Mr. Mint

"By gad, sir, you are a character" Kasper Gutman

So, let’s talk Alan Rosen, or as he loved to gloss himself, “Mr. Mint”.

For those of you who weren’t active before the internet and eBay revolutionized the hobby, Alan Rosen was at the top of the dealers’ heap. A relentlessly self-promoting former coin dealer and salesman, he went into cards with a garish, brazen style, a big ad budget and a drug dealer’s keys and G’s mentality years before it was part of the hobby culture; hell, his behavior became the hobby dealer’s culture for a while. Sporting dark glasses, chains and a pinky ring, and a giant Rolex, the aloha-shirted Rosen was a fixture at the front of every major card show, loudly accosting anyone with a briefcase, bag or box. Always reminded me of a construction worker hooting at a pretty woman from a job site. Many was the time I snarled “nothing for you, jerk” in response to his approach. Well, at least in my mind I did.

Rosen was best known for his heavy advertising and his finds: the picks that his advertising brought in. He uncovered several astounding finds in various backwaters of the country, the most famous of which was a 1952 Topps accumulation of nearly 4,000 high numbers with 62 Mantle cards that yielded most of the high-grade Mantle cards in existence. As Heritage Auctions wrote when selling one of the Mantle cards, an SGC 9.5:

“One of the pioneers of that industry was a man named Al Rosen, but the late twentieth century hobby knew him best as "Mr. Mint." It was a moniker he had bestowed upon himself, one facet of the almost cartoonish persona he cultivated, not unlike the ambulance-chasing lawyers whose commercials populate late-night television. Bald-headed and always sporting a deep tan suggestive of a recent tropical vacation, Mr. Mint occupied prime real estate in every hobby publication and convention of the era, fanning dozens of hundred-dollar bills like playing cards while he beamed a thousand-watt smile as if he had just found that stack of cash on the street.”

After getting a public relations puff piece in Sports Illustrated, Rosen even wrote a book and had trinkets with his image on them made up. He became a celebrity at card shows, posing for photos and signing his merch for the awed rubes.

I first saw Rosen in action at a 500-table Labor Day weekend card show at the Moscone Center in San Francisco in the late 1980s and I was intrigued by what I later realized was a very clever, well-honed sales methodology and business plan.

Let me set the stage. I was in law school in San Francisco and just returning to the hobby after a fruitless several-year break chasing girls. Cards were way less disappointing. I had not been to a card show in years, so when I heard there was a 500 table show at the Moscone Center, which was walking distance from my apartment, I decided to check it out. The brash, energetic fellow with the overpriced cards at the front was not as interesting at first as the sheer mass of cards at the show, and meeting and chatting with Stan Musial, Bob Gibson, Bob Feller and Lou Brock at a lightly attended and barely regulated autograph area on a Friday afternoon, but once I got my cards signed and ran out of my small student budget for cards, I hung around the Rosen booth and watched the floor show because it was absolutely hopping over there.

After accosting multiple visitors with parcels and bags, someone finally bit, a man in his late forties. He had the proverbial shoebox of cards and allowed Rosen to go through it. Rosen looked through stacks of nice early 1950s Topps cards (mostly 1953s, as I recall), and called out prices to an assistant with a notepad and pen. He said nothing to the customer while he was doing this. The cards ended up stacked on the table in a few neat piles. Then the show began.

His minion tallied up the notes and said “5,500.” Rosen yelled out to his other minions (he had an entourage of helpers) “the briefcase, please.” From back behind the table, one of the lackeys lifted a silver metal attaché case over his head and passed it overhead to another who handed it to another then to Rosen. He ceremoniously whipped open the case and pulled out a stack of $100 bills as thick as a Snickers bar (I think it was a $10,000 bundle with the bank band around it). He then counted out 55 $100 bills as rapidly as a casino teller, arraying the cash next to the cards in fanned out rows of 10 bills. Five rows of a thousand, one row of $500. He then put the rest of the cash in the case, crossed his arms, and waited.

The walk-in began to hem and haw. His conflict was visible on his face. This was his childhood on the table; it was obvious he’d saved the cards intentionally, and it was hard for him. He started to speak and stopped a few times, then actually cried. Just a few tears down his cheeks. Face reddened, he said “OK”. Rosen scooped up the cash and handed it to him, one of his lackeys scooped up the cards, another returned the briefcase to its hidey-hole, and the man walked away somewhat sheepishly. Or maybe it was concern over making it to his car without getting jacked for the small fortune in cash he now had.

I have been analyzing Rosen’s technique since then and it was just brilliant. Rosen first created a persona, then cultivated it with the media of the day. That in turn created a perception of him as the king of cards for non-collectors. By the time he was set up in the front of the show, he was a pseudo-celebrity. The position he staked out physically and his relentlessness got him first look at everything that walked in. Lots of signage and self-promoting materials depicting him with stacks of jack and smiling sellers decorated his booth. As for the booth, it was well-staffed and buzzy before that was even a concept at card shows. Most important for setting the stage was how Rosen manipulated the potential sellers. Sellers were impressed at being in his presence, much as they would be if they were meeting a sitcom star. He commanded an audience when he transacted because he put on a show. That all made it more likely for sellers to want to deal with the ‘star’. He then made them into players in a reality show, with him at the center.

The way he broke down the lot was markedly different than the usual. Most dealers at the time (hell, most dealers now) spewed a condescending rap about the quality of the cards to justify the low-ball prices they were going to offer. Not Rosen. He just reviewed and stated prices for his lackey to write down. It was no-nonsense and, yes, professional. While he did not denigrate the seller’s cards, he also did not engage him in small talk. The whole setup, including how definitive he was about prices, was designed to prevent haggling. The awed seller would just have to take his definitively uttered word on what the cards were worth. Having a nameless third person tally up the numbers was a brilliant piece of manipulation. A third person announcing the total to Rosen added gravitas to the pronouncement, and having two people announce the figure literally made it two against one. If two people are telling the mark what’s what, the mark will feel psychological pressure to accept their position. Social group dynamics at its most basic.

Speaking of group dynamics, that also drove the cash handling routine. When the tally was done and announced, the fanfare over the briefcase was a wonderful bit of showmanship designed to tell the seller and the audience that this was the climax of a special event. In movie parlance, it is the third act. Act 1 was the approach. Act 2 was the assessment. Act 3 is the tally announcement and the drama over whether the seller will take the deal. You can almost see the reality TV show jump cuts between seller and Rosen in close-up and cut to commercial before the decision. Again, this reflected a keen understanding of how to work a crowd to advantage. The showier it was, the bigger the audience, and the less likely that the seller, who was in an unfamiliar situation and likely uncomfortable in the spotlight, would refuse the deal and disappoint the gathered audience.

Throwing down the cash next to the cards like a casino payout and letting it sit was the most brilliant bit of showmanship of all. We are profoundly visual creatures: “seeing is believing” or “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Seeing a stack of money while hearing an offer is far more intensely motivating than merely hearing an offer. Rosen knew that most people have never seen thousands of dollars in a stack. Try it some time. Several thousand dollars looks and feels like a fortune, and all you need to do is stuff it in your pocket and walk away. This is the same technique some boxing promoters use to lure fighters to sign. Don King, for example, used to show up to meet fighters with a briefcase of cash to lure them to sign up.

Everything Rosen did was carefully calibrated to get the sale done at his price on the spot. But it was what happened after the deal closed that really taught me something on a whole other level. Again, I was watching because I was out of cash and had nothing else to do.

One of Rosen’s bobos took the shoebox and split the cards into two equal value piles. He handed each pile over to a lackey and told him “3,000”. The lackeys set off into the show. I followed one. He took the pile to a dealer, handed it over and repeated “3,000.” The dealer agreed. The lackey left and the dealer began breaking down the pile. Over the next two days I saw pieces of the deal spread over a few dealers’ tables.

Note what Rosen did. The cards were run of the mill, desirable but not exceptional, so they were not grist for Rosen’s publicity/auction mill. Knowing that, he whacked up the lot and wholesaled it for a 10% profit. In an hour. Rosen understood what investors call “velocity” and how it worked in the card biz. His model was beating the bushes for inventory and buying it all. As long as inventory poured in, Rosen understood that on most deals you take a profit very quickly, recoup your investment, and move your money into the next deal. It mitigated his risks and locked in his profit with a few minutes’ work, and reduced his cash needs, which is always a concern for any business: you don’t make money paying a bank vig on a credit line. Very, very smart. Don’t try and wring out every last dime in profit from a deal by slowly retailing the cards, get your money out and your profit out as fast as you can.

If Rosen’s shtick seems hokey today, well, it is. But consider the context. Rosen was the first one to see the value of media. All the other dealers at the time who went on road shows merely posted a small buying ad in a local newspaper and brought people to a hotel room to make a deal. It was low key and kind of sordid, like a drug sale. Rosen blasted his message across the landscape, came to you with his entourage in tow, and made an event of it. Rosen’s shtick worked because no one else did it and because he had no real competition: there was no eBay, no internet auctioneers, no way for average people to sell cards except via a laydown with a dealer at a hotel or show. Rosen advertised to get attention, made appointments, and came to you with cash in hand. His biggest deal, the 1952 Topps find, cost him $125,000 in cash. Bearing in mind inflation, that was nearly half a million bucks in today’s dollars. In cash.

Did I mention the cash? Lemme repeat it: CASH. One of the great allures of Rosen was the shadow economics of how he dealt. Do you think that guy who stuffed the $5,500 in cash into his pocket at the show declared that income? If so, I have a slightly used but still elegant bridge to sell you. It runs from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Naturally, it will be cash only, please. One of the dumber things his sellers did was to allow him to put them in ads flashing the cash: hello, IRS, since I didn’t declare the income, here’s evidence that I am felony-stupid.

The internet and the rise of auctions took Rosen out of the spotlight. With democratized information and with the ability to sell cards through myriad outlets, Rosen’s advertising blitz was no longer a decisive factor in wooing would-be sellers. It was also apparent that his business model depended on buying cards very low because of his feeder network of dealers. A laydown at a show usually is the walk-in selling to the retailer. For mundane acquisitions, Rosen had at least one and sometimes more than one layer of middlemen between the seller and the retail buyer; in other words, his sellers were selling to a wholesaler. All those layers had to be fed, which dictated that Rosen buy very low. The cash and flash did not conceal how cheaply he was buying cards once the information playing field was leveled. I think that auctioneers did the most damage to Rosen because they could pitch the seller at getting 70%-80% of retail for their cards and in some cases secure deals with cash advances.

The rise of PSA and eBay put the stake through Rosen’s vampire heart. When grading became the thing, Rosen fought it tooth and nail for a very good reason: it was readily apparent that Mr. Mint was really Mr. Ex-Mt. Many of the cards he hyped and sold were overgraded as grading standards evolved and standardized under the PSA banner. A Rosen mint card was lucky to get a 7 from PSA. Add to that the ability to be a seller in a perpetual card show on eBay, and the need to sell to a wholesaler like Rosen dissipated. His client base shrank as people learned more.

Rosen’s final denouement as a hobby force was an epic flameout at a Cleveland National. Rosen always insisted on being the first table at the entrance because his business model depended on grabbing walk-ins before they could get to other dealers. He had an absolute fit when the fire marshal had the venue open a second set of doors and he saw people entering the venue from the other side. Rosen swore that he’s never attend the show again. The reaction from the NSCC management was the equivalent of a bemused “who are you?”

Rosen went on dealing until he died but his relevance to the hobby had ended well before he pitched a hissy at the National. He remains an interesting but increasingly archaic artifact of a bygone era in card collecting, and one that we can still enjoy today. If you go on Youtube you can see some of what Rosen did in promotional videos he shot later in his career, the hobby equivalent of watching a dinosaur from the Silurian Age walk across the Vegas strip. I don’t miss Rosen’s obnoxious presence at shows, but his business model was both brilliant and informs much of the style of dealers to this day.

Next time I will be live at the Pasadena show (November 18-19), so I will do a column each day of that show.