THE MARKEL REPORT: Are Graded Baseball Cards Being “Juiced” (Aesthetically Enhanced)?

[Jacklitsch]

Susor made the NY Daily News

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/iteam/


September 9, 2009 8:21 PM By Michael O'Keeffe
Memorabilia world's opinion swayed on fraud
It wasn't that long ago that some sports memorabilia collectors would pull a Linda Blair and spew pea soup whenever the Daily News published a story that pointed out that their hobby was fraught with fraud. Some collectors, it seemed, preferred to bury their heads in the sand when confronted with evidence that their hobby had problems.

When our book about hobby fraud, "The Card," was published a few years ago, some of the guys at the card collector forum Net54Baseball.com acted like they were going through an exorcism. "The book portrays the whole hobby in a bad light," Net54Baseball moderator Leon Luckey grumbled. "The book sheds no new light on anything, is sensationalism at its worst, and is a piece of crap in my opinion."

"How sad that such a piece of rubbish gets published," a collector named Dan Markel added.

Maybe the fact that federal agents investigating allegations of shill bidding and other hobby fraud questioned industry executives and passed out subpoenas at the last two national sports memorabilia conventions. But a lot of Net54Baseball.com regulars - including Luckey and Markel - have become converts. Both now recognize that their hobby has significant problems

"A few years ago, fraud was a taboo subject," said Kevin Saucier, a collector who runs AlteredCards.com, a Web site to help fans protect themselves from the hustlers. "People just didn't talk about it. Now its come to the forefront of the hobby."

Markel, a collector who lives in Texas, is doing more than complaining about the hobby's crooks and con men. He led a group of collectors who conducted a lengthy investigation that concluded that a prominent eBay dealer was buying low-priced, low-grade cards, trimming them to enhance their appearance, and then submitting the doctored cards to PSA. When the cards came back with higher grades, the dealer, another Texan named Scott Susor, would sell the cards on eBay at premium prices.

Luckey recently posted the results of the investigation - called "The Markel Report" - on Net54Baseball.com.

Susor didn't return calls for comment, but his Houston-based attorney Bennett Fisher said Susor is an honest dealer who has never knowingly sold an altered card. "If they were trimmed, they were trimmed when Scott got them," Fisher said.

Susor considered filing a defamation lawsuit against Markel and others involved in "The Markel Report," but Fisher says a suit would be prohibitively expensive. "How much do you spend to fight something like this?" he asked.

Susor's eBay registration was pulled last week, which means he's no longer doing business on the Internet flea market, at least not under his own name. Spokeswoman Evonne Gomez declined to say if Susor had been banished because of The Markel Report. "I can't give specifics on this account because of privacy issues," Gomez said. "But the activity outlined on Net54 would not be tolerated by eBay.

"We have a very solid relationship with law-enforcement," Gomez added. "We take these kinds of allegations seriously."