The deals Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers and their affiliate, the Montreal Royals, are at the center of a fraud lawsuit filed by the United States Securities Commission (SEC) against website Collector’s Coffee Inc. (CCI).
The contracts, which have been missing for years and are now collectors’ items, resurfaced in 2016 and were unveiled by CCI to great fanfare. Back then in Times Square, New York.
But a decision by Judge Gabriel Gorenstein on Monday means a jury in New York’s Southern District is likely to decide who owns those contracts.
The Jackie Robinson Foundation intervened in this case, insisting that the Dodgers had ceded the rights to those contracts to them. Investors in CCI also expressed their point, noting that the contracts served as collateral for defaulted loans.
complex case
This is a complex matter to say the least as multiple stakeholders are involved.
Robinson signed contracts with the Montreal Royals and the Dodgers in 1945 and 1947, respectively. It was the second agreement that allowed him to become the first black player in Major League Baseball in the 20th century.
What happened to those contracts is both complex and mysterious. In a more than 11,000-word ruling, Judge Gorenstein stated that newspaper articles from the 1940s and 1950s indicated that Dodgers executives Walter O’Malley and Branch Richey lent or relinquished the contracts to the Brooklyn archives for exhibition purposes.
In the 1970s, contracts at the James A. Kelly Institute at St. Francis College in Brooklyn ended.
In 2009, the director of the institute, Arthur Konop, died, and his widow gave his son the key to a safe deposit box with the contracts. The message “My children will know what to do with it” was included with the key.
sale
We have to assume that wasn’t the case, since the Konop family sold the contracts to a company called Gotta Have It Collectibles three years later for the sum of US$750,000 (C$1.02 million).
This company then sold the contracts to CCI for two million dollars (CA$2.7 million), and CCI used this acquisition as collateral to obtain a loan of six million dollars (CA$8.2 million).
Actually, the company should have auctioned off the collectibles in 2018, but the sale never took place. The Dodgers instead sent a letter to CCI stating that they owned the contracts and that they wanted them back by involving the Jackie Robinson Foundation in the application.
CCI argues that the Dodgers do not own the contracts and insists the decades-old Los Angeles team ceded its rights in a 2011 bankruptcy filing that pitted MLB against owner Frank McCourt.
CCI argues that the contracts were not included in the club’s inventory or were missing. However, Judge Gorenstein found that the holdings did not include any old treaties of a historical nature, meaning the omission of those that referred to Robinson was not indicative of anything special.
flights?
Judge Gorenstein does not appear to favor the theft route during the contract period. He also noted in his statement that the Dodgers had voluntarily split the contracts and that they needed to be aware that they were open market.
Additionally, he notes that the team never took any action to regain the contracts, meaning they may have given them away or given them up.
According to witnesses interviewed by the judge, major league teams in the 1940s did not appear to view contracts as valuable items to protect. In fact, the Dodgers’ archives contain no contracts from players who were part of their lineup between 1945 and 1947.
However, the judge acknowledges that it is “conceivable that the Dodgers may have treated Jackie Robinson’s contracts differently.”
The parties involved now have a few weeks to appeal Judge Gorenstein’s report, which will be reviewed by Judge Victor Marrero. The Marshals Service is now in possession of the contracts.
With Sportico