Opinions on a Pie Traynor autograph and much more

[RichardSimon]

Traynor did have more than one type of T.
No the photos of Mantle were not done by Dross.
Dross has been dead for some time.
Dross started out forging autograph cuts only.
This was approximately 20 years ago.
He forged mostly HOFers as far as I know.
Before I knew that he was a forger he actually bought some blank B&W plaks from me at a JFK airport show.
All of a sudden rumors were sweeping the hobby, this was about 17-18 yrs ago, that a big find had been made of B&W HOF plaks.
Many names were involved. The cards themselves were pure mint.
Dross got some dealer to be his front man, I forget who that was, and he sold many of the plaks to several dealers. The front man claimed he had collected these himself and now decided to sell them. This frontman left the hobby not long after this scam went down. One dealer in particular bought $80K worth and sight unseen, knowing what he was getting I ordered a number of them from that dealer. As soon as I got them though I realized they were fake and got out of my deal. There were many better names in the group of forgeries. I believe I still have photocopies of the forgeries and I will look for them tomorrow so I can list them here. One of the things to look out for is pure mint B&W Artvue HOF plaks. Many of these cards were shown to me afterwards at shows and many collectors did receive refunds when I told them they were not authentic.
The clever Mr Dross had been visiting Cooperstown and stumbled upon a store that had connections to the HOF. After the HOF switched to gold plaks they sold their remaining stock of B&W plaks to this store. All the plaks were shrink wrapped and stayed mint until the store owner put them out on his selling floor. One of the ironies of this scam was that none of the living HOFers at the time were part of this scam. The reason for that being that individuals who visited the store were buying up the living HOFers to mail to them for autographs.
Thus here was a huge group of HOF plaks but no DiMaggio, no Hubbell, etc. By the time Dross got to the store he could not buy any players who were still alive then because the store had sold out of those.
Some of these plaks are still in the hobby I would think.
I will try to find my photocopies and produce a list here tomorrow.