John Gleason, Lawyer Impersonator?

(orig. published 9/4/2010)

[This post is continued in “Gleason’s Greasin’” and “John Gleason, Mob Plant“; and is a continuation of “John Gleason and Me.”]

***Updated June 1, 2015***

There is compelling evidence that John Gleason–the man holding the office of Colorado Supreme Court Attorney Regulation Counsel–is not a lawyer.

According to his online bios (Exhibits (1) and (2)), Gleason says he “earned a law degree” from Ohio Northern University, Pettit College of Law.  This law school says on its website that it requires a baccalaureate degree from an accredited undergraduate institution for admission (Exhibit 3).  There is substantial evidence Gleason never obtained the baccalaureate degree.

He would have had to have earned it prior to taking on his employment with the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office, Colorado, in 1977.  He did attend Bowling Green State University in Ohio for about one year before coming to Colorado, as discussed below.   His application to the ACSO, in 1977, is Gleason’s own admission that did not graduate from BGSU, however, since he said on it he had only an AA in law enforcement from a technical college.  See also p. 21 of 129 of his ACSO personnel file, his supervisor’s approval of tuition reimbursement for courses at local Columbia College because John was “working toward his B.A. degree in psychology.”  Gleason left the sheriff’s office in 1982 for law school, so there was no chance he returned to Bowling Green State University after 1977.

Corroborating evidence he never graduated from BGSU–not even necessary because of the admission in his ACSO application–includes a 1996 book of alumni, which has no listing for “John S. Gleason” (although there is one for his brother, James Rudy Gleason.  It appears I have lost the pages I copied from that.) Only one BGSU directory ever listed him as a student (“A&S junior”), in 1973-74.  Two others show him as a campus police officer (Temporary 1971 BGSU directory and the ConSurvey Directory of 1974, which I did not copy).  There is no listing for John S. Gleason, ever, in the Bowling Green State University yearbook The Key.

It appears Gleason very much wants to call BGSU his alma mater, but cannot, because he did not graduate.  A list on the BGSU website contains the names of thousands of donors, almost all of which are followed by year of graduation–e.g., “Barry Smith ’67.”  John Gleason’s name is on this list but is not followed by a year [(Ex. 4, p. 6 of 7)].  In fact, he regrets not having graduated from BGSU so much that he must have forgotten he didn’t actually do so, since he told a writer for the Oregon State Bar Bulletin that he “earned an undergraduate degree at Bowling Green State University[.]”

This is a baldfaced lie, therefore.  Keep in mind that this man was the Moral Police Chief for the Colorado Bar for 15 years, sending real lawyers like me to their professional graves.  Or maybe ONLY me, because it appears he protected the truly corrupt lawyers in return for payoffs (see my later blog post, Gleason’s Greasin’).

Does Gleason have an undergraduate degree from any other institution?  While at the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office from 1977 to 1982, Gleason did take several courses at Columbia College, a for-profit institution with military connections in Aurora, Colorado, which is in the business of selling degrees.  Gleason puts this on his bio apparently to make people think he went to “Columbia University.”  Because Gleason left the sheriff’s office directly for law school, going back to Ohio for that in 1982, his bachelor’s degree, if he got one, had to have been from Columbia College.  Indeed, taking courses there was the largest part of what he did at ACSO, as can be seen from his personnel file (pp. 22-30, 32-49).  Taxpayers paid for that:  two courses every eight weeks for several semesters.  But his grades are blacked out and there is no certificate of graduation in the file.  A person at the registrar’s office of Columbia College, to whom I spoke on Oct. 29, 2013, would not tell me whether Gleason had graduated, but indirectly confirmed that was the right school, by telling me there was a block on his record. 

Note the carefully worded bios [Exhibits (1) and (2)] stating that he “attended” Columbia College and “attended” Bowling Green State University.  He never says he graduated from either of these undergraduate institutions.  Interestingly, he also says he “earned a law degree” from Pettit, again a careful choice of words. He used the same locution (“earned a degree”) in the Oregon Bar Bulletin article respecting BGSU.  There is no firm evidence he graduated from law school, either, although I did find he lived in Ada, Ohio, where ONU is, from 1983-85; and was listed in the index of the yearbooks in 1983, 1984, and 1985.  No pictures, though, and no designation of him as a graduate, or even as a law student.  As to the pictures, that is particularly weird, because photos of all graduating law school classes going back many years hang on the walls of the main building of Pettit Law School.  I walked around looking at all of them.  The photo from 1985 is not there–and that is the only one missing.

Gleason also made misleading statements in his bios about his work experience.  One states that he “previously served as a criminal prosecutor” for several years (Exhibit 1).  Another (Exhibit 2) says he “served in the Allen County Prosecutor’s Office”–without saying where Allen County is.  Mind you, these bios were written when he had lived and worked in Colorado for 30 years.  Allen County, Ohio, is, in fact, where Ohio Northern University is located.  I contacted the prosecutor’s office in Allen County and they have no record of Gleason ever working there, not even as a student intern (Exhibit 5).  Thus, Gleason’s statement to the Oregon State Bar Bulletin that he “clerked in district attorneys’ offices” was also a lie.   An internship is not the same thing as a clerkship.  (Sorry, John, but you ought to recognize resume padding better than anyone.  In fact, you would prosecute a sole practitioner for this type of lie.)  I also contacted the Ohio attorney registration office and they said Gleason was not registered as an attorney in Ohio and had never sat for the bar exam in Ohio.  So, Gleason’s statement in his bios that he “served in the prosecutor’s office” is intended to make people believe he had lengthy experience working as a prosecuting attorney, when he had no such experience at all.  Zero.

Gleason’s bios also state that he was “in private practice with a law firm in Denver for several years” [Exhibits (1) and (2)],  making it sound like he had a wealth of experience in civil litigation before coming to OARC, as well.  By the time of his interview with the OSB Bulletin (after this post had been online for three years), he shaved it down to a “couple of years in private practice.”  This is misleading, too.  He was admitted to the bar in Colorado in 1985, and worked with a sole practitioner named Robert Bartholic before being employed by the Supreme Court’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel in 1988.  I found this out by going through back issues of the Legal and Financial Directory to match up the office address.  He was listed at the Supreme Court’s address in the 1988-89 directory, which was stamped “Received” by the Supreme Court Library in August 1988.  So Gleason either was working there already, or knew he would be, as of the cut-off date for that publication, which was April 1988.  At most, therefore, Gleason worked 2-1/2 years for Bartholic after being admitted to the bar in October 1985.  I talked to Bartholic on Feb. 17, 2010, who said he did no litigation and that he “didn’t really have enough business to keep Gleason busy.”  Thus, as I said above, Gleason had never done any civil litigation or criminal prosecution as a lawyer prior to getting his job at OARC. [As I found out later, Bartholic’s main claim to fame is as Most Worshipful Master of all the Colorado Masonic lodges–see Gleason’s Greasin’.  Curiously, Gleason’s close friend at the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office, John V. Egan, III–who has also been “Most Worshipful Master”–got a law degree, too, and wound up working for Bartholic at the same time as Gleason, according to Bartholic.]  [I’ve found out more about Egan which is not good, including his participation with Gleason as co-executors on certain wills–and his suspension from practice after Gleason left Colorado.  More to come.]

The Attorney Registration Office in Colorado says–incredibly–that it does not keep old employment records of attorneys or judges.  You cannot even find out if the judge on your case has a conflict due to prior employment, therefore.  This is why I had to page through back issues of the Colorado Legal and Financial Directory to find where Gleason had practiced, before starting at OARC, by matching up the address given for him with the address of the Bartholic firm.

I located the advertisement for the job Gleason got at the Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel, in the Sept. 1987 issue of The Colorado Lawyer.  It was published only that one time.  The text is as follows:

“Full time & half-time investigative counsel, Supreme Court Grievance Committee.  $36,876-42,684,  full-time; $18,348-21,342, half-time.  Must be adm. to prac. in CO w/at least 3 yrs law prac. to related exp.  Send ltr. of interest, res. & one writ. sample to Committee Counsel, 600 17th St., #500S, Denver  80203-5435 by 8/25/87.”

This jibes with what Maximillian Potter reported in a June 2010 article in 5280 Magazine that Gleason was hired by OARC as an investigator.  The problem is, he did not have at least the required three years of experience when he applied (although the ad is garbled).  He did not even have two, since he was admitted to the bar in October 1985.  Interestingly, too, it appears that the 8/25/87 deadline stated in the ad for submitting applications would already have passed by the time the September 1987 issue was published, so that the ad was spurious–a fake. (I am pretty sure I applied for this job myself.  I’m an Ivy League graduate who scored in the 98th percentile on the LSAT, and I did not get an interview.)

The ad also required the applicant to submit a letter of interest, resume, and writing sample.  In open records requests to the OARC which both Sean Harrington (of knowyourcourts.com) and I made early in 2010, we were told, first–not by Gleason, but by deputy attorney general Maurie Knaizer, who had zero authority–that only Gleason could produce these records, since he was in charge of the office, and that Gleason was out of town.  Too bad, Maurie said.  After Gleason came back, Knaizer told us the records “do not exist.”  So, what happened to them?  These documents were part of a personnel file and a public record.  Gleason was in charge of them and now they “do not exist.”   

I tried again, in late 2013, with another records request to Gleason’s successor James Coyle.  He turned it down for a new reason:  in 2012, OARC got a yummy sundae with a cherry on top from the Colorado Court of Appeals, a ruling that it is exempt from producing any records, at all!  The Court just created a new exception to the law on its own!  The criminality of the legal profession is a seamless web.  Here is my disgusted reply.

Then there is the mystery of the bar exam.  Pettit College of Law boasts on its website that half of its student body scored below 150 on the LSAT. I do not believe someone who scored that low on the LSAT could pass the Colorado bar exam.  Also, as discussed, Pettit says an undergraduate degree is required for admission.  Did Gleason lie on his application for admission to that school?  Or did someone let him in without this credential?  They won’t tell me. 

Did he lie on his application for admission to the bar in Colorado?  I can’t get this either, of course.  A long statement from the applicant about his or her education and work experience is required, under oath, to gain admission to the Colorado bar–and then there is the bar exam, which is tough.  Did someone just give him a bar ticket?  And did he lie on his application for employment at OARC?  Is that why it’s gone?  Or did he lie to me in 2010, through Maurie Knaizer, saying that his application materials, which are public records, “do not exist”?  [In recent years I’ve realized it’s not there because he never submitted an application.  He was pre-selected for the position, and the advertisement in The Colorado Lawyer was a ruse to make it look like there was a neutral selection process.] The Board of Bar Examiners did tell me he sat for the bar exam in 1985, but would not document that fact; and the list of persons who passed, which they used to post on the Supreme Court library window twice a year, was not preserved.  The Oregon State Bar, incredibly, told me they did no background investigation of Gleason before hiring him in 2013.

As of my latest research, it strongly appears someone did just give him a bar ticket:  John Moye and James Lyons. The Catholic cabal at work.  My latest blog post about Mr. Gleason covers this:  “John Gleason, Mob Plant.”  [to be restored by 4/1/2022]

Postscript, 3/25/22: A couple pictures for your enjoyment:

Gleason at age 21 (from the Fulton County Expositor, Wauseon, OH, Aug. 7, 1971):

The Real Colorado image-690x1024 John Gleason, Lawyer Impersonator?

Gleason in 2013 (now with the sunken eyes of a meth addict)

The Real Colorado image John Gleason, Lawyer Impersonator?

2 thoughts on “John Gleason, Lawyer Impersonator?

  1. He demonstrated incompetence when representing my ethics case. I’d like to talk to you

    1. And are you aware that William Lucero had aged out when he sat on your case? He turned 72 on Feb. 14, 2019, the constitutionally mandated age for retirement. Although the constitution purports to apply only to judges in courts of record, and the PDJ is not a court of record, a Court of Appeals case says administrative judges are subject to the same requirements as bona fide judges are. That case (Kilpatrick) said that administrative judges must file financial disclosures, which Lucero never did, either. There is compelling evidence he took bribes. I will communicate with you by email later today.

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