1976 Mastro auction

[trdcrdkid]

Originally Posted by Fred

You've got to wonder, was shilling on his mind during the 70s? I know I'm no the only person to think about that.

Well, Mastro says in the above article that he met Frank Nagy at the second annual Detroit convention, which was in 1971. And in Mike Anderson's account of that convention in The Ballcard Collector, which I posted here (http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=218371), Anderson mentions Irv Lerner shilling his own lots in the nightly auction to drive the prices higher. So Mastro definitely had a front-row seat at an early instance of shilling, whether or not he got the idea there.

And in response to some of the other posts in this thread, I don't think it does much good to view Mastro as a one-dimensional villain, incapable of positive human emotion. I'm sure he did love collecting and the cards themselves, and I have no reason to doubt that his friendship with Nagy and affection for his family was genuine. But Mastro does describe himself in the article as "a little rich kid from Jersey", and he obviously had quite a bit of money to throw around given that he set a new record by spending $1500 for a Wagner at the age of 19 (see here: http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=217776). So money was always a big part of collecting for him, and when the amounts of money grew exponentially in later years, the lure of cash obviously seduced him into doing bad stuff.