Mr. O'Keefe is a professional reporter. As such, it's not surprising that he's very good at deflecting. His logic seems to be that we aren't allowed to talk about the two fraudsters unless we give equal time to the Mastro situation
No, Mr. O'Keefe - we are not ignoring Mastro. We've talked plenty about him, and very little of it has been pleasant. But we have often managed to actually hold two conversations concurrently - if you check, you'll see many threads going at the same time, on many different topics. Amazing, isn't it?
These two scammers heard about the value of the T206 Wagner, and like many others who know practically nothing about vintage baseball cards, figured that if they could rough up a reprint well enough to fool each other, then certainly they could do the same to someone with some big bucks. So they decided to make a run at a big paycheck, using an obvious reprint. That, Mr. O'Keefe is why we don't like these two guys. Whether or not they actually went to Michael with the card is almost irrelevant, but I do believe it - why would I believe two liars over Michael? The fact that others who know even less about vintage baseball cards (e.g-yourself) are supporting their efforts is also not such a great thing.
Many of us have mentioned this before: in our hobby, when you have a questionable item of this supposed value, you take it to either SGC or PSA. The excuses that the two fraudsters used for not doing so were pathetic. Your backing them up was just as bad. But I realize - you were trying to sell a book. Congratulations - you sold a book.