Court Opinion

ID: 9419221
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:47:43.294166+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:16.348475
License: Public Domain

Me. Chief Justice Stone,
dissenting:
I think the judgment should be reversed, and the convictions affirmed, subject only to an examination of the sufficiency of the evidence as to some of the respondents, and to a consideration of whether the union itself is a “person” within the meaning of the statute.
Respondents, who are members of a labor union, were convicted of conspiracy to violate the Anti-Racketeering Act. They, or some of them, lay in wait for trucks passing from New Jersey to New York, forced their way onto the trucks, and by beating or threats of beating the drivers procured payments to themselves from the drivers or their employers of a sum of money for each truck, $9.42 for a large truck and $8.41 for a small one, said to be the equivalent of the union wage scale for a day’s work. In some instances they assisted or offered to assist in unloading the trucks; and in others they disappeared as soon as the money was paid, without rendering or offering to render any service.
The Anti-Racketeering Act condemns the obtaining or conspiracy to obtain the payment of money or delivery of property by “the use of . . . force, violence, or coercion . . .” To this definition of the offense Congress added two — and only two — qualifications. It does not embrace the “payment of wages by a bona fide employer to a bona fide employee,” and the provisions of the Act are *540not to be applied so as to “affect the rights of bona fide labor organizations in lawfully carrying out the legitimate objects thereof, as such rights are expressed in existing statutes of the United States.”
There is abundant evidence in the record from which the jury could have concluded that respondents, or some of them, conspired to compel by force and violence the truck drivers or their employers to pay the sums of money to respondents or some of them; that the payments were made by the drivers or truck owners to purchase immunity from the violence of respondents and for no other reason; and that this was the end knowingly sought by respondents.
I can only conclude that such conduct accompanied by such a purpose constitutes a violation of the statute even though the defendants stood ready to unload the trucks in the event that they were hired to do so. Unless the language of the statute is to be disregarded, one who has rejected the proffered service and pays money only in order to purchase immunity from violence is not a bona fide employer and is not paying the extorted money as wages. The character of what the drivers or owners did and intended to do — pay money to avoid a beating — was not altered by the willingness of the payee to accept as wages for services rendered what he in fact intentionally exacted from the driver or owner as the purchase price of immunity from assault, and what he intended so to exact whether the proffered services were accepted or not. It is no answer to say that the guilt of a defendant is personal and cannot be made to depend upon the acts and intention of another. Such an answer if valid would render common law robbery an innocent pastime. For there can be no robbery unless the purpose of the victim in handing over the money is to avoid force. Precisely as under the present statute, the *541robber’s use of force and its intended effect on the victim are essential elements of the crime both of which the prosecutor must prove. Under this statute when both are present the crime is complete, irrespective of other motives which may actuate the offender, if he is also aware, as we must take it the jury found, that the money is not in fact paid as wages by a bona fide employer. It is a contradiction in terms to say that the payment of money forcibly extorted by a payee who is in any case a lawbreaker, and paid only to secure immunity from violence, without establishment of an employment relationship or the rendering of services, is a good faith payment or receipt of wages.
Even though the procuring of jobs by violence is not within the Act, and though this includes the “stand-by” job where no actual service is rendered, the granted immunity, unless its words be disregarded, does not extend to the case where the immediate objective is to force the payment of money regardless of the victim’s willingness to accept and treat the extortioner as an employee. It was for the jury to say whether such was the objective of respondents and whether they were aware that the money was paid because of their violence and not as wages.
When the Anti-Racketeering Act was under consideration by Congress, no member of Congress and no labor leader had the temerity to suggest that such payments, made only to secure immunity from violence and intentionally compelled by assault and battery, could be regarded as the payment of “wages by a bona fide employer” or that the compulsion of such payments is a legitimate object of a labor union, or was ever made so by any statute of the United States. I am unable to concur in that suggestion now. It follows that all the defendants who conspired to compel such payments by force and violence, regardless of the willingness of the *542victims to accept them as employees, were rightly convicted.
If I am right in this conclusion, there was no error in the instructions to the jury. All the counts of the indictment were for conspiracy to violate the statute. The jury was told that to convict it must find conspiracy or agreement by respondents to violate the statute and that they must have the purpose or intention to commit the crime which it defined. As I have said, the intention to commit the offense includes the intention to use force and violence on the victim and the intention that the victim shall pay because of it. The jury was then instructed that the offense defined by the statute was the obtaining of money or property by force and violence but that “the jury may not find the defendants guilty on any count of the Anti-Racketeering Act indictment if the money which they are charged with having obtained from truck owners through the use of force and violence or threats of force and violence was paid as wages, and if the defendants who received the money were bona fide employees and the truck operators who paid the money were bona fide employers ... If the jury find that the sums of money paid by the truck operators were not wages so paid in return for services performed by such defendants, but were payments made by the operators in order to induce the defendants to refrain from interfering unlawfully with the operation of their trucks, then the sums in question may not be regarded as wages paid by a bona fide employer to a bona fide employee ... If, however, what the operator was paying for was not labor performed but merely for protection from interference by the defendants with the operation of the operator’s trucks, the fact that a defendant may have done some work on an operator’s truck is not conclusive.”
, Respondents’ 48th and 49th requests were rightly refused. So far as they involved a ruling that the obtaining *543of employment by force and violence does not constitute the offense, the court had already ruled specifically that there could be no substantive offense unless the payment of money or property had been obtained by force. But, in any case, both requests were erroneous because they made respondents’ willingness to work the test of guilt, regardless of the intended and actual effect of the violence on the victims in compelling them to pay the money not as wages but in order to secure immunity from assault. The first part of the 58th request likewise had already been charged. The rest was plainly defective, since it required an acquittal unless it was the aim and object of the conspiracy that “all of the conspirators should obtain money without rendering adequate service therefor.” Upon any theory of the meaning of the statute, it was not necessary for the Government to show that it was the object of the conspiracy that “all the conspirators” should receive payments of money. They would be equally guilty if they had conspired to procure the payments to some.