The Grocery Company That Cooked Its Own Books
Tacoma Grocery Company’s president is accused of falsifying minute books and hiding assets from the receiver, creditors and stockholders.
Tacoma, April 9.—New sensational charges were made in the superior court today in the Tacoma Grocery Company litigation. A. E. Joab had been appointed receiver of the defunct concern and had filed affidavits charging President Charles E. Hale and H. R. Vanderhoof with conspiring to deceive him and with altering and erasing the books.
Today H. Langton Potter, a wealthy Tacoma resident, filed affidavits alleging that Hale had told him the books given to Receiver Joab were not genuine, and that entries were made “for the purpose of giving the receiver something to play with and to entertain himself.” Potter swore that the minute book had been falsified, altered and mutilated by Hale and Vanderhoof, and that they still had possession of the books and would not let local stockholders examine them. He believed the transactions of J. D. Stacy & Co. were colorable and intended to put the corporation’s goods beyond the reach of creditors and stockholders.
W. R. Blackwell, Walker Oakes Jr., and H. S. Johnson of Laramie, Wyoming, made similar affidavits. Judge Stallcup ordered the books opened at 3 o’clock for inspection at the office of O’Brien & Robinson, attorneys for Hale and Vanderhoof. Receiver Joab, Blackwell and Oakes went there and waited half an hour. When they were about to leave, Mr. Robinson appeared, declined to permit them to examine the books, and said he would arrive at some determination tomorrow morning at 10 o’clock.
“Entries made therein were for the purpose of giving the receiver something to play with and to entertain himself.”
The Tacoma Grocery Company fight has the familiar shape of a modern corporate collapse: a receiver, accusations of cooked books, insiders moving assets beyond the reach of creditors. Then as now, the question was whether the people running a company could control the paper trail long enough to escape accountability. The scene in the Chamber of Commerce building makes the scandal a very local Tacoma story.
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