Ezzard Charles disgrace with pre-certification, when will it end?

[mighty bombjack]

Originally Posted by Big Dave

I believe Donald Fragipani, Chris Morales, and others have used this analogy.

You are correct, and I think this is the really interesting conundrum in the area of autograph collecting. Forgery is a crime, as is knowingly selling forgeries. Is it a crime to authenticate fake autos? Even if someone is being paid for it, they are merely giving an opinion.

I think that a criminal investigator looking at coaches corner would have a lot of trouble determining who was actually signing these things and proving that the auction house is knowingly selling fakes. Sort of that, I don't know that Morales could be convicted of anything. He can claim ignorance/negligence, but those are not crimes.

[Big Dave]

....and that is why all these authenticators are still in business. It is not a crime to give an opinion, regardless of how incompetent one is.

[jimmyfoxx]

I can see most points made in this thread but one thing we are overlooking is the workload for authenticators is tremendous and yet the percent of autographs that we discuss here is small. We should all consider that when quoting others, we should at ourselves as well - "To err is human, to forgive divine." ... Not one of us - no, not one - is perfect and as long as the percentages of autographs like the above Charles remain small - lets not rip those that who do work hard to provide a service to our industry ...

[RichardSimon]

Originally Posted by mighty bombjack

I think that a criminal investigator looking at coaches corner would have a lot of trouble determining who was actually signing these things and proving that the auction house is knowingly selling fakes. .

I think that CC, in their divine work, would be paying their forger/consignors by check. They probably get paid by CC or check so they do have to pay out to consignors by check. If only some government agency could get subpoena power for their books, then it would be easy enough to find the forgers. Just look at the books and see who has gotten paid every month for the last 10 or more years.

[toybulldog]

"To err is human, to forgive divine."

Forgiveness awaits all that have the courage to admit their mistakes. We're still waiting.

[travrosty]

exactly.

When is the craziness going to stop on their part? its pretending on their part, that they know what they are authenticiting.

Can it be honest mistake? i dont know if it can. i find it incredibly difficult to comprehend how they can authenticate these autographs when they have no resemblance to the historical record of these boxers signatures.

It's a total, complete breakdown of the systematic way they go about authenticating. They have holes in their system when it seems like they are not finding a way to put these autographs in front of a pair of eyes that knows boxing autographs.

If every so often, a car comes off the assembly line in detroit with square tires, you can only call it an honest mistake so many times before you have to look in the mirror and decide you want to do something about it. Should it be that hard to make sure the tires are round? These are not judgment calls that are tricky, could go one way or the other, they are obvious. I mean come on!

The first step is to admit you have a problem. They are still stuck on step #1 and have been for a long time because it would require swallowing a little pride. Domino's admitted their pizzas weren't that great and did something about it. You can call it a marketing ploy, but it was a risk on their part to show they had a ways to go to satisfy the requirements of their customers. In this case it is to authenticate autographs and not make the obvious mistakes that we can't even fathom a rookie would make.

I am convinced Joe Orlando simply sees things like this, shrugs his shoulders and moves on and goes on to the next thing, whether it's a tee time at high noon or whatever. Because he doesn't seem to be addressing the problem. If he did address the problem, he would bring their authenticators into his office and chew on some hide, and maybe we wouldn't see autographs like these get their LOL, I mean LOA.

Why he won't come here or another forum and say something? He's only the guy in charge! Now that's a real LOL.

[PowderedH2O]

I gave up on PSA's 'expertise' a long time ago. I emailed them in 2009 and asked if they would authenticate Olympic autographs other than the ones we see all the time. They asked for a list. I have over 5,000, so I decided to concentrate on swimming signatures. I sent a list of 75 to start with, and they said they could authenticate them all (assuming they were legit). I mailed them out and paid my money and I got back 23 slabbed items, and a credit voucher for the 52 they didn't slab because they had no expertise. It seemed to me that they could have told me they had no expertise on these signatures before they took my money. The odd part, was that they slabbed a few that there is NO POSSIBLE WAY that they could know the legitimacy of. One signature was of a swimmer that I got in person that I have not seen another example EVER. Yet, there were fairly common signatures that they couldn't do.
I had planned on building the biggest PSA/DNA registry of Olympic signed items possible. Now, I wish I hadn't even gotten any of them slabbed. I ended up using the credits for grading cards that I really didn't need to have graded. And one other note... on their "Greatest American Olympians" set, they selected 18 Olympians to start with. They didn't pick most of the greats of all-time, but they chose people like Dominique Moceanu and Kerri Strug. Oh, and Steven Redgrave... of Great Britain. I told them in 2009 he was British. He is still in the set. Oh well... enough of me ranting.