People v. Coffelt

SPENCE, J. Defendants V. L. Coffelt and G. R. Searl were jointly indicted, tried and convicted on the charge of grand theft. Defendant Searl has not appealed, but defendant Coffelt has appealed from the judgment of conviction and the order denying his motion for a new trial.

The charge was tried upon the theory that a conspiracy existed between the defendants for the purpose of obtaining money and property from the public in exchange lor stock of the Lusitania Corporation upon false and fraudulent representations and that the property of the complaining witness, Mrs. Clara M. Thornton, was unlawfully taken in pursuance of such conspiracy. The transcript is very voluminous, containing almost 2,000 pages, and it appears that over' 150 exhibits were offered at the trial. We believe, however, that the essential facts for the purposes of this opinion may be briefly stated.

Mrs. Thornton owned a piece of land in Concord consisting of about three acres. She had authorized her agent Adams to sell this property. Adams was approached by defendants with a proposition for the purchase thereof. After certain negotiations, in which the purchase price of $3,000 was practically agreed upon as a basis for the deal, Mrs. Thornton finally exchanged her property for the sum of $500 and 125 shares of the preferred stock of the Lusitania Corporation. . Mrs. Thornton previously knew nothing of said corporation and relied upon written and [446]oral statements given and made to her through her agent. Among the oral representations made hy defendant Searl to said agent and communicated by him to Mrs. Thornton were the following: “That they had the Lusitania building in which they were . . . ; that they also owned the Pitts-burg Building and Loan Association and that they owned the Victory Mutual Life Insurance Company and that they had the office of the Pittsburg Building and Loan Company at Pittsburg as a part .of their assets”; that “the income from the Victory Mutual was approximately a thousand dollars a month”; “that the Lusitania building had a very good class of tenants and they were paying good rental prices and the property was considered a very valuable piece of property”; that the University of California was “one of their tenants occupying a group of offices there in that building”; that the “Lusitania Company was taking in quite large amounts of money” and “that it was a good, profitable concern”. These and other representations which were made for the purpose of inducing Mrs. Thornton to part with her property were shown to be false and fraudulent.