Malcolm Bell grew up in Brooklyn, graduated from Harvard College (cum laude) and Law School, served in the U.S. Army, and practiced in Manhattan. After fifteen years of mainly civil litigation, he decided to become a criminal defense lawyer, where more was at stake than other people’s money. To learn the new trade, he answered a blind ad for prosecutors, a step that would change his life.
The special prosecutor of crimes arising out of New York’s bloody 1971 Attica prison riot hired him and soon tasked him with indicting state troopers and prison guards who had committed murders and other violent crimes there. But the closer he came to obtaining indictments, the more his superiors blocked his efforts. He resigned in protest and took the cover-up public in the New York Times. High officials postured and scurried, leading to revelations they had sought to suppress and more justice than they had wanted; and New York law firms lost interest in hiring Malcolm. His account of all this came out in 1985; its latest version is The Attica Turkey Shoot: Carnage, Cover-up and the Pursuit of Justice (Skyhorse Publishing, paperback, 2022).
Having sacrificed his career to uphold the law at Attica, he chose a decade later to break the law. During the 1980s, refugees streamed north from lethal, state-sponsored, U.S.-backed repressions in Guatemala and El Salvador; U.S. immigration judges nearly always denied them asylum and returned them to the death squads. This outrage gave rise to the Sanctuary Movement, whose members violated criminal laws to stand with the refugees. Malcolm and his wife Nancy joined the movement. He served on the national steering committee of the Alliance of Sanctuary Communities; spent many years working with the Mayan founders of the International Mayan League/USA; and reviewed books for Interconnect, a quarterly for the U.S.-Latin America solidarity community. His yet unpublished Sisters in the Storm: Life and Death on the Receiving End of U.S. Power relates the saga of three valiant women, two of them Americans and one a Guatemalan, who challenged the U.S.-Guatemala reign of terror and survived. And he wrote Roses in the Night, a fact-based novel about two valiant Maya who strove to survive that power.
Cry Uncle! is a courtroom drama that Malcolm wrote to educate people about the Sanctuary Movement. A good-hearted minister and an outspoken nun are on trial for taking into his church a Guatemalan refugee whose husband was murdered by a death squad. The audience is the second jury. The play was stage-read at a number of churches and other venues and usually led the audiences to lively discussions afterwards. NYC’s Quaigh Theater optioned it for an off-off-Broadway production but did not produce it. Malcolm recently heightened the drama of the play’s ending. Anyone who wishes to consider producing it should contact him. There is no charge for non-commercial productions.
While becoming a confirmed Episcopalian at age thirteen, he began to question traditional Christian doctrines. His spiritual journey took him from the Episcopal Church to a United Church of Christ, where he taught junior and senior high Sunday school, to the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), where he found his spiritual home. For the past forty years, he has jotted down his spiritual thoughts, which are now collected in Overdue Heresies and the Search for Truth. The book seeks, not to persuade anyone of anything, but to prompt readers to examine their own spirituality.
Malcolm and Nancy are enjoying a lively retirement community that faces the lovely Green Mountains of Vermont while he works on a memoir titled Tales from America’s Golden Age: A Life on the Privilege Spectrum.