United States v. Crimmins‪.‬

The accused in this case was convicted of a conspiracy to transport stolen securities in interstate commerce § 415, Title 18, U.S.C.A.The prosecution proved that nine of the ten persons indicted had been carrying on a joint enterprise in the City of New York of disposing of stolen bonds, some of which were stolen in other states. Crimmins was the tenth defendant, and all ten (except one, Sonking, who had died) either pleaded guilty, or were convicted. Crimmins and two others appealed, but he alone has prosecuted the appeal to a conclusion. He was a lawyer practicing in Syracuse; his only contact with the rest was through one of them, Mahler, who lived in New York. (Another, Koch, did indeed swear that he had visited Crimmins, and Mahler swore that Sonking also had visited him; but for the purposes of this appeal these interviews may be disregarded.) Mahler went several times from New York to Syracuse, and offered stolen bonds to Crimmins, which Crimmins bought under circumstances which justified the jury in concluding, as they did, that he knew that they had been stolen. The record is, however, entirely bare of evidence that Crimmins knew the place of any of the thefts, and if it was necessary to prove that he knew that his confederates were fetching stolen bonds into the state, the prosecution failed to make out a case.