Seeing Jim Wirken’s personal life and his career as a lawyer spiral downhill has unsettled and disappointed me.
On Wednesday, the 70-year-old former lawyer was sentenced to 13 months in federal prison for money laundering.
He had pleaded guilty in May to one felony count, admitting that he took more than $116,000 from a client and used it to pay off a loan. Two years ago he was disbarred after the Missouri Supreme Court determined that he had improperly “borrowed” about $800,00 from seven clients.
Jim Wirken
I’ve known Jim a long time, perhaps since I covered the Jackson County Courthouse for The Star in the 1970s, although I don’t specifically remember him from those years. In the late ’80s or early ’90s, I used to see him at the Rockhill Tennis Club, where I played numerous times as a guest, and later when his son Matt and our son Charlie were in the same class at Visitation Grade School and played football together.
In more recent years, I’d see him occasionally at the Grand Street Cafe, where he went for drinks almost every night and dined frequently. One time when Patty and I ran into him there, he and his family were celebrating some special occasion. We chatted with them for a few minutes before taking a table, and later we discovered that Jim had arranged for the waiter to give our bill to him.
My impression of Jim was always that he had an ego as big as his personality but that he was a decent fellow. I remember one time when he was doing some heavy-duty landscaping work at the Rockhill Club, and I thought, “Wow, that’s some serious volunteer service for your club.” I remember a day when a kid suffered a broken arm during a Visitation football game and Jim used a magazine to fashion a temporary splint to stabilize the boy’s arm.
Jim was definitely a self-promoter, however. He loved the limelight and loved being in the news. For a few years, he had a Sunday morning show called “Wirken on the Law” on KMBZ radio. More recently, he represented Mayor Mark Funkhouser and his wife Gloria Squitiro at the height of their unpopularity, when they were fighting a racial discrimination suit stemming from mistreatment of a mayor’s office employee. (The case was settled in the employee’s favor.)
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Jim apparently began stealing from clients in 2007 and for the first few years thereafter was able to maintain the image of a successful, go-to lawyer. He was as bombastic as ever and still hung out at Grand Street Cafe.
The first inkling I had that something was askew was when I ran into him one day, asked how his wife was doing, and he replied, “She left me. Just up and left!” He said that in a way designed to impart the impression that was still just as surprised and perplexed as the day she moved out. I probed a bit further but quickly saw that he was holding fast to his story that he’d been unceremoniously dumped for no good reason.
That could have been around 2007, but I don’t recall.
The next thing I knew he was charged with money laundering a few years ago. As recently as a year or so ago, he rented space in the Plaza office building where my dentist had her practice. According to a story that went up on The Star’s website today, he now lives in a recreational vehicle that he also uses as an office for a legal consulting business he operates.
It will be interesting to see if Jim can make a comeback once he gets out of prison. It wouldn’t surprise me. If he lives long enough, he may well get his law license back some day. He’s not the kind of guy to yield the spotlight easily or to let ignominy prevail.
I do feel quite sure that, assuming he survives his prison stint, he’ll be back at the Grand Street Cafe…It might be quite a while, though, before he’s able to pick up other people’s dinner tabs. He’s got a lot of money to pay back to clients he “borrowed” from.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
Burnin’ the midnight oil, I see! ;)
Jim, Nice work on Jim Wirken. Had never heard of him, but now I think I know him — a testament to your skill. Sounds like the kind of person who makes KC so interesting, though I expect his clients have another adjective in mind.
Thanks, Tim. I feel very badly for the people he gouged, for small fortunes. I can imagine how someone would feel if they won a big judgment after years of skirmishing in the courts and then, bam, it’s gone; your lawyer spent it.
I saw that you all on the eastern front had a terrible killing recently — the 38-year-old guy who was baited into a fight on Gravois and then beaten to death with hammers by three or four young thugs. Unbelievably senseless.
This morning, I heard from two friends who had dealings with Wirken, and what they had to say tends to belie my statement that Wirken had struck me as “a decent fellow.” (Of course, when a guy picks up an $80 or so dinner tab for you, it tends to color your impression.)
Anyway, one person who had dealings with him and his law firm over the years said that former employees of Wirken had told him Wirken “could be difficult to work for.”
Another friend more than corroborated that when he recounted how a very brief, 2011 employment stint with Wirken unfolded. Here’s what happened.
My friend answered an employment ad that Wirken had posted. Wirken hired him after a breakfast interview. A few days later, before formally starting work, my friend helped Wirken move his office from one location to another. My friend wrote:
“Wirken was incredibly abusive to the guys helping him and toward the end of the day was being pretty mean to me as well. By the end (of the day), I had a bad feeling.”
Two days later my friend reported for his first day of work.
“Wirken was verbally abusive to me the minute I got in there. He was showing me how to divide all his phone messages and telling me that I wasn’t doing it quickly enough.”
At one point during the day, my friend said, a man who had done some repair work for Wirken a year earlier came into the office and confronted Wirken about money still owed. The man said he wasn’t going to leave until he got the money, and Wirken rooted around and came up with some cash.
Having seen and experienced more than enough, my friend contrived an excuse to leave the office for a while. He walked out and never went back.
Later, Wirken called my friend at home.
“I didn’t answer it. He left a message and said he was sorry that it didn’t work out but that he was going to let me go. Hah!”
…That testimony is good enough for me to conclude that my impression about Wirken being “a decent fellow” was wrong…And in any future posts I’ll be referring to him as Wirken, not Jim.
This is very common among solo practitioners who struggle to make ends meet and then wind upgetting shafted for looting a trust account, or some other malfuntion of being over worked.
Two of the best attorneys I know (both liberals, by the way)have both had their tickets suspended, one for dipping into a client’s trust account and the other for missing a deadline on a case he had devoted 100s of hours on with very little remuneration.
In the meantime attorneys in the large firms can virtually get away with murder without so much as a slap on the wrist. If you want to see stratification and inequality of treatment, check out the legal “profession”.