WASHINGTON — LinCo Services Inc. and john conti Coffee Company have come to an agreement, albeit a somewhat uneasy one. The john conti company had, essentially, folded LinCo into their business in spring of 2009 with promises made to employ the Linneweber family for life, lease their warehouse for 15 years and purchase equipment at assessed value, according to Greg Linneweber, who runs the family-owned LinCo. There were many promises made and broken, he said. Last Friday, the conti people swooped in without warning when Greg and his sister, Jan, the company’s sales manager, were in northern Indiana on business. They shut off the family’s company cell phones and began removing items from the business. Max and Vera Linneweber, among others, locked themselves in the offices to keep the john conti employees from removing things that belonged to the family. Still, the Louisville-based company got away with several semi-trailer loads of inventory and other items before a restraining order was delivered to the site prohibiting further removal. Representatives from both companies met at the Daviess County Courthouse on Wednesday morning for negotiations mediated by Daviess Circuit Court Judge Gregory Smith. Ultimately, the Linneweber family was allowed to tag items they personally own, and john conti was not permitted to remove those items from the facility. “We were ordered by Judge Smith to mark what stays,” Max said. “If it’s not marked, (conti) can take it. That’s fine.” He said he’s not happy about some of the things that were lost, but said God has taken pretty good care of his family. Some inventory is not paid for, according to Max, but Greg said the suppliers are billing john conti directly, and the customers are serviced and invoiced by conti, not LinCo. Greg said the Linnewebers got things that were clearly theirs and let everything else go. “They’re not entitled to everything they’re claiming, but they are entitled to several things,” he said Wednesday afternoon, adding that the process was moving along fairly peacefully. “Given how badly we’d messed things up, Judge Smith was very fair.” In explanation, Greg said he made some mistakes in working with the john conti people. “There were liens on things that were sold to conti that I was not aware were being sold,” he said. “Basically, they took the entire depreciation schedule of the company (an accountant’s version of all the assets of the company) and attached it to a bill of sale. I was not aware that that had happened. I didn’t check everything as well as I should have. In my defense, we had jobs, we had promises of no less than a 15-year lease with the promise of buying the building later. We were dealing with personal bankruptcies, etc., and I definitely was not as diligent as I should have been.” He said most of the promises he had from john conti were verbal. An equipment sale agreement is the only thing LinCo has in writing, he said, although he had many agreements in e-mail form. “I made an error taking people at their word,” Greg said. “One of my big errors was not getting promises in written contract form. Much of the proof has disappeared because our servers were removed. “The documents we had were not as clear as what they should have been, and I, Greg Linneweber, take 100-percent responsibility for that error. The documentation we have does not back up all the promises made. “There’s a difference between what’s right and just, and what you can legally defend. We can’t defend ourselves because of my mistake.” Greg said he believes what john conti has done is completely morally and ethically wrong. He said if they’d simply wanted to cut costs and eliminate the Linnewebers and LinCo, he doesn’t understand why they did it in such a stealthy manner. He said the family will sit down with its attorneys and regroup. Though he said it won’t be a slam dunk, they intend to come up with a game plan for their future.
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John conti trucks line up in front of LinCo warehouses Wednesday morning waiting for negotiations between the two companies to be resolved. Kelly Overton
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