Posted By:
Jeff ObermeyerSteve, those may be two of the most potentially libelous posts I've ever read.
"What he [Brian] did not tell people is he trimmed, pressed or otherwise altered the card and then got it graded. Some could say I have sour grapes, but I am not a trimmer, and people can interpret this FIRST HAND information however they wish."
Perhaps Brian didn't tell people these things because they aren't true. Your "evidence" here consists of a card, which you mis-identified in your post, that you felt was a PSA 7 and that Brian sent into PSA and got back as an 8. As near as I can tell, that's the extent of your "FIRST HAND" information. Pretty damning - you thought it was a 7 and it came back an 8. Boy, I'm sure that's never happened to anyone before.
You later wrote, referring to the same card: "but that card was altered by Drent to get in an 8 holder and his recent purchase was suspicious." And your evidence is what exactly? Did you see it being altered? Did you see it after it was graded? Altered how? Can you provide anything to support your allegation other than the fact that you thought the card would have gotten a 7 when you sold it raw?
In your second stunning example you state that Brian paid about 25% more than others were offering for a lot of mid grade Mantle cards. Gee, so he paid more than other were supposedly (I sincerely doubt you know the actual amounts of all the offers made) offering. And that's evidence of what? I assume you haven't seen any of these cards since he bought them, correct? So this appears to be proof of nothing more than that Brian made (apparently) the top offer on this lot. Have you seen any of them graded? Have you seen any in an altered state fromwhen you first looked at them? No? Wow. Lock him up.
Finally you swooped in to deliver the coup de grace: "Also, did he not have a big Old Judge or other 19th century that was originally in a Mastro auction that SGC graded that had writing or something else removed from the back? He never made it clear whether the card was from a consignor or if he owned it?"
Let me see if I'm following you. Brian apparently had a card, which you can only identify as "a big Old Judge or other 19th century" card. I can't tell from the quote exactly what you're implying. I assume from the last sentence that it was in Mastro raw, but ended up in Brian's auction SGC slabbed with either writing or something else (you apparently aren't sure which) removed from the back. Now you acknowledge that you don't know if he owned this card or it was consigned to him... so exactly what is this evidence of? Some unidentified card was bought raw from Mastro, may or may not have had something (you're not exactly sure what) removed from the reverse by who knows who, was submitted to SGC by who knows who, and ended up in Brian's auction owned/consigned by an unknown person. Wow. I feel like I'm watching an Oliver Stone movie here. I think I know less about this situation now than before I'd ever even heard of it in the first place.
I guess I can come to one conclusion from all of these posts. I will never deal with Steve Verkman if this is how he operates.
Jeff