St. Louis Lawyer Dad Launches RICO Suit Against ‘Family Court Mafia’
By Richard Luthmann with Michael Volpe
Zoom Call Bombshell Sparks Corruption Lawsuit
On The Unknown Podcast Episode 52, co-hosts Richard Luthmann and Michael Volpe introduced what sounded like a legal thriller come to life.
“This threatens to take down the entire system. The judges are in on it,” a Missouri guardian ad litem warned in a leaked Zoom call.
That ominous quote set the stage for guest Matt Grant – a 49-year-old St. Louis attorney and father – to detail his war against what he calls a “well-known corruption” in Missouri’s family courts.
Grant has filed a 170-page civil RICO and 42 U.S.C. § 1983 civil rights lawsuit in federal court, a class-action complaint aimed at dismantling an alleged “organized crime” ring operating in the St. Louis County family court.
Grant is no fringe figure: he’s a veteran litigator who spent 21 years at a top-100 law firm, earning equity partner status and a reputation for skill and integrity. Now he’s taken a sabbatical from that career to focus full-time on this crusade.
“I decided to step back and focus just on this,” Grant said, describing the personal cost of taking on the system.
He frames his fight as nothing less than a civil rights mission to bring transparency and accountability to a court he says has betrayed families.
In August 2025, Grant sat down with Luthmann and Vople to reveal evidence from his case – a case he hopes will “take down the entire system” of family court corruption. The result was a bombshell podcast episode and a rallying cry for reform.
Matt Grant’s War: Evidence of a Family Court “Enterprise”
Grant’s lawsuit alleges a pattern of systemic abuse: backroom deals, favoritism, and retaliation against parents who don’t play along. In the podcast, he described a “small circle” of roughly 40 insiders – attorneys and guardians ad litem (GALs) – who dominate the St. Louis family court scene. According to Grant, this cabal works hand-in-hand with certain judges to prolong litigation and pad legal fees.
“They take active measures to perpetuate litigation… It’s a financial scam, a criminal RICO like any other,” Grant said bluntly.
His court filings back up those claims with specifics. He caught family court Commissioner Mary W. Greaves secretly coaching the opposing side through ex parte communication – even issuing orders to help them “without even being asked.”
After Grant exposed Judge Bruce Hilton’s role in the scheme, a colleague of Hilton’s was recorded admitting that Grant’s complaints “threaten to take down the entire system.” The secrecy is by design, Grant says. His complaint describes an “organized crime” mentality in which the court operates behind closed doors: “keep everything in-house, and keep everything hidden”, forbidding recordings or public scrutiny of what judges do.
Perhaps the most shocking evidence is a recorded phone call from June 2025, when court-appointed GAL John Fenley allegedly tried to broker a sinister deal.
“He offered a quid pro quo: disavow your claims of corruption and you can have your children back,” Grant wrote, calling the 26-minute call “bone chilling”.
Grant says Fenley “attempted to extort me and trade me custody of my kids for disavowing my truthful claims of corruption”, an offer he flatly refused.
Grant submitted the audio to authorities as evidence of what he labels a “racketeering scheme.”
Other allegations read like a crime drama: Grant’s own sister, enlisted by the opposition, broke into his home to steal documents and passwords. An associate of the ex-wife’s attorney abruptly withdrew after Grant exposed their secret emails with the judge.
Grant even claims the judge and lawyers plotted to set him up in a “false kidnapping scenario” – a trap he thwarted by preemptively filing a motion in January.
Through it all, Grant has meticulously compiled witness statements, transcripts, and forensic evidence, which he has made public on his website StopMissouriCorruption.com.
The picture that emerges is a court system run for profit and revenge, not justice – a “years-long racketeering scheme of corruption” with children as leverage.
Matt Grant’s War: Retaliation and a Father’s Fight for His Kids
As Grant became a whistleblower, he says the family court machine struck back viciously. In early 2025 he moved to disqualify Judge Hilton for bias; under Missouri law that motion triggered an automatic stay of the case.
But Hilton ignored the rules. Within hours of Grant’s filing, the judge issued an order slashing Grant’s parenting time. Grant recounts a tit-for-tat timeline of retaliation: he exposes corruption, and then watches his visitation get revoked in real time.
On February 28, 2025 – just 12 hours after Grant filed to recuse Hilton – the judge denied Grant’s request to restore 50/50 custody of his sons.
When Grant petitioned the Missouri Court of Appeals in late March, Hilton responded by imposing an ex parte TRO cutting off all visits, effectively suspending Grant’s contact with his boys.
Grant took his pleas to the Missouri Supreme Court, which on March 4 appointed a special judge to review Hilton’s conduct. But Hilton, as alleged, hid the high court’s order for 23 days – long enough to continue wielding power.
Two days after Grant notified the Supreme Court of further misconduct, Hilton signed another order barring all contact between Grant and his children.
“They took my children away from me completely… That is the price to be paid for exposing [Judge] Hilton as the ring-leader of corruption,” Grant writes of that moment.
By April 2025, the father who once shared equal custody was reduced to zero visitation. Grant insists the court had “never come up with any reason to withhold my children” – no abuse, no neglect. In fact, Grant had voluntarily entered rehab for a brief alcohol relapse in 2024 and emerged sober, even using a breathalyzer daily to prove his commitment. There was, he says, “not now, nor was there ever, any reason” to keep him from his kids.
Instead, Grant believes he was punished solely for refusing to stay silent.
Internal emails unearthed by reporters show that Grant’s case isn’t the first to rattle Missouri’s judiciary. His complaint notes that Judge Hilton replaced Michael Burton – a judge who abruptly retired in 2021 after investigators caught him colluding with a GAL to undermine a mother’s lawsuit.
Grant also points to the notorious Vandenberg case, where Hilton awarded joint custody to an alleged abuser, as evidence of warped priorities.
In Grant’s own ordeal, every attempt he made to seek help outside the local courthouse was met with swift retribution inside it. Even after Missouri’s Supreme Court intervened, Grant’s children were taken as “retaliation for [his] exposure of the corrupt scheme”, according to his filings.
He has since regained a token one overnight per week, but a GAL is now pushing to halve even that meager time – a move Grant calls pure payback for his whistleblowing.
“It is shameful, it is criminal and it is a violation of… Due Process,” Grant’s complaint argues, describing how his kids have been used as pawns.
Matt Grant’s War: “Kids for Cash” Echoes and a Civil Rights Crusade
Grant’s battle in Missouri carries echoes of national scandals. His complaint explicitly compares the St. Louis scheme to Pennsylvania’s “Kids for Cash” case – where two judges infamously took bribes to funnel children into detention centers. Those judges got 17 and 28-year prison sentences, and it was a federal RICO action that ultimately brought them down.
“Missouri has its own Clayton Kids for Cash,” Grant declares, likening St. Louis County’s courthouse (located in Clayton, MO) to Luzerne County’s corruption racket.
As in Pennsylvania, Grant seeks to use the civil Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act to do what local authorities wouldn’t – shine a light on systemic abuse and hold the perpetrators accountable. But his lawsuit doesn’t stop at RICO. It also invokes 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the federal civil rights statute, arguing that Judge Hilton, Commissioner Greaves, GAL Fenley and others acted “under color of law” to deprive Grant and numerous other parents of their constitutional rights.
Grant asserts that the “justice system in at least St. Louis County… is broken and run by corrupt judges, lawyers, guardians ad litem, and politicians.”
By treating his fight as a class action on behalf of similarly-situated families, he hopes to spark broader legal reform. His cause has begun to attract attention beyond Missouri. Whistleblowers from other states have contacted Grant with eerily similar horror stories of custody arrangements manipulated for power and profit.
“When a parent doesn’t settle, that is when the RICO enterprise springs into action,” his complaint reads, noting that children are often used as “bargaining chips to drive up legal fees” in these schemes.
Now, with a federal case filed and a spotlight on the 21st Circuit’s dealings, Grant is demanding nothing less than full transparency and accountability.
“It’s time to commence the process of actual justice,” his complaint proclaims, calling his effort a mission to protect not only his own kids but “all the others that have already been victims.”
The road ahead is perilous – “the Defendants will fight… with all that they have”, he acknowledges. But Grant’s resolve is unflinching. He has sacrificed his career, spent his savings, and endured personal attacks, yet refuses to back down.
As he told Luthmann and Volpe, “I refused to settle then and I refuse now.”
With his children’s future and the integrity of the courts at stake, Matt Grant is prepared to fight this battle to the end – in the courtroom and the court of public opinion – to finally “put an end to the corruption in St. Louis County.”
