Court Opinion

ID: 8801620
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-11-26 14:34:28.075657+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:03:55.597055
License: Public Domain

WOODS, Circuit Judge
(dissenting). I concur in the opinion of the majority in so far as it sustains the indictments. I dissent from the conclusion that the District Judge should have directed the acquittal of Sam Wolf for lack of evidence tending to prove his guilt.
The Aiken Dry Goods Company was adjudged an involuntary bankrupt on January 22, 1915. Sam Wolf, the president, and Ben Wolf, the secretary of the corporation, were convicted of fraudulently pon-cealing the assets of the corporation. No question is made of the guilt of Ben Wolf. A short statement of the material evidence, it seems to me, will show that it tended to prove the guilt of Sam Wolf.
Owning and conducting a mercantile business at the town of Johnson’s where he lived, Sam Wolf in 1913 established a similar business at Aiken, 30 miles distant. About a year afterwards he incorporated the Aiken business and put his brother Ben in charge as manager. There is no evidence that Ben contributed anything to the capital stock or that he had any interest except whát might have been bestowed on him by his brother. Sam visited the store, sometimes once a week anci sometimes once in two or three weeks. In the autumn of 1914, according to the testimony of Sam Wolf, the corporate assets were a stock of goods of about $3,000 and some accounts due to the corporation. After bankruptcy there was found in the store goods of the appraised value of $1,000, which brought, at the sale $562. During the months of September, October, and November, five or six trunks and three or four boxes of goods were taken out of the store by Ben Wolf; and they were found concealed on the premises of two friendly farmers in the country. This concealed merchandise consisted mainly of shoes and overalls. Their estimated value was $1,400, and the proceeds of their sale $605.
*908Reasonable men might well refuse to believe that one-half of a small stock of goods could have been taken out of the store in such a short period of time without the knowledge of the man who had the chief, if not the sole, proprietary interest in it when he was visiting the store every week or two. It is true there were some empty boxes, but it is improbable that Ben Wolf meant to defraud his brother Sam and deceive him with empty boxes. Shoes, overalls, and trunks are bulky articles, and the abstraction of such articles to the value of $1,400 from a stock of $2,500 or $3,000 could hardly fail to attract the attention of an owner who had learned to observe and value goods by carrying them on his back as a peddler.
But aside from this, the proof is direct and strong that Sam Wolf himself, through Tom Powell, the clerk in the store, abstracted and concealed goods. Powell, although offered as a witness by the government, was strongly hostile to the prosecution and favorable to the defendants.' He testified directly and positively that by direction of Sam Wolf he shipped three trunks of goods in the latter part of the year 1914 from the store in Aiken to Johnson’s, where Wolf lived. It is true that he varied this statement in‘ the manifest effort to shield the defendants, but this effort to shift only made his first statement the more important and credible. The craft of the method of shipment directed by Sam Wolf was of weight against him when taken with the other circumstances. Instead of boxing the goods and shipping them as freight, passenger tickets were purchased, and the goods were shipped in trunks checked as baggage. By this method he made it practically impossible to trace the shipment by the railroad records, since passengers who check trunks are not identified either on receipt or delivery of the trunks. It seems to me these circumstances even as they appear in the printed record support the inference of guilt on the. part of Sam Wolf in the minds of reasonable men. Before the District Judge and the jury they were vitalized by the personality and the manner of the defendants and other witnesses. Whether they were convincing of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt was, of course, a question for the jtiry and not the court.