The Bill Mastro Collection (as auctioned by Legendary, 2010)

[trdcrdkid]

At the Net54 dinner at the National last Friday, one of the speakers was an FBI agent who worked on the Bill Mastro fraud case, and who has also worked on similar cases involving collectibles. It was a really interesting talk, and not surprisingly the Net54 audience had a lot of questions afterwards, which he patiently answered. One of the questions was, "What happened to Mastro's personal collection?", and the answer was that it was sold through Legendary in the course of the FBI investigation. Afterwards I mentioned to Leon that I have the catalogue for that auction from December 2010, and how it's full of language making Mastro sound like a saint, giving the impression that he had just decided to get out of the auction business in order to do charity work in the inner city. Leon thought that sounded hilarious.

So, here it is. Not the whole catalogue, which is 388 pages long, but I've scanned the introduction (with its description of saintly Mastro's religious awakening), the auction rules, and the introductions to most of the sections, especially those that mention Mastro and how he built his collection. I have to admit it was a pretty impressive collection, even though most of his cards were not included in this auction.