Paul, respectfully, read his indictment. He committed every type of fraud known to the hobby and robbed his friends. He then got caught, cooperated against his co-conspirator/friends and paid none of his victims back (including his victim/friends) unless he got sued and was forced to cough some up. He's just another criminal in the hobby, just on a much higher level. The two years he received in prison was a gift, it should have been much more.

Sure. I think some trimming can't be detected. But what I was saying is, it's still trimmed.
For the record, Bill Hughes, who actually graded the card, said it was an 8 to him and he didn't know a backstory. That's what he's told me.
I enjoyed the interview. Thanks for posting it, Peter.

I don't disagree. I just think it's hard to analyze the thought process by which we acknowledge that an item might be altered, but in some cases have zero ability to prove it.

The discrepancies between this interview and some of what has come to be the accepted lore of the card (i.e., the 30-for-30 short "Holy Grail", that ESPN did with Keith Olbermann and others a decade or so ago...) is that here you have Mastro saying it's "one of the larger" Wagners that exists. And everyone in the older interviews are saying it's short, up to 1/16 short, and that's how they knew it was sheet cut or trimmed and not factory.

Which is true?

Can't they both be true? Mastro claimed in the interview to not have touched the top and bottom borders. According to him, whoever cut it from the sheet cut it that size, but left massive borders on the left and right, which he then trimmed. So the card could be short, and still have wide borders on the sides.

Leon, as we've discussed, at least according to O'Keeffe, he said he knew it was sheet cut/trimmed.

I still don't understand the emphasis in the popular lore on the trimming as opposed to it being sheet/strip cut. It was never worthy of a number grade.

I am only stating what Bill told me told about 2-3? yrs ago.

As for Okeefe, he completely misquoted Chris Ivy on purpose, in an article concerning me selling my collection, by putting a period (or comma, I forget) in a sentence, changing the meaning. Before that, I had no issue with him. After that, I had no use for him or his reporting.

As a former journalist — I agree in full. With something like this, you ask a question and get out of the way. Wayyy too much talking over the person everyone is here to see.

Mastro
 

So painful to watch... Bill was in a mood to just tell stories about stuff we all wanted to know about and I found myself screaming at the screen to "shut up!!" over and over again.. I will give him credit for getting the interview though.

Brian Gray is hands down my favorite person to listen to in the hobby. He always gives great interviews and has wealth of insight. This is the first time I've seen him as the one conducting the interview though, rather than the other way around. He always seems to have his finger on the pulse.

I suppose that's true. Neither Mastro or Olbermann / O'Keefe in that other thing I referred to said specifically how it was either too big or too small (horizontal v. vertical, or both). The ESPN video seemed to insinuate it wasn't wide enough, but that may have just been my perception.

The thing I had not questioned really before watching this new Mastro interview, was how many people were really concerned about the size of cards the way we are now in the late 80's and early 90's? I was a kid in the hobby then, but was collecting "old" (the term vintage was not yet really applied to cards then) cards voraciously, and I can tell you that would not have been a question I would have thought to ask in 1990. Unless the card just obviously presented cut or small. I hear that and think well, probably Jim Copeland never asked Mastro anything like that. Maybe Sotheby's didn't either - hell, probably. They didn't know anything about cards.

That's exactly what I was screaming multiple times listening to it in my car yesterday.

Surprised no one brought up Brian's quick jab at auction houses in specific states when it comes to houses bidding against customers.

https://youtu.be/Omp0P5kJ9Cs?si=LDJLz_WIZ1BYNHol&t=2754

Others such as Dave also brought this up.

My apologies for my ignorance, but given his criminal behavior I will not watch the interview.

Wasn't part of Bill's sentencing is that he is forever prohibited from engaging in the sport's card industry either as a dealer and auctioneer?

I came away mostly wanting to hear more about the early days of hobby types / sets becoming "discovered" or "popularized", what that was like to uncover these rare regional sets and some of the early collectors who gave them their attention and deemed them valuable. so much hobby knowledge today is just accepted without learning much of the origins and how things came to be favored or desirable.

I also want to see the collection of John Ramirez (sp?), who Mastro said has everything and has been collecting forever.

Agreed, TJ. I had a weird experience with Iconic Auctions recently where there was a bid against me on a Babe Ruth cut auto in or right before extended, so it looked to me like I lost as the underbidder. Then they contacted me in the morning saying that I could purchase it for my high (under)bid, because the seller decided that they would lower the reserve. I didn't see anything on the listing about it having a reserve and when I inquired more, they dodged my questions and just pressed to know if I'd buy it or not. I wonder if Arizona is one of these states Brian was referring to where AH's can be a fake bidder with up to the reserve... which I, of course, did not know about and do not like.

"The T206-series Wagner card is considered one of the world’s most expensive trading cards. Mastro admitted in the plea agreement that he cut the card’s side borders, and then concealed this information when he sold the card in 1987. Mastro again failed to disclose his alteration even after participating in subsequent auctions of the card in 1991 and 2000. The sale in 2000 produced a purchase price of more than $1 million, according to the plea agreement. Mastro also failed to disclose that he cut the Wagner card again in 1992, even though he was aware that the card had been submitted to become the first baseball card assigned a grade based on the condition of the card."

cut from here the below link seems to answer your question:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndil/pr...l-bidding-scam

Here is an excerpt from the actual indictment. As evidenced by a thread last year, there is a lot of misunderstanding of this proceeding and the role of the Wagner. Bottom line, people who claim it had NOTHING to do with the case are flat out wrong, but at the same time, it certainly was not the focus of it. The focus was clearly shill bidding.

11. It was further part of the scheme that in marketing materials distributed
on behalf of Mastro Auctions, which were intended to portray Mastro Auctions to
potential bidders and consignors as a premier seller of valuable items for which a
strong market existed, defendant MASTRO represented that Mastro Auctions had sold
the most expensive baseball card in the world, a Honus Wagner T-206 card. In making
this representation, however, defendant MASTRO knowingly omitted the material fact
that defendant MASTRO had altered the baseball card by cutting the sides of the card
in a manner that, if disclosed, would have significantly reduced the value of the card.

Ray may have been lying for some reason, but he is the only actual primary source I have ever seen able to recount the origin. His testimony appears to be the only actual evidence. I have been told there is some evidence of the Long Island origin but nobody is able to produce it when questioned about what it is. So strange.


Mastro was obviously guilty of very serious criminal fraud. Imperfect is putting it far too lightly. But criminal fraud is not seen as a big deal in this hobby for some reason ($$$), so I guess that is not a big problem. What's wrong with having auctions and auction houses run by convicted fraudsters? Nothing!


The 'trimming' is kind of irrelevant, since it was cut by hand from a "sheet" (deductively, almost certainly not an actual sheet, perhaps a panel or strip). Its only added value is that the card was effectively cut illegitimately twice and PSA still pretends it's an 8, adding to the comic absurdity of their money-printing claim to this day. If a corporation says up is down, this hobby will decide that up is close enough to down that it is fine as long as money can be made.


A card that is altered in reality is... altered, independent of any single person's knowledge of said alteration. Not being caught doing something does not mean that thing did not in actual objective reality ever happen or it somehow does not count.


The real tragedy of the saga is that possibly the only piece of uncut material from the set production runs to survive to modernity was destroyed without any documentation of the layout, size, what was on it, etc. There are only a handful of uncut T strips/sheets/panels that anyone can show (mostly Obak), and none for T206. Some other T sheets we know survived to modernity have been destroyed, like the T25 sheet and the T204 sheet.

Where did Ray discuss the origin? I know I have read this but cannot now recall except to vaguely remember it was something about Florida.

Was Brian somehow, someway unaware that much of Bill’s criminal behavior running Mastro Auctions was his creation of fake accounts to run up his customers’ bids while knowing what their ceiling bids were? And his telling Mastro employees to secretly hit lots over and over to run up the prices, creating hidden reserves?

I feel like I’ve just taken crazy pills and somehow no one recalls who and what Bill Mastro is.

Off memory - Ray's version of events is recounted in O'Keefe's book, who I believe he spoke to for an article or two from a couple years before the book. I believe there are other places it's been, but I'm not sure when it first appeared as it was probably before my time. I'm pretty sure we dived into Ray and the card in the thread here a couple years ago.

As I recall the details (I'm not home, I can't go through my archive right now), the Florida origin was stated by Ray to be from a flea market. The sheet was bought at the flea market for an unstated pittance, and then brought up north where the cutting and selling (1985) happened via Ray. Ray, of course, is probably the only person who would really have any real information on the origin. I would never assume people are honest, but there's no other evidence and nothing that contradicts.

The claims from Long Island have been made by multiple people. None have ever been able to provide a shred of evidence or real information beyond just insisting they are right because they are.

NY is closer to the production facility (we do not actually know, despite many claims to the contrary, for a certain fact which facility actually printed T206 - probably it was multiple, and not all of them may have been direct on paper facilities of the ALC), but in the course of 70 something years items move around. Plenty of New Yorkers have retired to Florida and brought their possessions with them. I have found 1910 T card sheets (actually a series of panels in two sheets for two different sets) and traced them to a NY origin, but things can be found in other places too and be legitimate. I don't see any problem with a sheet popping up in Florida.

In this 2001 piece by O'Keeffe, Ray refused to say where he got it. Also note Mastro's adamant denial.

https://www.t206museum.com/page/periodical_19.html

I do not have a copy of O’Keefe’s book anymore, I recycled mine. The Florida speculation/story is included and mentioned in some articles in promotion of the book you can pull online if you want. I doubt I can trace it to the first appearance, and I doubt O’Keefe was the first claimant as I’ve heard this since the late 90’s.

The Long Island claimant was asked for evidence they claimed to posses over and over on this board and refused to ever divulge it. This was a lie, it possibly is from NY (it probably was in 1909!) but it isn’t because of this claim.

I have no clue what the actual truth is, and nobody has ever given anything to prove it. I have no reason to doubt the long standing story especially, nor to argue that it is the truth. I don’t know where it is actually from, we probably never really will at this remove. That’s the point, that we lost a lot of history that we aren’t likely to be able to find anywhere else because this unique item of immense value to research was cut up and ruined for some bucks, and no information preserved. It is quite unfortunate for us all.

I think this is the only panel of T206 cards I have ever seen. But this panel appears to be a proof, not from a production sheet.

This panel is exactly why I phrased it as production. This is a very strange piece, I have never seen anything like it among the other uncut T card material available to us in other non-baseball sets. The few pre-production proofing sheets I own or have seen of ATC T cards are all on normal stock the same or (or indistinguishably similar) to the production cards. Same for solitary 'proof' cards that have come down to us.

If this wasn't apparently found in Wagners estate, I'd have a lot of doubts about it. To my eyes this piece is way more interesting and cool than the PSA 8 Wagner.

I would agree Greg. This panel is very odd. Have you ever seen any T205 uncut sheets or panels?

I wish! I love the gold borders.

For baseball there are a few Obak sheets and panels, but I believe this set was produced by an unrelated lithographer on the west coast. American Lithography was a lot more circumspect than the ATC was about a monopoly. A number of print shops are working with ALC and doing things that make no sense (one series of records I found in a card related court case has the ALC outsourcing a small project to 2 different 'independent' firms) if they didn't own a number of their 'competitors'. The documents suggest to me that the ALC didn't put on paper its ownership of firms like Brett Lithography that produced a number of the T card sets, but that in actual practice these firms were acting as subsidiaries.


I will edit this list if I am forgetting any, but I believe these are our surviving T sheets of the 1909-1912 ATC project. Finding even one panel or sheet of east coast printed T cards the same size as T205/6 could be very helpful.

Small Size Proof sheets, testing only a handful of cards, focused on colors and alignment and clearly not the size that would have been used for mass production:
T107
T62 (at least 2 different)
T51


Full size sheets or nearly full size sheets:
T212 Obaks

T25 - Auctioned and then cut up into strips and/or singles. (I have 2 strips of it).

T220 Silver - Proof cards cut into 8 panels long ago before 'discovery'. (I have 23 of the 24 surviving fragments).

E229 - cut into panels before discovery, from the same find as the T220 set. Candy set, but at least 1 of its backs is a licorice owned by the ATC and it was done by the same printers at the same place at the same time as T cards, probably using the same contracts, so I would bucket this as relevant, unlike the E90 sheets or the E93 sheet). These are probably proof cards, but there are no changes I have noticed. (I own most but not all of the panels).

T204 Ramly - cut up into singles that SGC slabbed, no picture or documentation was ever shown publicly (as far I am aware, I am no Ramly expert). These are probably not helpful to ATC card sheets.

T206 Panel - Cut up by Mastro in 1985. The presence of a single Wagner and Plank very strongly suggests this was not a "sheet" in the full sense, but a panel of some sort


The Wagner strip from his estate really doesn't fit with any. I would love to handle it raw and examine, but that ain't ever happening.


We would know a lot more than we do now about the ATC card project if we could find even a few sheets of random sets. That there are so few from any of the dozens of ATC sets and that some of those very few that did survive were not even documented before being destroyed saddens me. A lot of knowledge was lost, slowing research but perhaps preventing us from ever getting that information elsewhere. There may not be another sheet to discover and learn from, and we will forever be stuck squinting at miscuts and trying to deduce which cuts went with what sheet layout and its overall size etc.

When I first read Brian's comment, I thought his reaction was "odd" or a little "off base." I was able to watch 1:25 and then I had to turn it off. I feel like I need a shower. That was, frankly, disgusting not only in terms of what they were celebrating and normalizing, but in terms of things they never even addressed (conveniently). Frankly, at the end of 85 minutes, I have far less respect for "the interviewer" than I do for Mastro.

Its a real god damn shame that professionalism and expertise have gone by the wayside and any clown with a platform can host with the same weight and credentials as someone who.......knows what they're doing. That was an intense disservice to the entire industry.

I feel that way about several in the hobby. On the flip side I heard Bill sent out some nice gift baskets to those that said good things about him before he done his time.

The hobby has, IMO, handed out an insane number of free passes. Nothing surprises.

Ignorance is bliss

I seem to recall the claim made by myself and others wasn't that it had nothing to do with the case but rather that it had nothing to do with the sentencing. He wasn't charged for trimming the Wagner and he wasn't sentenced for it. It seems to have only come up because he was trying to propose a plea deal and/or as a way to demonstrate what sort of character he was.

I just quoted from the indictment, which IS the charge. We went through this at length before. I suggest that before you continue down the same wrong road, you reread the prior thread where virtually everything you thought was shown to be objectively wrong by reference to the case documents. He did not bring it up, the government did. And he responded. Now technically he was not charged with the actual trimming of the card, which of course is not a crime, he was charged with not disclosing the trimming in marketing materials where he touted Mastronet's prior sales of the Wagner. In other words, fraud. Again, it was not the focus of the case, shill bidding was. And I would presume shill bidding is what the judge was focused on in sentencing Mastro, although there was some discussion of the Wagner charge in the relevant sentencing documents, also referenced in the other thread.

https://www.net54baseball.com/showth...ght=memorandum

Dayenu.

The best thing you could have possibly done, seeing as the days of the outhouse are behind us.

I considered the outhouse, but I thought that would be insulting to excrement. His infatuation with Lifson and a number of errors about cards were forgivable, but spending much of the text implying card collectors are racists because they are able to recognize obvious reprints was just too dumb to waste bookshelf space with.

100%. As I was watching the video, I kept thinking "WHAT, there was an uncut sheet of T206s and somebody cut it up????"

A halfway decent interviewer would automatically have gone there. Mastro was jovial and in a talkative mood. The interviewer should have asked more about the original uncut sheet with a single question… and then shut up and let Mastro expound on it. But because he was mercilessly interrupted, cut-off and redirected (for the interviewer to talk about himself) I guess this critical part of the story has to remain a mystery.

Enough about you. Now, let's talk about ME.

LOLOLOL. So are you suggesting that this was not a good double down bet by Snowman?

I'll go one step further. I'm tripling down on my claim. Peter's take is bullshit. And there are numerous lawyers in the hobby that disagree with his take as well. Mastro was not charged or sentenced for trimming the Wagner or for not disclosing said trimming. Period.

Not my "take" bro, read the indictment. Tell me which words you don't understand. Better yet, tell me what words support your position. As for sentencing, I already said clearly I didn't think it was much if any of a factor. You can bluster and BS all you want but it doesn't change the document. Once more, with feeling:

11. It was further part of the scheme that in marketing materials distributed
on behalf of Mastro Auctions, which were intended to portray Mastro Auctions to
potential bidders and consignors as a premier seller of valuable items for which a
strong market existed, defendant MASTRO represented that Mastro Auctions had sold
the most expensive baseball card in the world, a Honus Wagner T-206 card. In making
this representation, however, defendant MASTRO knowingly omitted the material fact
that defendant MASTRO had altered the baseball card by cutting the sides of the card
in a manner that, if disclosed, would have significantly reduced the value of the card.

Period. :)

What does the indictment have to do with this conversation? You can put whatever you want in an indictment. What matters is what he was actually found guilty of and sentenced for. That's what we're talking about. Show me where I can find something along the lines of the jury saying "As to count #11, we the jury find the charge of the defendant trimming the Honus Wagner baseball card and failing to disclose said alteration upon selling it: GUILTY".

You can't because it didn't happen.

I'm not saying it wasn't brought up at trial. I'm saying he wasn't sentenced for it and he didn't go to prison for it.

Geez, even the official U.S. Attorney's Office press release discussing the sentence talks about the Wagner.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndil/pr...l-bidding-scam

You have no clue Travis. Geez. Stop moving the goalposts. You claimed he wasn't CHARGED with it. Post 91 and many prior posts to the same effect. The indictment is precisely the document that sets out the CHARGES against him. So yes, he was CHARGED with it. The indictment has everything to do with this conversation. He then pleaded guilty to the one count indictment which included this CHARGE and was sentenced. There was no trial and no jury because he pleaded GUILTY. If you actually listened instead of just argued from ignorance and ego you might understand this better.

Recall that in the prior thread your ridiculous theory was that Mastro himself injected this into the case to win brownie points.

BTW, as to your statement that you can put anything you want in an indictment (you clearly know a lot about the law lol), the indictment was returned in this case by a federal grand jury after months of work and presentation of evidence. And lo and behold, the FBI press release describing the unsealed indictment also talks about the damn Wagner.

https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/ch...r-collectibles

A definition of the word indictment:

a formal written statement prepared by a prosecuting authority charging a person with a crime and returned by a jury (such as a grand jury) upon finding that sufficient evidence to support it was presented.

Clearly it was part of the charges/accusations and no lawyer would say otherwise. As to his sentencing docs I have read...ok browsed...I did not see a breakdown of charges with the associated time he would serve so I (non lawyer) cannot speak to how much of his jail time was due to the Wagner but the trimming and the failure to disclose the trimming were part of the charges.

Reading this is akin to listening to fingernails across a blackboard. Travis -- stop. Please. Bill was sentenced for any and all of his bad conduct in the indictment to which he pled guilty. He was a cooperator with the feds and ate the entire indictment. His PLEA AGREEMENT SPECIFICALLY MENTIONED HIS FRAUD IN CONNECTION WITH THE TRIMMED WAGNER ON PAGES 12-14. He was charged with it, he specifically pled guilty to the fraud re the Wagner. It is a public document. He had a 30 page plea agreement and 15.5 pages of it described his many frauds.

Most of his bad acts related to shill bidding -- in essence, creating hidden reserves to drive the prices of Mastro lots up. In that ridiculous, idiotic interview, I believe he was shaking his head and smiling with derision when the interviewer claimed that auction houses which LEGALLY bid on lots were bad -- Mastro did it ILLEGALLY. He used fake names as bidders, employees, dead people and even a priest if I recall.

He also ran up, along with his co-conspirators, a religious Jewish bidder who they knew couldn't bid at the auction close as he observed Shabbat. So they looked at his ceiling bids and ran them all to the top. Was the shill bidding worse than the Wagner fraud? Yes, no, maybe -- but the judge knew of all of it, along with Mastro's cooperation against his friends. Again, he paid $0 back to his victims. Unless you sued Mastro, you didn't get back any of the money he stole from you.

Sorry Chase, you left out the part where you can put anything you want in it.

Maybe you and Peter are mistaken??? Per Travis: "And there are numerous lawyers in the hobby that disagree with his take as well."