote in his own affidavit filed in 2011, after his conviction.

The case has been assigned to 4th District Judge Mike Wetherell. No hearings have yet been scheduled.