Opinion ID: 1547054
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Ackerson

Text: This defendant had, so far as appears, nothing to do with the scheme until the end of October, though he had known the elder Van Riper and Maloney before. He told Maloney of Van Riper's proposed withdrawal, which was a surprise to Maloney, and offered him employment in the office which he proposed to set up. This he opened at 500 Fifth avenue about the middle of November, taking over, from the Moore street offices, Maloney, McCluskey, and Resnick, and employing in addition one Rabinowitz. The name he chose for the firm was James Loftus & Co., though it was disputed whether there ever was a Loftus. Ackerson himself adopted an alias, Martin Sands, and Maloney and McCluskey sold stocks; that being the business. Again, there is a dispute whether Parco shares were sold, but that we cannot settle. It is enough that there was testimony to that effect; testimony which, if we were called on to pass upon it, we should not hesitate to believe. Later the firm changed its name to Holton & Abbott, after Rabinowitz had left, and Brown, who had drifted back from Wyoming, had been taken on by Ackerson. H. P. Douglas & Co. and Craig, Matthews & Co. have a somewhat ghostly but unimportant relation to these firms, all of them apparently ephemeral creatures, well suited to the purposes of their creators. This showing amply justified the jury in finding Ackerson guilty. As we have said of Maloney and McCluskey, any sales of Parco shares at that time, or effort to sell them, was the barest fraud. It is preposterous to argue that the jury had no right to say that Ackerson, who clothed himself dishonestly and took over the ruins of a broken-down scheme, must have known what his subordinates were about. If he had an innocent explanation to make of what on its face was a common enough trap for the guileless, it rested with him to show it, and he did not. Men do not set up a business of such a kind under a false name, employing cheats as their active assistants, and keep aloof and ignorant of the means by which the profits are made. However, Ackerson was not connected with any enterprises of Maloney and McCluskey after April 10, 1925. Rabinowitz, who testified for the prosecution, expressly says that he was not in the firms of J. A. Foster and E. Lenroot, and that J. A. Foster & Co. was formed on April 10, 1925, over three months after he had left Ackerson's employ because of some differences between them. It is true that Elkins once saw Ackerson at the office of Lenroot, but that does not warrant the inference that he was connected with it. Therefore we must conclude that the evidence does not implicate Ackerson in the scheme at the time when the letters laid in counts 7 and 9 were posted. The crime consists in the posting of the letter (U. S. v. Young, 232 U. S. 156, 161, 34 S. Ct. 303, 58 L. Ed. 548), and if the defendant was not in the scheme when the letters were posted he was not a principal or an accessory to the crime then committed. Thus it happens, apparently by mere chance, that the evidence will not support the conviction of Ackerson, except on the conspiracy count. On that it will, because it is enough that for five months he was attached to the scheme, even though during that time no one of the letters laid in the counts was mailed. Ackerson's motion to amend the return needs no more than an allusion. There is no reason to suppose that the newspapers which the jury saw affected their verdict; but, if so, it was a matter of discretion for the trial judge. Error is assigned because of many of the rulings in the admission of evidence. The most important was the failure to limit the declarations of certain of the defendants to themselves and to those who were then in the conspiracy. Such declarations are admitted upon no doctrine of the law of evidence, but of the substantive law of crime. When men enter into an agreement for an unlawful end, they become ad hoc agents for one another, and have made a partnership in crime. What one does pursuant to their common purpose, all do, and, as declarations may be such acts, they are competent against all. Hitchman C. & C. Co. v. Mitchell, 245 U. S. 229, 249, 38 S. Ct. 65, 62 L. Ed. 260, L. R. A. 1918C, 497, Ann. Cas. 1918B, 461; Conn. Mut. L. Ins. Co. v. Hillmon, 188 U. S. 208, 23 S. Ct. 294, 47 L. Ed. 446. For this reason, merely narrative declarations are not competent. But it is also a part of the law of joint crimes that, when a party joins an existing group already so engaged, he assumes responsibility for all that has been done theretofore. Anonymous, 6 Mod. 43; People v. Mather, 4 Wend. (N. Y.) 229, 258, 259, 260, 21 Am. Dec. 122; Comm. v. Rogers, 181 Mass. 184, 194, 63 N. E. 421; 1 Russell on Crimes (8th Ed.) 190; 1 Bishop, New Criminal Law, § 642. For this reason all that was done before he entered may be used against him, but obviously not what was done after he left, Logan v. U. S., 144 U. S. 263, 309, 12 S. Ct. 617, 36 L. Ed. 429; Brown v. U. S., 150 U. S. 93, 14 S. Ct. 37, 37 L. Ed. 1010. It was therefore entirely proper to admit against him all that had been done before Ackerson came into the conspiracy, but it was strictly speaking improper to admit against those who had left in October what was done thereafter, and possibly as against Ackerson what Maloney and McCluskey did after he had left on April 10, 1925. All that it was, however, necessary to do as respects this proof, was to caution the jury that they were not to consider the evidence against those who had left the enterprise. The trial occupied seven weeks; the record consists of over 2600 typed pages of evidence, filled in large part with repeated objections to the admission of evidence, argued at length. The trial judge declined to make specific rulings upon the motions to strike out evidence, since they were of unimaginable prolixity, and would have served no conceivable purpose, but to confuse the jury. Very properly he left the matter to be dealt with in his colloquial charge. There he told them that, if they concluded that any defendant had actually and in good faith withdrawn from the conspiracy at any time, he was no longer responsible for the acts of those who remained, nor was he bound by their declarations, even though made in pursuance of the conspiracy; that it was a question of fact for them whether any given defendant had in fact so withdrawn. This told the jury the law quite as effectively as  indeed, more so than  formal rulings striking out the proof. Indeed, in a case of this kind it is extremely doubtful whether such admonitions have any serious importance. We do, indeed, continue to give them, though the whole matter is highly technical, since in nine cases out of ten it is impossible for any one, lay or legal, to divide his mind into proof-tight compartments, and forget at one moment what he must use at another. Assuming, however, that the instruction was necessary, it would reduce the trial of a cause to the most sterile logomachy to insist on more than was done here. Perhaps chiefest of all the counts in the indictment against our criminal procedure is based upon the sophistries which have pervaded it in respect of rulings on evidence. Reversals for formal errors are a crying scandal, which has brought the whole system into disrepute. The only other question of evidence which seems to us important is the admission of telephone talks between customers of the defendants and persons at the other end of the wire, who represented themselves as speaking from the offices at 15 Moore street, or uptown, and who generally gave the name, Hedrick, or that of some one in the employ of the defendants. Usually the witness professed to be able to recognize the voice of his interlocutor, though the evidence was often unsatisfactory; but there were some instances that can hardly rest upon that. In most cases it was the witness who was called on the telephone. We do not think that the competency of the testimony inevitably depended upon the witness' recognition of the voice. Other circumstances may be enough sufficiently to identify the speaker. If, for example, a man were to write a letter, properly addressed to another, and were to receive a telephone call in answer, professing to come from the addressee, and showing acquaintance with the contents of the letter, it would in our judgment be a good enough identification of the speaker to allow in the proof, though in the end, of course, the issue of identity would be for the jury. This is the reasoning on which a complete correspondence is admitted, once its origin is established, so long as it continues to be consecutive in substance. Wigmore, § 2153. The decisions hold, though not with entire unanimity, that when a witness calls up at the proper number in a telephone book the person whose admissions are relevant, and gets an answer from one professing to be the person called, it is prima facie proof of identity; that is, that the proof is equal to an interview with some one found at the office of the party in question. Holzhauer v. Sheen, 127 Ky. 28, 104 S. W. 1034; Miller v. Leib, 109 Md. 414, 72 A. 466; Theisen v. Detroit, etc., Co., 200 Mich. 136, 166 N. W. 901, L. R. A. 1918D, 715; Union Construction Co. v. Western Union Tel. Co., 163 Cal. 298, 125 P. 242; Godair v. Ham. Nat. Bank, 225 Ill. 572, 80 N. E. 407, 116 Am. St. Rep. 172, 8 Ann. Cas. 447; Knickerbocker Ice Co. v. Gardiner, etc., Co., 107 Md. 556, 69 A. 405, 16 L. R. A. (N. S.) 746; Wigmore, § 2153. The case is not the same, to be sure, when the declarant calls up the witness, for the declaration of the speaker cannot establish his identity; but even then as we have suggested, the substance of the communication may itself be enough to make prima facie proof. In the case at bar Parco stock was almost certainly not being sold by any one outside the offices at 15 Moore street, and later, except at the offices uptown. There is, of course, a theoretical possibility that others might sell it, but it was extremely remote. The kind of solicitation was the same as it was proved that Maloney and McCluskey and others in the office used to beguile customers. The calls were upon customers to whom sales had already been made by the defendants, presumably known only to them. The chance that these circumstances should unite in the case of some one who did not speak from the offices seems to us so improbable that the speaker was sufficiently identified. Of course, this did not identify him as the person whose name he gave; indeed, we may be substantially sure that ordinarily he was not that person. But the jury might conclude that he was either Maloney, or McCluskey, or some other salesman in the office, and the other proof was again enough to allow the jury to find that the defendants were privy to the way in which Parco stock was sold, and to the devices used, by their salesmen. Therefore, we think that the testimony was competent. The judgment is affirmed as follows: As to Hedrick, on counts 1, 3, 5, 6, and 10. As to L. C. Van Riper, on counts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 10. As to Sweet, on counts 1, 3, 5, 6, and 10. As to Ish, on counts 1, 3, 5, 6, and 10. As to C. E. Van Riper, on counts 1, 3, 5, 6, and 10. As to Maloney and McCluskey, on all counts. As to Ackerson, on count 10. As to the other counts it is reversed.