United States v. Zgrebec, 8590.

• Decision Date: 21 March 1941
• Docket Number: No. 8590.,8590.
• Citation: 38 F. Supp. 127
• Parties: UNITED STATES v. ZGREBEC.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Western District of Michigan

38 F. Supp. 127

UNITED STATES v. ZGREBEC.

No. 8590.

District Court, E. D. Michigan, S. D.

March 21, 1941.

Louis M. Hopping, Asst. U. S. Dist. Atty., of Detroit, Mich., for plaintiff.

Land & Land, of Cleveland, Ohio, and John Stipeck, of Detroit, Mich., for defendant.

PICARD, District Judge.

This is an action brought by plaintiff against defendant, Blaz Zgrebec, to cancel his certificate of citizenship on the theory that it was fraudulently and illegally procured. The action is brought under Section 15 of the Naturalization Act of June 29th, 1906, 8 U.S.C.A. § 405. Defendant was admitted to citizenship in common pleas court, Trumbull County, Warren, Ohio, September 15th, 1922. Most of the facts are not in dispute, except defendant denies fraud on his part, alleging that the several cited instances were merely mistakes resulting chiefly from his inability to understand and speak the English language. Through counsel it was claimed that whenever defendant testified before an examiner he would use the present tense instead of the past, and that statements thus made years ago have arisen to plague him in his present troubles.

The court makes the following findings of fact:

Defendant was born in Yugoslavia in 1886 and on November 20th, 1911, married Josephine Galinac. He came to this country alone on June 6th, 1913, living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, then in Ironwood, Michigan, and then in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Here he lived about 22 months, re-entered at the Michigan "Soo", but paid no head tax. He spent some time in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Gary, Indiana; Uniontown, Pennsylvania; Youngstown, Ohio; and Detroit, Michigan, then back to Youngstown at the end of 1915 or the beginning of 1916, where he remained until 1921.

In 1918 he learned that his wife was living with another man, by whom, he was advised later in 1920, she had had a child.

On January 19th, 1920, he filed his declaration of intention but before filing that declaration with his petition for citizenship in 1922, he admits he erased the name of his wife "Josephine" and filled in the rest of the blank to denote that he was a "single" person. He made the change he said for two reasons — first, he thought his wife had obtained a divorce, and second, he supposed that the question had reference to his present status, not what it might have been when he filed his declaration. In any event, the duplicate declaration as filed with the petition, contained a statement that was untrue. Neither he nor his wife in Yugoslavia had secured a divorce.

Dates are important in this matter and for that reason we refer to the essential ones in detail.

In March, 1922, he married his present wife, Katherine Kozkar, who was also married and not divorced from her husband. The following May is when he made his petition for citizenship and then occurred the erasure of his wife's name on the accompanying declaration of intention. Therefore at that time he had two "wives" and under these circumstances, unknown to the government, he was admitted to citizenship in September of that same year. In 1924 his present wife secured her divorce in Trumbull County, Ohio, but made no mention in her bill that she had been married to defendant in 1922. Incidentally, also, she used her first husband's name and nothing in the bill indicated that she had been living with defendant, under his name, for two years. In defendant's brief it is contended that the second wife gave all this information to the court in chambers but this does not appear as a matter of record and if the divorce proceedings are read without this explanation, at least a technical fraud was practiced upon the state court. With this, however, we are not concerned except as it may throw light upon what happened before and after in the series of events scrutinized by this court in arriving at a conclusion on the credibility of defendant, or at least the reasonableness of his story.

In 1930 defendant, having failed by correspondence to get the children of his wife, by another man, not to bear his name, went to Yugoslavia and started divorce proceedings there, but he stated that this action would have taken too long and so he returned to the United States. In 1932 Janko Yakovac confessed to the naturalization officers at Warren, Ohio, that when he appeared as witness for defendant in May, 1922, in support of defendant's petition for citizenship, he, Janko Yakovac, had committed perjury, giving as his reason that he then thought defendant had the possibilities of a good citizen but recently had become convinced that Zgrebec was a communist, a bigamist, and a person not of good moral character. Two years later, in February, 1934, defendant filed his bill for divorce from his first wife, but said nothing in that bill about cohabitation with his present wife, then of 12 years' duration, and finally obtained his divorce the same year.

In the meantime, defendant has had one or two brushes with the law both on suspicion of illegally making wine, but he has never been convicted. He was also charged with being a communist, but the warrant issued was never served being returned with the notation that he could not be found. There is no evidence that defendant had been hiding. Defendant in securing his citizenship papers made representation that he had lived in the United States continuously since 1913 and this was admittedly a deliberate false statement or error, since he had lived in Canada for almost two years after entering the United States in 1913, to-wit, beginning with the end of 1913 to 1915. He claimed that either he misunderstood the interrogators or they misunderstood him. One of his witnesses also said at the naturalization hearing that he had known defendant more than five years previous to the filing of his petition and had seen petitioner continuously for the five years previous and up to the day of the filing of defendant's petition. As a matter of fact this was an untruth.

This court cannot believe that all the above happenings that now appear on the record of defendant as evidences of his fraud, were the result of "mistake." Such a contention taxes our credulity. Although ill-fortune may follow one person with startling and amazing continuity, this court cannot believe that everybody connected with this man's journey, prior and subsequent to his becoming a citizen, the Federal government's naturalization department, examiners and others, and even his own attorneys, always misunderstood defendant simply because he very often used the wrong tense in speaking. This might have happened once or it might have happened three or four times but we believe the trained men of the United States naturalization department are accustomed to making allowance for those not well versed in the English language, while his lawyers, handling his own and his wife's divorce cases, would certainly have realized the importance of the rather unusual situation in each case. If they had been told the facts they certainly would have included the...