Mission Hills’ blow-dried Elmer Gantry, The Right Reverend Robert Meneilly,
I first met Russell “Rusty” Leffel 40 plus years ago…
A fellow Kansas City lawyer, he had graduated from KU Law four years before me. We were both active in Johnson County Republican politics and I supported him when he ran for Congress in 1984. I liked Rusty but he had an irksome trait of naiveté combined with self-righteousness that surfaced during the campaign.
For example, Rusty seemed inordinately impressed with himself for leading a group at KU his senior year that had some juvenile name like “The Phantom Five” or “The Secret Seven.”
This group was started by Leffel to initiate a “dialogue” between the leftist radicals-who burned down the Student Union that year, 1970-and the other students, in order to “find common ground.” Another friend of mine also tried to “reach out,” to begin a “conversation” with militant black students and ended up being so badly beaten up for his efforts that he was hospitalized.
Rusty was unfazed by the fact that such attempts were abject failures and that any sentient human should have known that they were doomed to fail at a time when the different factions on campus were engaged in a literal shooting war. (Yet another acquaintance was killed as a result of this gun violence.)
In fact, Rusty was convinced that this fatuous exercise was a sterling credential qualifying him for high office. (I thought of him when I saw “Coexist” bumper stickers on Priuses in the wake of 9-11.)
Later on I had the misfortune to have a lawsuit in which Rusty “represented” someone I was suing. I use the term loosely because Leffel got in and out of the case three different times. He would show up at court hearings where the judge required his client (“Mr. Jones”) to have an attorney present and then would withdraw as soon as the hearing was over.
In the meantime, Leffel’s client acted “pro se”, i.e. he acted as his own lawyer.
This meant that Mr. Jones was free to engage in every kind of unethical conduct imaginable, against both me and my client, in order to get us to drop the claim against him.
These include calling my boss at my law firm (“Do you know you have a paranoid schizophrenic working for you?”), threatening to bring criminal charges against my client’s brother, verbally abusing me and my office staff, threatening to file an ethical complaint against me with the Kansas Bar Disciplinary Administrator’s Office, and physically assaulting me at a deposition. (Later, several years after the case was over, I was at a high school basketball game where my son was playing. During the halftime I was outside the gym, talking to another parent, when I felt someone punch me in the small of the back. I turned around in surprise, only to see Jones, Leffel’s client, standing there smirking. He said, “I saw where your old law firm went out of business. I shouldn’t be surprised when it had terrible lawyers like you working for it.”)
Since Jones was not a lawyer none of the legal ethics rules prohibiting this kind of abuse applied. Leffel had the best of both worlds, getting paid but having no responsibility for what went on, especially if these scorched earth tactics worked and got us to give up and go away.
I tried complaining to Rusty about what his intermittent client was doing, some of which he witnessed, but he simply wrung his hands and said he was helpless to stop this bully.
Matters got to the point after one hearing where I told Jones that I would take him outside the courthouse and further disfigure his already repulsive face, fit only for scaring small children. Rusty stood there and whined ineffectually while I delivered this verbal beat down, “Please, Dwight, please! This is cruel and uncalled for!” My comments must have worked because Jones never said another discouraging word to me again, at least until after the case was over and he paid what he owed.
In the end, I concluded that Rusty Leffel was weak willed and devious, i.e. he enabled a dishonest and bullying client, by going along with his abusive behavior. As long as he got paid ($150.00? $200.00?) per court appearance he tolerated his erstwhile client engaging in unethical and even criminal activities.
The case went on for three years and generated hundreds and hundreds of pages of pleadings, document production, and deposition transcripts. By allowing his client to drag the matter out for so long, with no valid defense to our modest claim, Leffel cost both sides in fees a sum representing two or three times the actual amount in controversy. By thinking he could manipulate the legal process in this manner to his benefit, Leffel also squandered a large part of people’s lives, not least of it his own.
Fast forward 30 years and Rusty is back in my headlights.
He owns a vacant lot in Mission Hills, which he is apparently unable or unwilling to sell.
Paraphrasing Robert Louis Stephenson’s classic volume of children’s poetry, A Child’s Garden of Verses, Leffel has created A Child’s Garden of Clichés, Leftist Variety.
To wit: he has caused the vacant lot to be adorned with “installations”, sculptures/signs which look like they were done by my grandchildren’s pre-school art class.
The first piece I saw was “Reunite Families”, which I took as a heartfelt call for opening the Southern Border to illegal immigrants, especially if they had children with them when they crossed the Rio Grande. As Jay Leno once said, “Undocumented immigrants is code for unregistered Democrats.”
Next, we have a pro-impeachment montage, first with a black swathed Lady Liberty, then with two signs with quotes from the Presidential Oath of Office. This pompous, pat-on-your-own-back symbolic message was from people who tried to block a duly elected president from taking office and to destroy his presidency before he was even sworn in.
Next, we had the Green New Deal mantra, which has now even been repudiated by noted right wing corporate shill Michael Moore and former climate change activist and Obama administration official Michael Shellenberger. This was followed by anti-gun messages, which ring a little hollow now that we’re going to defund the police and when calling 911 is an act of white privilege, i.e. you’re on your own as far as defending yourself.
After that came the COVID attack, which places the blame on President Trump for not preparing the nation for a disease which had never been encountered before. After all, no other country has “Failed to prevent its spread.”
Most recently we got the obligatory tribute to Black Lives Matter. Continue reading →
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