Court Opinion

ID: 9450154
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 16:37:04.053742+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:32:10.539202
License: Public Domain

LUMBARD, Chief Judge
(concurring).
I concur in affirming the judgments of conviction. However, as I believe that much of what Judge Waterman has written regarding probable cause is unnecessary to the facts of this ease, I think it advisable to emphasize that here the FBI agents had probable cause to make the arrests on the basis of information in possession of the FBI and what they themselves knew and saw. This information and knowledge was quite apart from the reliability or unreliability of the person who informed them on the morning of December 11, 1961 that a Reo truck with a red cab and blue body parked in the vicinity of the Boston Post Road in the Bronx contained rubber boots and phonograph records which had just been stolen in Albany.
As Judge Waterman points out, the check which the agents then made and their own observations when the back of the truck was opened voluntarily in response to their knocking, taken together with the Bureau’s confirmation of the fact that rubber boots and phonograph records had in fact been stolen the day before from a freight terminal owned by Crowe and Company, Inc., an interstate trucking firm, in Albany, were sufficient to give the agents probable cause to believe that a crime had been committed and that Elgisser and Gladstein were then and there in the act of committing the crime of which they stand convicted. Therefore, cases such as United States v. Robinson, 325 F.2d 391 (2 Cir. 1963) where the arresting officers knew nothing more than what the informant had told them, are not in point and need not be discussed.