[7] In 1998, Hale was barred from practicing law in Illinois by the state panel responsible for evaluating the character and fitness of prospective lawyers.
The panel stated that Hale's incitement of racial hatred, for the ultimate purpose of depriving selected groups of their legal rights, was blatantly immoral and rendered him unfit to be a lawyer.
By the age of 12, Matt Hale was reading books about Nazism, including Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, and had formed a Nazi-themed group at his school.
Hale was arrested for mob action,[citation needed] and because he lied to police about his brother's whereabouts, he was also charged with felony obstruction of justice.
In 1992, Hale attacked a security guard at a mall and was charged with criminal trespass, resisting arrest, aggravated battery and carrying a concealed weapon.
"[13] The COTC's founder, Ben Klassen, committed suicide on August 7, 1993,[13] leaving the organization listless[11] and owing a default judgment of $1 million to the family of a murder victim.
On June 30, 1999, a Hearing Panel of the Committee refused to certify that Hale had the requisite moral character and fitness to practice law in Illinois.
[16] During a television interview in the summer of 1999,[full citation needed] Hale stated that his "church does not condone violent or illegal activities".
[11] On January 8, 2003, Hale was arrested, charged with soliciting an undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informant named Tony Evola to kill Lefkow.
In March 2000, Evola attended his first World Church of the Creator meeting and won Hale's trust by confronting a protester to the organization.
On June 23, Hale told Evola and two other followers that he wished Smith "hadn't done it" and lamented the difficulty of nonviolent resistance through the courts without a license to practice law.
Evola further pursued the possibility of a fabricated assassination to which Hale responded the former member had "already been deposed" so killing him was a futile decision.
Chicago police revealed on March 10 that Bart Ross, a plaintiff in a medical malpractice case that Lefkow had dismissed, admitted to the murders in a suicide note written before shooting himself during a routine traffic stop in Wisconsin the previous evening.
[20] On April 6, 2005, Hale was sentenced to a 40-year prison term exactly one year after the trial began for attempting to solicit Lefkow's murder.
During the trial, jurors heard more than a dozen tapes of Hale using racial slurs, including one in which he joked about Benjamin Smith's shooting spree.