Click image to open full size in new tab
Article Text
VOGEL GRILLED IN SIEGEL BANK CASE Says Loans to Stores Were Made by Him and Siegel as Individuals. SANK $1,400,000 IN ENTERPRISES Witness Professes Ignorance as to Many Details Along Bookkeeping Lines. Frank E. Vogel, vice-president of the Siegel Stores Corporation, told yesterday how he sank $1,400,000 in his department store enterprises in ten years, made himself liable for an indebtedness aggregating $4,242,546 77, and was to-day possessed of only $1,991 in real money. He was a witness before George C. Holt, special master of the receivership, In the offices of Douglass, Armitage &*McCann, in the Woolworth Building, for more than four hours. Under the cross-examination of a half dozen attorneys Vogel described his handling of the Siegel firm finances in the effort to keep four big department stores, a bank and their subsidiary corporations going. He did not give the receivers much new information, but his testimony will come as a shock to the 15,000 depositors of the Siegel bank whose $2,500,000 of deposits have gone into the bankrupt stores. Vogel testified the enormous loans to the department stores were made by himself and Henry Siegel as individuals, not as bankers or as a firm of bankers, and that it was their understanding and agreement that these loans to the stores would come second to debts for merchandise. This statement was assailed by John P. Murray, attorney for the depositors; Henry Melville, receiver of the bank, and Joseph M. Proskauer, his associate. They objected to any testimony along this line that was not substantiated by better evidence than Vogel's impressions and opinions. "This is not a question of fact, or a question to be considered here," said Proskauer. "It is a question of law." "If you will permit an outsider to butt in," said Levy Mayer, of Chicago, attorney for the L. Z. Leiter estate, which is heavily interested in the Chicago store, "that's a question that your courts are going to have some trouble with and you lawyers some fees in determining." James A. Rosenberg, attorney for Sheppard and Marble, receivers of the 14th Street Store, the Simpson, Crawford Store and the other Siegel subsidiaries, crossexamined Vogel. He drew from him his present financial condition and asked him if his wife now held any property, directly or indirectly, that be had given her. The witness said she did not, and swore that since December 29 he had drawn only $495 from his own bank accounts, and now had only $700 deposited in the Union Exchange National Bank, $1,161 in the Central Trust Company of Illinois and $130 in the National Bank of the Republic. He had no cash, he said, but had a claim of $50,000, advanced to the Simp. son-Crawford store. He is on the books of the stores for $44,211 77, he testified. Vogel asserted he had drawn no dividends on his holdings of stock in the