Ha, oops! Sorry Jolly Elm

There's something seriously wrong with your brain, Asperger's.

Again: a defendant who pled guilty to charges has the same effect as being convicted by a jury -- in fact, most would suggest he's more guilty by pleading because he can't blame a mistaken jury or government misconduct at a trial, or any number of potential appellate issues which could vacate his conviction.

Mastro pled guilty to every charge he faced and admitted to even more bad conduct which wasn't charged.

But you know more about the law because you have a ten card collection and you stayed in a Holiday Inn Express last night.

I've heard of fur burgers, but never have eaten an Ass burger. Just me though, i could be missing out.

I can't really add anything here. Bloody bloody Mary look in the mirror. That's all I've got

(Deleting my message - probably misread your comment, Ted…

Kind of a stretch there. I was clearly posting about Snowman telling people they looked stupid to look in the mirror.

Thou doth protest too much.

Got your 15 mins if fame and multiple posts about;


Black swamp find
Auction house to use
Grader to use for high end cards

Etc


It was all so contrived.





Sent from my SM-S918U using Tapatalk

Congrats on a truly incredible find and bringing it to market Jeff and hats off to Brian for marketing the find properly, I'm sure the consignor will be very happy.

https://media.tenor.com/HC_g_9HMXB0A...s-time-ufc.gif

Lichtman vs. Snowman (special guest referee P. Spaeth).

Sherman vs. Gross

Only on Netflix

Just don't do it....
 

One thing I have tried to do on this forum, is not argue law with leading attorneys. It just doesn't go well. Now, if we are talking pre war type cards, I should be able to hold my own. :cool:

Ditto. Same with doctors (my wife). Ha

Same with Nuclear Physicists (me)

Anyone else skip right over the bickering posts? Good lord it's tiring and so boring.

Back to cards...Yes the Caldwell is top 3 hardest cards to find for 1914 set collectors. Last I checked there were only 33 graded examples between PSA/SGC. Ray Keating, Del Pratt and Hick Cady are all around that same pop.

The funny thing is we're just taking past each other. They want to pretend that we're arguing about the law or legal terminology. It's hilarious. I'm just making a very simple point that there's a world of difference between someone agreeing to a plea deal and someone being tried in front of a jury and found guilty of a crime (especially in this case where the other charges he was facing were far more serious than him trimming the Wagner). It's not a legal debate. It's just common sense and simple logic. You don't have to be a mathematician to know that 2+2=4 and you don't have to be a lawyer to know that there's a difference of implications between someone agreeing to a plea deal and someone being tried in front of a jury and being found guilty of specific charges.

If a prosecutor lists out 20 things that they think they might be able to get you on and you come to an agreement with them because you think overall the terms are more favorable than you'd get if you were to fight them in court, it says nothing about whether or not each of those specific 20 charges would have stuck. Regardless of whether or not an entire room full of lawyers tells you otherwise.

Mastro pled guilty to every count he was charged with and received no “terms” in exchange. He admitted to all criminal conduct the government said he had done and more crimes than what the Feds were even aware of. He was sentenced for more than trimming the Wagner and selling it as untrimmed. He was sentenced on all that he pled to which included every charge in the indictment. He did not receive a break on the plea by being required to plead to only some of the charges.

He threw himself on the mercy of the court at sentencing and even brought a priest along to help exemplify his acceptance of guilt. Part of the sentencing computation was a three level downward adjustment in his sentencing guidelines (which determined the length of his sentence) for “acceptance of responsibility” for his crimes. He received that at sentencing.

Had he gone to trial he would have fought every allegation. He would have told the jury and the public he was innocent. After conviction he would not have received the three level downward adjustment in his sentencing guidelines for acceptance of responsibility for his crimes. Additionally, afterward he would have surely publicly said the jury was wrong, they didn’t understand the hobby, the judge was biased against him, the prosecutors withheld favorable evidence and the original charges against him were faulty as they didn’t make out crimes. To his grave he’d continue to claim publicly he was innocent.

You might be the only person on the planet who believes Mastro’s guilty plea makes him less guilty than if he had been convicted after trial.

Now can you stop?

No. He can't.

Mary, Queen of Scots was known as 'Bloody Mary" for her proclivity of having opponents' heads cut off.

I have one that was slabbed, but I can't tell if it is an older PSA or SGC slab.

Of course, this could be a 1915 card as well...the orientation of the copied text on the back offers more questions than answers.


Brian

This is the new normal. I don't know how these guys make money when you are trying to sell a card that sold 1 month ago. Insane.

I agree with everything you said here. But all of that still has nothing to do with my claim. Like I said above, we're just talking past each other. You know damn well what I'm saying, you are just too stubborn to admit that I have a valid point. If you were hired to defend the argument that someone accepting a plea deal does not have the same implications as someone being tried by a jury of a specific charge and found guilty, you'd surely be able to come up with a compelling argument.

Let's all pretend like Lichtman isn't the one who brought this back up (again) in this thread.

I actually don't know at all what you're saying because you make no sense. There is no compelling argument for anything you said about Mastro's guilty plea. I made it very clear why Mastro's guilty plea - without any out for him to claim that a jury got it wrong or he was unfairly convicted -- is actually more powerful than a conviction after jury trial. You're not a lawyer, you've never been inside a courtroom, you've got no idea what you're talking about. You just are one of those guys who thinks he knows everything when in fact you don't know shit.

I don't know why you continue to double down on this but I have to think there's something wrong with your brain. And next time you want to attack me in a thread, just be aware that I'm going to continue to bring up this idiocy of yours.

Ok, I'm done with this. You've done some fine litigating and I see a bright future in criminal defense for you. But at this point it's a disservice to anyone who is forced to read this.

This is just the latest in a series of absurd positions that Travis never acknowledges were wrong, he just moves on and/or doubles down.

The Wagner had nothing to do with the case. Oh, wait.
The Wagner wasn't in the indictment/part of the charges, Mastro brought it up to curry favor. Oh, wait.
The Wagner had nothing to do with the guilty plea. Oh, wait.
The Wagner had nothing to do with the sentence. Oh, wait.
And now, a guilty plea doesn't mean as much as a verdict.

And who did you say looks stupid?

I just asked my poker friend (another high-profile attorney that you guys would surely know the name of if I told you) about whether or not charges listed in a plea deal could ever be irrelevant. Here is his response below. Funny how he had no problem grasping what I was saying even though, as you've pointed out dozens of times, "I'm not a lawyer".

"Yes, in some situations, charges included in a plea deal can be considered irrelevant to the case, particularly when they are used as leverage to negotiate a plea on a more serious charge, essentially "throwing in" a lesser charge to secure the defendant's agreement to plead guilty to the main offense."

Except that's not what happened at all in the Mastro case. He pled guilty to every charge in the indictment. He also cooperated and provided information on all the charges against him, admitting all of it. There was no leveraging anything here. For you to suggest that a guy who pled guilty committed perjury before the judge, is really comical. You provided bogus information to your imaginary friend and then received a bogus response back.

Why don't you ask the FBI agent who investigated Mastro if he was guilty of all things he was accused of? He thinks you're a moron too.

LOL. Travis previously. It's four lines but I cannot even count the errors.


I'm no lawyer, but when I read through discussions of this topic on the Blowhard forums a few years back, I seem to recall most of the lawyers there were in agreement that he had not in fact been charged with any crimes in relation to the Wagner card. But rather it was brought up during the trial as a mere testimony to his character, or lack thereof. Him basically just trying to come clean with anything and everything he could in an effort to gain favor and get a more lenient sentence. But he was not directly charged with a crime for anything related to the Wagner. You mention that he admitted to trimming the Wagner in his plea deal, but that plea deal was rejected by the judge. He was not sentenced for anything to do with the Wagner.

If you look at all his lies regarding Mastro’s case, they all form a pattern: his effort to downplay Mastro’s criminal conduct of knowingly selling an altered card. Which just happens to be the very thing people on this board accuse him of: willingness to sell altered cards without disclosure.

It’s fairly obvious why he’s willing to die on this hill, no matter how bad it makes him look.

I would be more than happy to disclose anything I've done to any of my cards. But I don't alter cards, so your theory doesn't hold up.

I'm curious though, when you were representing Brent, why do you think he told you to go pound sand and fired you after you told him that he was cooked and that his best defense was restitution and a plea deal? And why do you think you were wrong and that his best defense was to instead fire you and listen to someone else's advice?

And why do you think your boyfriend Brusokas was fired (sorry, "retired"?) after the investigation he spent years on, and millions of dollars worth of our tax dollars, fizzled out and fell flat? An outcome that I predicted years prior, I might add.

And why do you think an "ignorant moron with Aspergers" was able to see how this would all play out ahead of time while one of the best lawyers (even a "savant" in his own words) in the country was absolutely certain it would end quite differently.

You are digging deeper but please continue. It's the trainwreck you can't take your eyes off of.

I get that one has to really disconnect from facts a bit to try and justify things like criminal fraud, which is the central point of every Snowman thread for reasons that surely do not have to do with him being a fraudster doctoring cards and selling them without disclosure, but it will never stop being funny that the hill he chooses to die on more than any other in his quest to justify fraud is the absurd claim that pleading guilty to a crime just doesn't really count.

It would be interesting to know what changed in Brent's approach to the investigation, which did seem a turning point from this outsider's perspective after Brent initially was cooperating -- but attorney-client privilege means we won't know unless Brent himself chooses to talk. Without knowing, it's pretty useless to speculate.

In any case, to tie this back to a favorite false theme of Travis, I highly doubt the reason for ultimately not bringing the case was the lack of a viable legal theory. That part, as has been explained ad infinitum, is easy -- mail fraud and wire fraud.

This has definitely become my favorite discussion on the forum :) It's a fascinating dive into human psychology.

It really is, just probably not the way you are thinking.

Travis, I think Brian would be surprised to learn he was fired from the FBI. He was a decorated FBI agent and probably one of the best two I’ve ever worked with and against. Similarly, you know I can’t talk about my relationship with Brent but like everything else you have said here, it’s either a lie or just wrong.

You’re a low level fraudster. Period. And you want to convince yourself that you aren’t a fraudster by twisting yourself into a pretzel in defending of all people, Bill Mastro.

It's a two-way street. You guys think I'm batshit crazy and remarkably stubborn (to say it politely) because I won't admit to being wrong about something when you think I'm debating legal matters with a legal expert.

But there's a while other side you're not seeing to this, which is that the legal experts in this thread have such tunnel vision that they cannot understand why someone would think there is merit in pointing out that someone being charged with a specific crime and found guilty of having committed that crime by a jury would have different implications than someone agreeing to a plea deal where dozens of offenses with varying degrees of seriousness were listed on it.

Here's the key difference. In one case, someone successfully argued in front of a jury that not only was someone guilty of doing the thing they are being accused of, but (and here's the kicker) also that the thing they are being accused of is in fact a crime to begin with. That's the key differentiator here. In a plea deal, you can just accuse them of something that you think is a crime and if they think the deal they're being offered is a favorable outcome, they'll just agree to it. And you never even have to successfully argue whether or not accusation #21 out of a list of 37 accusations was even a crime to begin with. And it might not matter anyhow, especially if the other 36 charges are far more serious (which in this case they certainly were).

The tunnel vision crew is stuck on the fact that Mastro was charged with trimming the Wagner and pled guilty to a list of charges in his plea deal which included the Wagner trimming/reselling. They are simply taking for granted that what he did with the Wagner was even a crime to begin with. What I am saying is that I don't believe that's a given. I'm saying it's something that would need to be argued. It's not like stealing a car or slashing someone's tires or something. This isn't a black & white issue. It would be very easy to make an argument that what he did with the Wagner wasn't even a crime to begin with. I'm saying it needs to be argued in front of a judge and jury. I'm also saying that because the Mastro case ended in a plea deal, the hobby was robbed of the opportunity to see how a jury would view the arguments for and against what he did with the Wagner as even being a crime to begin with. I think it would be very difficult to make the case today, knowing what we know, that he withheld material information about the Wagner when we know that the entire hobby is well aware that the card was trimmed but that it still didn't affect its value one bit (how can a fact be material if knowing it does not affect the value of something?). It is still to this day the single most valuable sports card in existence. There were no victims in his sale of that card. And if you think it's just a given that a jury would automatically accept your viewpoint/argument that it is in fact a crime, I'm saying perhaps you should think again.

That sure smells a lot like defamation to me, Jeff.

What you're missing, among other things, is that the reason people agree to plea deals in the first place is that they've been advised that the admissible evidence against them is so strong that they'll highly likely be convicted if they go to trial. People don't agree to go to jail lightly. So the decision to plead is highly correlated with the strength of a case and the likely outcome of a trial. If Bill Mastro and his counsel thought there was any modest chance he would be acquitted, he would have gone to trial.

Sue him for defamation. Please. Please do it.

No, I'm not missing that at all. Of course he did. Every other charge on that plea deal was far more serious. He knew he was cooked. His only objective at that point was to spend the least amount of time behind bars as possible. But we still learned nothing about whether or not what he did with the Wagner would have been viewed as a crime by a jury to begin with. I know you think it's pretty straight-forward. Jeff thinks it's straight-forward as well. But I assure you, it is not so cut and dried.

I'm just hoping to be the subject of his next podcast episode.

Don't bitch out, do it. You know the law better, I'm sure you'll win.

If I recall now, the charge was that he touted the past sale of the Wagner by Mastronet, and the price realized, without disclosing that he had trimmed it. I believe the prior sale had been years before, the one he touted. At that time, "everyone" certainly did not know it was trimmed, nor could you fairly say that it wasn't a material fact affecting the value. It seems like straight fraud, intentional failure to disclose a material fact. Sure, it's possible that charge would not have stuck, but in theory that's true of everything. It doesn't invalidate the conclusions one can draw from a guilty plea. Recall that your initial thesis was that it wasn't part of the case at all but something Mastro himself injected.

Hey, now we're getting somewhere. This is progress. Congratulations, Peter!

Sure. But again, I'm not interested in those conclusions. I don't think they're interesting or informative at all about how the rest of the world, the people outside this hobby, would view the selling of altered sports cards.

I knew nothing about the case. I never read it. I was simply quoting/responding to whatever you said about it.

I don't see how we're getting anywhere. With any charge, of course there is always the theoretical possibility that had there been no plea, the jury might not have convicted. That's inherent in life, no one can predict with absolute certainty the outcome of a jury trial. That does not in the slightest negate the significance, legal or practical, of a guilty plea. And right, you didn't read the case, but that did not stop you from making repeated incorrect pronouncements about it. Why do you have such an incredibly difficult time just saying, OK I was wrong?

You're reverting back again to whether or not a jury would find them guilty of a charge. Again, that's not my point. He did it. He admitted to doing it. The question I'm asking is whether or not a jury would agree that it's criminal behavior to begin with. Not whether or not he in fact did it.

You keep circling back to the significance of a plea deal. Why are you doing this? This has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. I keep pointing to this over and over and you keep responding with some other point that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

I have no problem with saying I'm wrong. I was absolutely wrong about the details of the case before. I was misinformed and took that misinformation for granted and repeated it. I was dead wrong. No problem admitting that. But those details still have nothing to do with what I've been talking about this entire time, which is wether or not a jury would agree that what Mastro did with the Wagner was in fact criminal behavior to begin with.

Because his thesis is that this is not a crime, so if he concedes this actual real-world case, his argument falls apart. It is very important this not be conceded, because he totally does not commit this kind of fraud himself, it's his passion for completely unrelated reasons.

The jury would have been instructed very precisely on the elements of the crime as charged. It would not have been up to them to decide if it could be a crime or not, only if as a factual matter the government had proved each element. In other words, that's not a judgment for the jury, they are told what the law is. Any argument that it couldn't be a crime would have been raised by Mastro in motion practice, presumably.

It's a common mistake, but Bloody Mary was Queen Mary I of England who reigned from 1553-1558. She was the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon and she was succeeded by Elizabeth I (her half sister).

Mary, Queen of Scots was Queen of Scotland from 1542-1567.

And that is probably the least likely post to ever appear on this board :).

You make it sound like the judge is going to say something along the lines of "If you believe Billy Boy trimmed and later sold a baseball card, then you must convict him of this charge."

Here's an example of a set of jury instructions from a NY court corresponding to a criminal simulation case. The phrasing of these instructions creates multiple significant hurdles that you'd need to successfully argue your way through in order to get a conviction even on something like the Wagner case with Mastro. And it would be significantly more difficult (perhaps nearly impossible) to get a jury to convict someone of criminal simulation for something as benign as selling a cleaned baseball card.

Anyhow... How about that Morehouse Baking #151 Babe Ruth Rookie?

Rea
 

Stampsfan- Congratulations, and a standing ovation! Back to the actual
topic of the thread. This REA catalog is loaded, I've bookmarked several
items and can't wait to see how things play out. My goal is to win just one:)

Trent King