The Big One?

Preparing for my first National since 2019, my thoughts turn to the hobby news. If you haven’t been in a grass hut in Fiji for the last two weeks drinking Fiji Delights and sitting on the beaches watching all the peaches, you know that a suicidal Hoosier fraudster named Brent Lemieux capped himself the day after police raided his home and confiscated a truckload of evidence of a fraudulent autograph ring. Lemieux left behind a Unabomber-esque manifesto and confession in which he claimed to have created and sold millions of fake signed items worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He said that he worked with co-conspirators including a Chinese contractor to create fake holographic authenticity stickers of Tristar, Fanatics, Steiner and others, and used them for years to push his auto-penned fakes through multiple eBay and other business names.

So, what’s it all about, Alfie? Is this the fraud that kills the autograph segment of the hobby or is it just another “so what” scandal like so many before: WIWAG, Mastro, PWCC, etc.? Well, that really depends on what and how you collect.

For my collecting, Lemieux’s screed is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. He specialized in forging autographs on manufactured memorabilia. The first time I saw the rows of identical items at a show waiting to be signed I was instantly put off of the whole thing; as far as I was concerned it was just decorative crap. Hundreds of essentially the same things? It may be expensive, but it is not rare, and I have never felt the allure of having a brand-new item signed by a living athlete that is just like untold hundreds of other out there. I turn down signed manufactured crap every time I attend a flea market; it is ubiquitous and I assume all of it is fake.

I do collect unique vintage signed items (nearly all of which are cards, vintage photos or paper ephemera) and I get manufacturer-certified signed cards and in person signatures myself from time to time, and that is what I have. The odds of my having a forgery from the Lemieux crew are nil. I suppose I could be hurt a bit if the autograph market evaporates, but I don’t think it will. I realize that there are fake signatures on cards out there too, of course (I’ve caught them for friends and seen them at shows). That’s not new. What is new(ish) is the emergence of a manufactured memorabilia industry that caters strictly to the autograph collecting community and that is both highly reliant on authentication processes and vulnerable to forgeries because of the readily acquired strata. Lemieux could buy new Patriots white panel footballs in quantity and fake some Tornado Toms on it with an autopen. Try doing that with a fountain pen and vintage ink on a 1933 Goudey Ruth at five grand a crack for the card itself.

What to do? That is the question if you like to collect signed stuff.

The good news is that this ring appears not to have forged the capsules used by third party graders, I am guessing because the tooling costs to produce the molds needed to make the slabs run well into six figures. In other words, if you want to dip your beak into the cesspool of autographs and emerge with as little stinky as possible on it, it is best to get signed things in slabs rather than with just the stickers or COAs. The authenticators certainly could have missed bad items, and there are bad items in slabs, but it is playing the odds.

I have heard some hobbyists taking the nihilist’s approach: there is nothing to be done and every time a scandal breaks the fraudster emerges from the sewer sleeker than before, so we are well and truly screwed. Maybe that is true, but if you really feel that there are no fixes and there are no changes that the industry can or will make, the only solution is to stop participating. Just say no to signed stuff regardless of origin, regardless of certification, regardless of who sells it. Of course, that takes a sizable portion of the hobby to zero overnight, but at least the scammers won't go on winning. If that’s how you feel, go collect something else.

No? Then my advice is to start by coming in off the ledge and regrouping, unless you have a cabinet filled with expensive bric-a-brac from a Lemieux front; if that is the case, you have my permission to start by crapping yourself. Understand that the hobby has weathered dozens of scandals ranging from forgery rings to shill bidding rackets to brazen robberies without going tits up like a cockroach hit with Raid, so the odds of this being more than a transient news story are very long indeed. Operation Bullpen busted over a dozen fraudulent autograph rings and there have been more since then, and the signature game is bigger than ever.

If this latest scandal does have legs, my initial reaction is that this will increase the value of and push for provenance on signed items, including manufacturer certified signed items. I think signed checks are boring, but the odds of a check being forged are pretty remote, as are the odds of a Topps-gathered autograph on a Real Ones card being forged. Older certified autos are suspect. You just have to know which are problematic. I pulled a signed Jack Kemp out of a Pro Line pack 30 years ago; my happiness was short-lived. The legendary AFL QB and then-sitting Congressman signed his allotted cards with an autopen, and the company inadvertently released some Muhammad Ali autograph blanks (which are themselves rare error cards) and gave forgers a field day, but over the last decade the card makers have gotten their acts together. I would trust a major card company’s signed cards unless proven otherwise; I will be searching for a Lance Stroll (F1) Topps signed card at the National without trepidation other than the fact that the recent card designs are so fugly that I may not like any of them enough to buy one.

Getting an item into a slab and attributed to a specific collection, or that is at least traceable to a specific series of collections, that is going to be another form of provenance that I think has a big future. It is the closest we are going to come to a catalog raisonne in the hobby. For those of you who don’t know what that means, a CR is an accepted and comprehensive annotated listing of all the known works of an artist. An item in the catalog has been vetted by experts; one that is outside the catalog may be genuine but hasn’t been accepted as such. Jean-Michel Basquiat has a CR and a large body of material attributed to him that is almost certainly fake, but no one can be sure since he spent a long time living on the streets creating art from whatever. There is a gray market in them, but it is a fraught enterprise. We don’t have an art world level of organization, but if you can trace an item, it may be of added value. I have a unicorn of a card (R340 Sport Kings premium) that originated in the collection of old-time dealer Harry Shaffer and was sold in his estate auction at MEARS to me. I then got it into a spiffy SGC slab. That is provenance that anyone can prove. When my daughter pries it from my cold, dead fingers to sell the card at my estate auction, it will be marketable as such.

If you do collect autos, resign yourself to the fact that there are fakes out there and if you want to collect you will get a fake now and then. I recently discovered that one of my Joe Louis third-party authenticated items is secretarially signed. It happens. Lucky for me it is on a card that is itself so rare that I’d have bought it anyway. You also have to have a little common sense as a buyer. Genuine items cost a lot because they are genuine and difficult to source. If Sandy Koufax charges $1,500 to sign a ball, do you really think that some lox with eyes in Podunk, Iowa is selling them in quantity at $250 each, or is it more likely that they are as genuine as the $20 Rolex that the nice Chinese gentleman sold you on Canal Street that summer evening in New York City?

Also realize that no matter the evidence, some people will reject it. Just like extraterrestrial UFOs and all manner of beliefs in the supernatural, people will believe anything despite having no evidence and even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Yeah, sure that Eddie Collins auto on a yellow HOF plaque postcard is genuine; what do you mean the card was produced years after he died? Even if the TPAs took this seriously--which I doubt they will--and somehow created a mechanism to weed out the alleged fakes, people will believe and there will still be a market for the crap. When the Ford Pinto was exposed as a literal deathtrap firebox, some state governments auctioned off their fleets of Pintos. People bought them anyway. They didn’t care that the cars might turn their kids into Crispy Critters if they got rear-ended. We can’t un-stupid people. If someone wants to play Booboo The Fool, let them. Life is too short to try and convince morons not to part with their money. We just need to be smarter.

See you in Chicago. Oh, and FYI, weed is legal in Chicago and there is a dispensary within walking distance of the convention center. Just sayin…