Candidate Has Stormy Background Newspaper Columnist Quit Practicing Law In ‘89

A former lawyer who once smashed his wife’s car with a baseball bat is now Chewelah’s front-running mayoral candidate.

Lew Arnold, 51, conducted a one-man demolition derby in front of the Colville police station after a 1983 car chase through town.

He paid a $200 fine for negligent driving, but escaped a malicious mischief charge. Legally, it was his own car that he pulverized.

“I didn’t think she ought to be driving around like a crazy woman,” Arnold said of the woman who regularly traded domestic violence charges with him before they divorced.

Arnold said he was angry with his wife for taking financial ledgers from his Colville law office, where she worked as a secretary. He said he was starting to drive home when “she came screaming around the corner.”

“I did a U-turn and took out after her,” he said, noting she eluded him in traffic but he found her car at the police station. “I don’t know why she didn’t get charged.”

Although Arnold said he was never convicted of domestic violence, public records show he was booked into the Stevens County Jail three times in 1988 and 1989. Court documents show an April 1989 fourth-degree assault charge - based on a threat to kill his wife - was resolved with a plea bargain.

Arnold was required to stay out of trouble for six months in exchange for dismissal of the charge.

“There’s a mistake in the record there,” Arnold said. “That was (Prosecutor Jerry) Wetle’s offer and I refused to take it. I said, ‘Go ahead and take me to trial.”’

Documents bearing Arnold’s distinctive signature show he requested the deal.

He said he doesn’t consider himself a violent person, and noted his police record is clean before and after his second marriage.

“I did have a bad marriage,” Arnold acknowledged. “Does that disqualify me for office? Maybe. I don’t know.”

The voters’ answer in September’s three-way primary was to give Arnold a six-vote lead over his closest competitor, Ron McCoy.

Arnold is well known as a longtime area resident, but he has lived in town only since April. He moved into an apartment in the back of the Chewelah Independent newspaper office, where he writes a column.

Some critics suspect he doesn’t really live there, but the apartment has a decidedly lived-in look.

Questions about Arnold aren’t limited to his marital problems and his residency. There’s also his record as an attorney.

Arnold claims he quit practicing law in 1989 to become a part-time laborer and newspaper columnist because he was “burned out” with the legal profession.

He insisted in a Sept. 8 interview that “there were no disciplinary proceedings” pending when his license was suspended in 1988 for failure to pay bar association dues and lack of continuing legal education. A complaint already had been resolved, he said.

Washington State Bar Association documents tell a different story. At least one complaint, filed in 1987, was under active investigation in 1988 and resulted in a September 1989 order for Arnold to appear before the bar disciplinary board on that and “other matters.”

Bar staff attorney Randy Beitel said in an October 1989 letter that he anticipated “several additional matters” would be added to the agenda.

Arnold said one of the bar complaints against him was filed by a client he represented in a drunken-driving case: “It was over fees as I recall.”

“I will be drafting and filing a formal complaint regarding all of the various charges against Mr. Arnold,” Beitel wrote to one of the complainants, Springdale-area resident Jean Bell.

Bell and her late husband were among 23 parties who hired Arnold to protect them in a foreclosure on property they were buying from a middleman who failed to pay the original owner or to build the roads he promised.

Beitel said his investigation showed Arnold violated seven rules of attorney conduct: He failed to tell his clients they had conflicting interests; didn’t deliver a required refund; asked for more money than agreed; failed to keep his clients informed; accepted a settlement without consulting all his clients, some of whom objected; quit without telling his clients; and refused to turn over files to their new attorney.

Court records show that, after clients discovered Arnold’s license had been suspended, they obtained an emergency order for him to turn over payments he had been collecting. The clients complained he hadn’t put the money in a bank trust account as agreed.

In addition to investigating Arnold for bad lawyering, the bar association probed his role in another land transaction that went awry. A Springdale couple complained that Arnold traded them land to which he initially lacked clear title.

Arnold said he wasn’t aware of the bar investigator’s findings against him.

“We had a hearing in Seattle,” he said. “I don’t recall any result, I really don’t.”

Arnold admitted he wouldn’t believe a story like that from someone else.

But bar association records also show no results from the investigation. Complainants believe the charges were dropped in exchange for Arnold agreeing to stay out of the legal profession.

U.S. Bankruptcy Court records reveal another sour land transaction involving Arnold.

He was buying and selling land on contract, collecting payments from his buyers without paying the woman who was selling the land to him, according to documents in the Chapter 11 bankruptcy Arnold filed in January 1986.

The land owner, Sarah Tuveson, complained that Arnold stripped the 170 acres of most of its marketable timber and sold some of the land while failing to pay her.

Arnold said he withheld payments because of a legal dispute over the logging, which he called “site preparation for a resale.” He said he eventually paid Tuveson and cleared up the transactions.

In the years since then, Arnold said he has pared his monthly expenses to about $200. This spring, he moved from a ramshackle home on the flank of Chewelah Mountain to a rustic apartment.

Arnold indulges his ascetic lifestyle with jerry-built ham radio equipment, an unlicensed community radio station and a Web page he calls “Squalor.”

Like his “Question Guy” column in the Independent, Arnold’s Internet offerings are a bit thick for many readers.

Flashes of wit are sandbagged among lines such as this: “Once upon a time, the Supreme Commander In Chief and (duly-elected) Omnipotent Potentate for the Township of Squalor was endowed with powers far beyond those of merely mortal public officials.”

In person, Arnold seems different: thoughtful, articulate, bright.

He said he’s discouraged by rumor-mongering that goes beyond his well-known faults. He has considered, but rejected, dropping out of the race. “I’d like people to understand that I do care about the city government,” he said. “I do care about people, and I like to try to help when I can.”

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