Quote:
Originally Posted by insidethewrapper
It also appears that Mike Gutierrez, according to the article, continued to sell fake Cobb autographs, even when it was known they were fake.
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Here is the excerpt in the article relating to Mike Guiterrez.....
"Josh Evans, a widely respected memorabilia expert
and principal in the very successful Leland’s Auctions,
has a much more serious indictment of Al Stump.
Evans, a young collector and authenticator in the mid-
1980s when Al Stump was actively trying to sell Cobb
memorabilia, worked with Mike Guttierez on selling
the Cobb items that Stump supplied. Many of the
items were sold to Barry Halper, one of Evans’ best
customers. After seeing multiple batches of purported
Cobb items arrive from Stump via Guttierez, and
becoming ever more suspicious with each batch,
Evans notified Guttierez that, in his judgment, the
items were all fakes—not just the now-infamous
Stump letters on Cobb stationary, but many other personal
items that had supposedly been owned by Ty
Cobb. In a recent interview, Evans stated: “The Cobb
stuff that was coming to me through Gutierrez all
looked like it had been made yesterday. It seemed that
Stump was buying this old stuff from flea markets, and
then adding engravings and other personalizations to
give the appearance of authenticity.” Young Evans was
so distressed by the fake Stump material
that Gutierrez
continued to sell that he first told Barry Halper of his
suspicions and then contacted the FBI in an attempt
to get an official investigation of Al Stump started."
I realize I'm nitpicking but a perplexing question that I have, is the moment it was established that Al Stump was a fraud, and the moment that Barry Halper was notified by Josh Evans that he was buying questionable Cobb material. Wouldn't Halper seek a refund and return all the bogus stuff??? Perhaps, he was too busy or didn't care to bother with a refund. But why did he keep all that stuff and actually tried to include it in his 1999 sale? Had he forgotten about its origin? Heck, I would venture to speculate, that if Halper would have made a big stink about it, the second Al Stump book would have never been made, nor would we have a Ty Cobb movie based on a now fictional book.
Robert Lifson,
the memorabilia expert who managed the 1999 sale of
the Barry Halper collection, examined dozens of Ty
Cobb artifacts and Cobb-signed documents sourced to
Al Stump, many of them identical to those described
by Stump in his 1981 correspondence with Howard
Smith. Lifson said in a recent interview that all Stump
items in the Halper collection became suspect after it
was proven conclusively that a Ty Cobb game-used bat
that Stump supplied to Halper was not authentic,
based on the dating of the bat by detailed analysis. Of
the large number of Ty Cobb documents from Stump
that came to Sotheby’s, practically all were judged by
Lifson to be fraudulent. Lifson went on to say, after
reading the content of these letters and examining the
forged signatures, that “Stump must have thought that
he was creating history, or something.” His faking of so
many Ty Cobb documents “must have been a pathological
issue with Stump, something deep-seated within
him. It was just crazy how Stump went to such elaborate
lengths to create the forged Cobb documents.”
Lovely Day...