Court Opinion

ID: 9476205
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:49:59.440386+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:11.015677
License: Public Domain

CUDAHY, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
The admittedly close question of the statute of limitations has gone to a properly instructed jury, which returned a special verdict for the plaintiff. An experienced trial judge has refused to set that verdict aside. Nothing cited by the majority justifies a different result here.
At the time of the fraudulent transactions, Susan Norris was an 18 or 19-year old girl. She was dealing with William Wirtz, who was both a trustee and a close family friend whom she had known all her life. William’s father, Arthur, had been a business partner of Susan’s father for many years. Susan “trusted Bill Wirtz and Arthur Wirtz and Ken Scanlon [the Wirtz lawyer] completely.” The Wirtzes, apparently in line with their usual view of women’s place, excluded Susan and her mother from any role in the businesses of which they were joint owners. Susan Norris claimed that she had never even heard of the three corporations in which she sold out her interests, in effect, to her trusted friends and fiduciaries. She had a high school education, no business experience, no personal attorney, no investment advis- or and no stockbroker at the time of the sales. The jury could quite reasonably conclude that a person in Susan’s position would not realize that book value is a very questionable measure of the worth of a firm. (Indeed, the defendants argued in the district court that book value was an accurate measure of the companies’ worth.) The defendants did not even bother to obtain Susan’s signature consenting to the 1968 transaction. Instead they merely told the court that all interested parties had “verbally approved” so that “no notice to any such interested person is expedient.” There is really no plausible argument that Susan should have discovered the fraud before she hired her own attorney in late 1975.
There is also sufficient evidence in the record from which the jury could have concluded that Susan, even in the exercise of due diligence, could not have discovered the fraud in 1975 when she hired Cuccio. Susan claims that she did not turn to Cuccio out of some concern that she had been defrauded. At the time, her mother was incapacitated by illness and she was “feeding] very alone.” As a woman, she had been excluded by the Wirtzes from the family businesses and “didn’t really know what was going on.” Although a letter written by Cuccio to William Wirtz in January 1976 suggests that Susan might have authorized Cuccio to examine past transactions, other evidence suggests that all of the tasks with respect to which Susan looked to Cuccio were forward-looking, relating to such matters as securing an increase in Susan’s allowance and getting her a job with the Black Hawks. During the period Susan was represented by Cuccio, neither she nor Cuccio learned anything about the fraudulent 1967 and 1968 transactions. None of the properties involved was specifically mentioned in the Norris will, and Cuccio would not have been put *1337on notice from that source. In addition, during the time Cuccio worked for Susan, the Wirtzes were still in a fiduciary relationship with Susan. Lacking actual knowledge, she should not be barred merely because her fiduciary was in a position to breach his trust. And there was nothing in the probate court records from which Cuccio could have suspected fraud in the 1967 and 1968 sales. One could go on citing evidence and circumstances which tend to support the jury verdict.
When an adolescent girl is allegedly defrauded by her trustee, who is also an old family friend and essentially a surrogate father, under circumstances like these, I see little reason to distrust the jury verdict. The jury had ample grounds for deciding as it did. Contrary to the approach taken by the majority, so long as there is sufficient evidence in the record to support the jury’s verdict, it is not for this court to reweigh the evidence.
I therefore respectfully dissent.