REA blog: Michael Jordan Jersey Authentication Story: 90% of Value Vanishes

[allstarsplus]

Does anyone know Ron Marth? Maybe we can get some more insight.

Is it the same Ron Marth as this one?

Fake Favre signatures alleged: Two are indicted

April 28, 1998
A widely known Milwaukee sports memorabilia dealer and a second man were indicted Tuesday by a federal grand jury on charges that they sold more than a thousand fake signatures of Green Bay Packers star quarterback Brett Favre for as much as $125 apiece.

The indictment also charges Ron Marth, owner of Mister Sports, in Mequon, with selling more than 1,000 fake signatures of other sports stars.

http://www2.jsonline.com/packer/sbxx...favre42898.stm

Eric - Great work on that one. If they are different people, it would be one amazing coincidence.

Andrew

[Eric]

Here is a story about Mr. Marth and the Jordan jersey from 1993

Milwaukee Sentinel

Three-peat means big profit for dealer
PAUL ARNOLD Sentinel staff writer
Published: June 28, 1993
Michael Jordan's big post-season meant a lot to the Chicago Bulls. It also meant a lot to Ron Marth.

Marth is the owner of Mr. Sports Sportscards, a Milwaukee memorabilia store. He was also the owner (at least for a little while) of one of Jordan's 1992 Olympic "Dream Team" jerseys. That was until Jordan padded out his Hall of Fame resume with a third straight NBA title last Sunday.

Twelve hours later, the game-worn, autographed jersey, one of six believed to be used by the two-time gold-medalist, was sold to Sports Heroes, a New Jersey memorabilia giant, for $25,000. "I was pulling for the Bulls like you wouldn't imagine," said Marth. "After the game, the calls started coming in. I think it (the third title) added a bit to the offers."

Marth purchased the jersey one week earlier at a charity auction in Cary, N.C.

"He (Jordan) donated one for the Ronald McDonald House fund-raiser there," he said. "I went down there and I thought I was going to steal it. I thought I'd get it for $2,000 and then I'd ask to pay $4,000 so it wouldn't look like I was stealing it. But I and a doctor from California battled for it. It went $4,000, then $6,000, $8,000, $10,000. I thought, `Uh- oh, I'm in a bidding war.'

"I was going to go to $20,000 and quit. But he quit and I got it for $19,500.

"I've never paid this kind of money before. I'm just a working guy who's worked all his life. But I've been able to put together some nice pieces by going to auctions and by buying, selling and trading."

Marth, whose store at 5100 W. Bluemound Rd. features game- used jerseys of such stars as Wayne Gretzky, Hank Aaron and Barry Sanders, had a nervous feeling "like I've never had before" after getting Jordan's Team USA white No. 9 jersey. "It makes you kind of nervous sitting on $20,000 like that," he said.

He said he could have sold the jersey for $30,000 to $40,000 at a prominent auction house or at the upcoming national convention in Chicago, but decided to let it go for less because "I didn't want to take chances."

"Who wouldn't want to make $40,000?" he said. "But people are funny and you never know what might happen. You can't take a chance with that kind of money. So, a $5,000 profit, a 25% profit, for a week? Yeah, I'll take it."

[Eric]

I found an article with references to Sports Heroes. Does anyone know their story?



Daily News of Los Angeles (CA)

WARNING: BUYER BEWARE

June 5, 1994
Section: SPORTS
Edition: BULLDOG
Page: SB8
Bill Madden New York Daily News Collecting baseball memorabilia - a hobby of kings fueled by the nation's romantic obsession with the national pastime - is often an exercise in misplaced trust.

A yearlong New York Daily News investigation of the once burgeoning hobby/investment has revealed an industry rife with deception, secret deals, artificially inflated prices and, in some cases, outright fraud. The villains are fly-by-night dealers who suddenly uncover a treasure trove of supposedly documented authentic memorabilia.

But, as The News discovered, in all too many cases the documentation is unsubstantiated, erroneous or even fraudulent, and the memorabilia phony - undetectable to all except the trained eye.

And when someone does spot a uniform or glove as fake, the dealers have been known to turn around and offer it to someone else.

In the most egregious case, a tattered glove purportedly used and autographed by Ty Cobb, the Georgia Peach who banged out 4,191 career hits, sold at auction for $38,500. The glove was a fake.

Two other gloves, sold at the same auction, supposedly were used and signed by pitching great Cy Young and Negro League legend Josh Gibson. Both were fake, yet the Young mitt fetched $38,500 and the Gibson glove went for $28,600.

The gloves were sold by Richard Wolffers Auctions, a San Francisco auction house whose president is Duane Garrett - a prominent Democratic Party fund-raiser with close ties to Vice President Al Gore and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

In November 1991, Wolffers offered a 1957 Brooks Robinson "rookie" road Baltimore Orioles jersey for $10,000 to $12,500. Before the auction, a Wolffers executive, having been informed by a Baltimore collector that the jersey "didn't look right," sent a picture of it to Phil Wood, a sports radio broadcaster in Baltimore who is an acknowledged expert on Orioles memorabilia.

"There were so many things wrong with that jersey," said Wood, ''starting with the fact that it was a Rawlings jersey when Spalding was the company that manufactured Orioles jerseys that year.

"Also, in '57 the Orioles didn't use a front number on their jerseys, and this one had one," he said. "Plus, it was a size 44 and Robinson was a 42 for nearly his entire career."

Wood said that even the uniform's orange lettering looked different from the orange number on the back of the uniform. Despite the unanswered questions of authenticity, Wolffers sold the jersey, Wood said.

That same year, a 1941 Hank Greenberg Detroit Tigers home uniform, which knowledgeable collectors have said is a fake, was once sold at auction by Wolffers for $85,000.

"When I saw that jersey, with the rounded No. 5 on the back of it, I knew it was wrong," said Ed Budnick, a Detroit-based dealer and collector who is a respected authority on Tigers' memorabilia.

"I wrote Garrett and showed him pictures of Greenberg from Baseball Magazine in May 1941, hanging up his uniform to go into the service. The number 5 was a block letter. The Tigers have never had rounded numbers on their jerseys."

Three years later, in March 1994, the same Greenberg jersey turned up for sale by Sports Heroes, an Oradell, N.J., publicly traded sports memorabilia company, which has worked closely with Wolffers on the sale of numerous high- ticket items through auctions.

But this time it was sold by Sports Heroes to a private collector for a reported $28,000.

"I seem to recall there were some questions about that Brooks Robinson jersey, and I think we refunded the money on it," Garrett said. "I don't recall ever getting a letter from (Budnick) on the Greenberg jersey."
Sports Heroes, the first sports memorabilia company of its kind to go public, opened at $6 per share over the counter in 1989 and reached a high of $10 in 1992.

But the combination of a recession-depressed memorabilia market and what industry sources say were inflated prices paid for items that were later sold or traded at a loss resulted in the company's stock plummeting to a current low of less than $1 per share.
Three weeks ago, Jerome Zuckerman, the point man on most of Sports Heroes' acquisitions and transactions, resigned as president of the company.

"Zuckerman's involvement in the hobby coincided with the price of uniforms especially going berserk because he overpaid in so many cases," said one hobby insider. "They (Sports Heroes) still have a huge inventory of big- ticket items in their warehouse."

That inventory, however, no longer includes the gloves that supposedly belonged to Hall-of-Famers Cobb, Young and Gibson. They were among a parcel of circa 1920 mitts that was sold at auction by Wolffers on consignment from Sports Heroes.

A closer examination of how these gloves were sold - despite damning evidence that they were fake - reveals how unreliable the industry can be.

The gloves first surfaced in the hobby several years ago through a collector named Anthony Abbott, a quality controller for Amprope Instruments in Lynbrook, L.I.

Abbott said the gloves were given to him by the late sportswriter Fred Lieb. In selling the gloves to Sports Heroes, Abbott provided letters of authenticity from Lieb and the Hall of Fame, through a now-deceased library researcher named Jack Redding.

"Not only did (Redding) not write that letter, no one at the Hall of Fame has the authority to write letters of authenticity," said Hall of Fame President Ed Stack. "We will not do that. We could only get in trouble. If someone donates something to us, we can't even give them an appraisal."
Before selling the gloves to Sports Heroes, Abbott offered them to noted New Jersey collector Barry Halper, a limited partner in the Yankees whose baseball memorabilia collection is reputed to be the most extensive anywhere - including the Hall of Fame.

Halper passed on the gloves because he questioned their authenticity.
"Abbott called me and said he had these autographed gloves he had gotten

from Fred Lieb," Halper said. "He sent me one of them, along with an 8-by-10 sheet of paper with autographs of Cobb, Cy Young, Honus Wagner and most of the others on the gloves.

"What he didn't know was that Fred Lieb had been a good friend of mine. I had asked Fred numerous times if he had any memorabilia, and always he told me he never saved anything," said Halper. "So I instinctively knew something was wrong here, and I passed on the glove."

Halper also rejected the autographed paper because it looked "too perfect." But Halper didn't return it, and Abbott has not asked for it back.
Abbott then went to another of the hobby's high-rollers, Alan (Mr. Mint) Rosen - the self-proclaimed "million-dollar dealer" of baseball memorabilia - who bought two gloves, a KiKi Cuyler and a Jimmie Foxx.

It was soon after Rosen put up the gloves in his own auction that he learned the Hall of Fame had confirmed that the accompanying letters of authenticity from Abbott were frauds. Upon confronting Abbott, he got his money back.

"I then told Zuckerman the gloves were fake," Rosen said, "but he went ahead and put them in Wolffers anyway."

When asked by The New York Daily News about the Abbott gloves transactions, Zuckerman would only say: "I have no comment about Anthony Abbott."

Abbott, reached at his office, was equally abrupt. "I don't know what's going on. Why are you calling me? I refuse to talk about any things in the past I've done," he said before hanging up the phone.

Despite common knowledge of the phony Abbott gloves circulating the hobby, Garrett insisted this was the first he'd heard of it when contacted by The News. "To the best of my knowledge, no one asked for their money back," he said, adding: "We stand behind everything we sell."
The other problem perpetuated in the industry is an across-the-board inflation or exaggeration of prices for items supposedly sold - creating 'a fragile market based on fictional prices.

In October 1992, the hobby was abuzz with the announcement that a 1927 Lou Gehrig road flannel, consigned by Sports Heroes to Wolffers, had fetched a record $363,000.

The winning bidder, a South Jersey ophthalmologist who asked for anonymity, actually put up $74,000. The rest of the payment was made with a Ty Cobb uniform for which Garrett gave him an inflated $300,000 credit - only to trade the uniform back to him later. The highest documented dollar amount ever paid for a Cobb uniform is $176,000.
"I don't remember exactly what the trade was," Garrett said of what his firm billed as a record sale. "I only know the Cobb was a beautiful uniform."
Another questionable "sale" involved an 1889 S.F. Hess baseball card of Tim Keefe, which supposedly was auctioned for $33,000.

"Nobody had ever heard of Wolffers until they announced they had sold that card for $33,000 in auction," said a collector who once owned the Keefe card.

[lund6771]

That is the same Ron Marth that got busted for fake autos

I met Ron in the early 90's and sold him his first jersey...a 1989 Jordan shooting shirt...this was at a show in Chicago

he was a card collector, but when he saw our jerseys he said it was way more exciting than cards...

At some point he hooked up with another guy who's been talked about very recently on this site and they pumped out a ton of NBA pro-cuts as game used...this was in 1992-93 and at that time if someone had a jersey that was tagged right, it had to be good...I think there were 12 players at that time...Jordan, Pippen, Shaq, Bird, Magic, Laetner, Mark Price, Ewing, Drexler, etc...the scam started to unfold when people started realizing that the Jordan & Pippen NOB was sewn too high on the jersey...the biggest discrepency was with Karl Malone..the Jazz had Jeff Malone on the team, so Malone had "K. Malone" on his jersey, but Mr. Sports' Malones only had "malone" on the back...How do I know all this?..I knew Ron for a long time and if I remember correctly I was told those jerseys came framed

Ron once sent me a Bird that I was considering buying from him...it was supposedly from 1991...what he did was take a pro-cut and took the 92 tag off and put a 91 tag on it...91 was Birds last year so he coudn't sell me a 92...the 1991 tag had stitch holes all the way around the tag!!!

At this time he had 2 stores in the Millwaukee area...they were running big auctions in SCD....lots of pro-cuts

He was also promoting card shows where a lot of Packers would sign...When he sold Packers autos in the stores noone doubted them because of his signings...at his sentencing I read that there were kids there who got up and told him about lawns they mowed so they could buy a Favre autograph..

remember when some Packer players got in trouble for not claiming taxes for cash payments at card shows?...guess who the promoter was....

I think Ron had good intentions initially, but greed took over...I think he's been out of the hobby since all that went down

[kingjammy24]

The jersey on HA has a hologram that looks like it was tampered with. Could the hologram been taken off of another jersey and placed on this jersey? The holograms are designed to break apart if tampered with.

There is no mention of damage to the hologram in the auction description.

Look at this close-up:

Attachment 7944

Thoughts?

Andrew

andrew,

i emailed upper deck and asked them to tell me what the hologram number corresponds to. as far i could see it, it read "AAE 2231". here is their response:

"Dear Rudy,

The hologram number you provided us is missing one digit. All UD
holograms will be comprised of 3 letters followed by 5 numbers ( ex:
BAJ12345 or AAE45632)

Sincerely,

Alex
UDA Customer Service
985 Trade Dr. N. Las Vegas, NV 89030
800.551.8220"

strange.

rudy.

[LWMM]

andrew,

i emailed upper deck and asked them to tell me what the hologram number corresponds to. as far i could see it, it read "AAE 2231". here is their response:

"Dear Rudy,

The hologram number you provided us is missing one digit. All UD
holograms will be comprised of 3 letters followed by 5 numbers ( ex:
BAJ12345 or AAE45632)

Sincerely,

Alex
UDA Customer Service
985 Trade Dr. N. Las Vegas, NV 89030
800.551.8220"

strange.

rudy.

It looks like if anywhere, the missing number would be after the 1. Perhaps you could ask if he could check all the 10 possibilities?

[allstarsplus]

andrew,

i emailed upper deck and asked them to tell me what the hologram number corresponds to. as far i could see it, it read "AAE 2231". here is their response:

"Dear Rudy,

The hologram number you provided us is missing one digit. All UD
holograms will be comprised of 3 letters followed by 5 numbers ( ex:
BAJ12345 or AAE45632)


rudy.

Rudy - Thanks for the added research.

Should it surprise us that on a Premium item like this Jordan jersey that nobody from the auction house noticed that the hologram was a glaring problem?

Let's see if we can crack the code on that hologram as that may give some clues.

Andrew

[jordan23collectibles]

the heritage jordan jersey has been pulled from the auction.

more to follow ...

rudy.

It looks like Heritage removed the jersey from their website but it still appears on E-Bay *Item # 170159251772

http://cgi.liveauctions.ebay.com/ws/...m=170159251772

This is a size 48 which is different from the REA Blog which is a size 46

jordan23collectibles

[kingjammy24]

heritage pulled it from their main auction but not from ebay and it currently has 1 bid on ebay.

rudy.

[mmonte4]

what did the MJ Dream Team size 48 end up going for on ebay?