Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. v. Bagg
| Decision Date | 16 September 1935 |
| Citation | 292 Mass. 125,197 N.E. 481 |
| Parties | GOODYEAR TIRE & RUBBER CO. v. BAGG et al. |
| Court | United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court |
Suit in equity by the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company against John L. Bagg and others. From an adverse decree, defendants appeal.
Decree affirmed.
Appeal from Superior Court, Suffolk County; Broadhurst, judge.
N. A Heller, of Boston, for intervener Rudnick.
R Wait and J. Barker, Jr., both of Boston, for defendants Bagg and others.
In 1920 the plaintiff by contract in writing engaged one Albert Flower, an expert accountant and tax specialist, to aid the plaintiff in recovering from the United States a large sum which the plaintiff claimed as an overpayment of taxes. In 1923 Flower brought an action at law against the plaintiff for breach of this contract by the plaintiff and in 1933 he recovered judgment in said action in the amount of $129,412.50. In the meantime Flower had assigned his contract to a corporation known as Albert Flower, Inc. He or the corporation had also assigned his or its beneficial interest successively by written assignments to several persons, including the present appellants Bagg and others, as security for debts owed by Flower or by the corporation to the several assignees.
When the judgment was entered in 1933, the total of the sums due from Flower and the corporation to these assignees exceeded the amount of the judgment, whereupon an agreement in writing was entered into among the plaintiff, Albert Flower, Albert Flower, Inc. and the various assignees holding formal written assignments whereby the assignees admitted the validity of each other's assignments, the plaintiff paid an agreed sum to each assignee, regardless of priority of assignment to be credited on the assignees' accounts against Albert Flower or Albert Flower, Inc., and all parties released the plaintiff from all demands. The sums so paid by the plaintiff exhausted the amount of the judgment against it except for a balance of $11,200, which was left in the plaintiff's hands to cover a claim against the judgment by one Stoneman under an assignment made by Albert Flower, Inc., to secure payment of legal services in the original action. Stoneman did not join with the other assignees in the agreement. To meet this situation the agreement further provided that the plaintiff should commence a bill of interpleader against the various assignees, including Stoneman, for the purpose of testing Stoneman's right to enforce his claim against the undistributed balance of $11,200 and that so much of this sum as the court should not order paid to Stoneman should be distributed among named assignees parties to the agreement in the same proportions in which they shared in the initial payments.
This bill of interpleader was brought in accordance with the agreement. The plaintiff has paid the money into court. One Rudnick has been allowed to intervene as a party defendant interested in this fund on the ground that in 1924 he lent $1,000 to Albert Flower and Albert Flower, Inc. on the security of an informal oral assignment of their claims against the plaintiff. Rudnick was not a party with the other assignees to the agreement which resulted in the partial payments mentioned above, and it does not appear that the existence of an assignment to him was known either to the plaintiff or to the other assignees at the time that agreement was made. The trial judge found and ruled ‘ that an assignment enforceable in equity was made by Flower to Rudnick of a sufficient portion of his Goodyear claim to secure repayment to Rudnick of his loan to Flower,’ that this assignment was next in point of time after Stoneman's assignment and that it ‘ is valid and effectual to entitle * * * [Rudnick] to be paid $1,044.26 out of the fund in court,’ after payment of a sum which he found to be due to Stoneman. The sole ground of these appeals is that the judge erred in allowing the claim of Rudnick against the fund.
The first contention of the appellants is that Rudnick's answer admits an assignment by Albert Flower to Albert Flower, Inc., but that nevertheless the judge finds that Rudnick's assignment was ‘ made by Flower’ and that there is no express finding of Albert Flower's authority to make the assignment to Rudnick in behalf of Albert Flower, Inc. But the evidence is not reported. Hence it must be assumed that there was evidence to support the judge's conclusions and they must stand unless his subsidiary findings are inconsistent with them. Check v Kaplan, 280 Mass. 170, 174, 182 N.E. 305; Splaine v....
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