A rare, genuine Honus Wagner T206 baseball card, circa 1910. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
CHICAGO (AP) — A major U.S. memorabilia company improperly jacked up auction prices for some baseball cards with shill bids and sold hair advertised as belonging to Elvis Presley even though its authenticity was in doubt, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.
In one case, the owner of the now-shuttered Mastro Auctions, William Mastro, allegedly failed to let potential buyers know in advance that a century-old Honus Wagner T-206 baseball card had been altered — information that would have reduced the rare card’s auction price, according to the 33-page indictment released by the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago. The indictment does not say how much the card sold for, but other Wagner T-260 baseball cards have sold for more than $1 million.
Mastro and another executive at the Chicago-area firm also sold hair purported to be from Presley even though DNA tests on the follicles raised questions, according to the indictment. It does not say how much the hair fetched at various auctions.
“Consumers might be lured to the auction market for sports memorabilia and other collectibles by an emotional attachment to an item or purely as a calculated investment, but . . . bidders must remain mindful of the maxim, ‘Buyer Beware,'” said Gary Shapiro, the acting U.S. attorney, said in a statement Wednesday.
Mastro Auctions, which billed its itself as the world’s leading sports and Americana auction house, is also accused of misleading bidders into thinking demand for an item was greater than it really was.
Mastro, 59, of Palos Park, faces one count of mail fraud, and former executives Doug Allen, 49, of Crete, and Mark Theotikos, 51, of Addison, face multiple counts. Just one count of mail fraud carries a maximum prison term of 20 years.
After Mastro Auctions folded in 2009, Allen and Theotikos founded a similar company, Legendary Auctions, whose investors bought the assets of Mastro Auctions, according to the Lansing-based company’s website.
No one answered at a phone number for a William Mastro in Palos Park on Wednesday. A message left at the Legendary Auctions’ office seeking comment from Allen and Theotikos was not immediately returned.
Honus Wagner baseball cards are among the world’s rarest. Wagner retired in 1917 with more hits, runs, RBIs, doubles, triples and steals than any National League player.
John Rogers, of North Little Rock, Ark., bought a Wagner T-206 from Mastro Auctions in 2008 for $1.62 million. The indictment is unclear about which card is at issue, but Rogers said the card he bought was never altered.
“The card in question is not the card that I purchased in 2008,” he said. He has since sold that card.
Rogers said he didn’t think this week’s indictment would shake the confidence of aficionados or dissuade them from spending millions on rare baseball cards.
“This story won’t hinder that,” he said. “I don’t think our industry has any more shenanigans than any other industry.”
Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
A rare, genuine Honus Wagner T206 baseball card, circa 1910. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
The walking tour will view St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond. Gen. Robert E. Lee and Confederate President Jefferson Davis are among the political figures who have worshiped there. Image by Morgan Riley. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
RICHMOND, Va. – Join Museum of the Confederacy Education Manager Kelly Hancock for “War so Terrible: Richmond 1862,” a walking tour focused on Richmond during one of its most transformative wartime years. The tour will explore the impact of this year on Richmond through the use of photographs, descriptions and the city’s monuments. The program will take place on Aug. 18 from 10:30 a.m. EDT to noon. Participants will meet in the lobby of the museum (1201 E. Clay St.) to begin the tour.
By 1862, Richmond, the Confederacy’s capital, had grown into a bustling wartime city. During this year, the city saw the inauguration of the first president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, it became a center of medical care and it opened its warehouses to create makeshift prisons for soldiers, citizens and slaves alike. The city’s population expanded in response to its new political importance to the South. Some of the new arrivals would work as nurses and doctors. The walking tour’s route will take participants past Court End, the Capitol grounds, St. Paul’s, the Stuart-Lee House, Monumental Church, First African Baptist Church and the former sites of the Spotswood Hotel, the Canal Basin and General Hospital no. 5. The tour does not include entrance to these sites.
Advance reservations are required. Program is free for members and $10 for nonmembers. For more information contact Kelly Hancock at khancock@moc.org or 855-649-1861 ext. 121.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
The walking tour will view St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond. Gen. Robert E. Lee and Confederate President Jefferson Davis are among the political figures who have worshiped there. Image by Morgan Riley. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
The dust jacket of John Steinbeck’s ‘Sweet Thursday,’ published by Viking in 1954. Image courtesy LiveAuctioneers.com Archive and PBA Galleries.
SALINAS, Calif. (AP) – They were the stuff of another America: Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. George and Lenny in Of Mice and Men. Lee Chong, Doc and the delightfully larcenous Mack and the bums in Cannery Row. Danny and Pilon in Tortilla Flat. Adam and Cal Trask in East of Eden.
Whether you met these classic characters while reading the novels of John Steinbeck or you’re encountering them for the first time, they come to life at the National Steinbeck Center, a sprawling and modernistic museum and study center in Old Town Salinas. It is the largest museum dedicated to a single American writer.
The Nobel- and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who grew up in Salinas, wrote about many things: migrant workers, labor “agitators,” World War II, the Mexican Revolution, New England, Russia, even Vietnam. But his most endearing and enduring works centered on the people and places he knew best, from the coast and farmland of the Salinas Valley between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The center opened in 1998 as a library and research facility and place to store and display Steinbeck memorabilia. While Steinbeck scholars can meet here to discuss his work and life, its 30,000 annual visitors also include ordinary fans and other visitors curious about his work and life. The area around Salinas is scenic and popular among tourists, with Monterey County wineries, the Pacific Coast and other attractions nearby. Big Sur, which has connections to literary figures like Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and poet Robinson Jeffers among others, is 50 miles.
Even those who don’t know much about Steinbeck’s work will come away from a visit to the center with a sense of his life and times. Curators have blended the work of artists, photographers and historians to bring back the atmosphere of the places he described, set mostly between the World Wars.
Here are the migrant labor camps; the louse-ridden bunkhouses of the migrant “bindle-stiffs” (as hobos were called); Lee Chong’s grocery; and the entrance to the Bear Flag Restaurant, which was the name of Cannery Row’s “stern and stately whorehouse,” which Steinbeck described as a clean, one-price joint presided over by its formidable yet soft-touch madam, Dora Flood.
Here is Ed Ricketts, “Doc” in Cannery Row, the eccentric operator of a marine biological lab, who was a character in the book but also a real person and close friend of Steinbeck’s.
Some incidents in his writings were also based on real events, such as the failed 1916 attempt to refrigerate lettuce in rail cars to bring the produce to Eastern markets, depicted in East of Eden.
And Steinbeck’s mastery of the vernacular, an ability to write the way people then talked, in a beautifully unrefined manner, can be traced not just to his observations of speech but to input from a mentor, Tom Collins, an anthropologist who researched speech patterns and customs, according to museum archivist Herb Behrens.
Steinbeck’s family had been ranchers in the Salinas-King City area, said Behrens, and many of the characters in works such as The Red Pony and The Long Valley almost certainly reflected people the writer knew as a child.
This sometimes got in him in the doghouse locally, since the not-always-favorable depictions often could be identified by townspeople.
But it wasn’t just locals who were riled by his work. At times some of his books were burned as un-American and subversive. Steinbeck was derided by angry growers and others as a “traitor to his class.” But he was not the ideologue he was accused of being. Of his novel In Dubious Battle, for example, a hard look at leftist organizers in the orchards, Steinbeck wrote that the Communists would hate it and the other side would too.
Behrens said the migrant worker novels sired a bevy of “damage control” books by others, such as Plums of Plenty the Grapes of Gladness that tried to show migrant life was just fine, that there were good jobs for all who wanted to work.
This, of course, was hooey and Steinbeck, himself at times a laborer and straw boss who had spent time with migrant workers and leftist organizers, knew it. The labor camps and the migrants with their problems were in place before he began writing about them, and he was overwhelmed by the conditions he found.
Those researching his work for the many later screenplays of his books concluded that if anything, conditions were even worse than he portrayed them.
Steinbeck and photographer Horace Bristol visited migrant areas for Life magazine for a piece on the impact of floods in 1937 and ’38, but Life rejected the pictures as too graphic, Behrens said. After the1940 film The Grapes of Wrath won two Oscars and was nominated for five more, Life published the pictures.
Loops from some of the many movies made from his books play in the museum’s pocket theaters.
Many of the buildings in old photos in the museum remain standing in the adjacent Old Town, and are easily recognized. Steinbeck’s boyhood home, a wedding cake of a Queen Anne structure three blocks from the center at 132 Central Ave., suggests stability and comfort. It is a restaurant now, called The Steinbeck House.
Steinbeck said he initially wrote East of Eden for his for his sons because “I wanted them to know how it was, I wanted to tell them directly.” His work and the Steinbeck Center have kept that world alive for others as well.
___
If You Go…
NATIONAL STEINBECK CENTER: 1 Main St., Old Town Salinas, Calif.; http://www.steinbeck.org/ Open daily, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Adults, $14.95; children 13-17, $7.95 and 6-12, $5.95. Allow a half-day.
THE STEINBECK HOUSE RESTAURANT: 132 Central Ave., Salinas; http://www.steinbeckhouse.com/ or 831-424-2735. Lunch served Tuesday-Saturday, 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m., most of the year. The restaurant is located in Steinbeck’s boyhood home. Tours offered Aug. 5 and Sept. 2 at noon, 1 p.m. and 2 p.m.; suggested donation, $10.
GETTING THERE: The Steinbeck Center is 17 miles east of Monterey, 60 miles south of San Jose and 105 miles south of San Francisco.
Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-07-25-12 1841GMT
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
The dust jacket of John Steinbeck’s ‘Sweet Thursday,’ published by Viking in 1954. Image courtesy LiveAuctioneers.com Archive and PBA Galleries.
VALLEJO, Calif. – Ron Fox has been in the business of collecting and selling antique drinking vessels for most of his life. His fascination started modestly in 1971, when he decided he wanted a stein to put his pennies in. Four steins later, and all his change in its place, a passion was born.
Fox has spent the past 41 years traveling throughout Europe and across America, visiting museums and private collections, researching and photographing steins. He has amassed an amazing knowledge that puts him at the top of his field. He has given numerous lectures and appraisals for the best-known collections in the world. He is editor of PROSIT, the magazine for members of Stein Collectors International.
The Stein Collectors International 2012 Convention is being held in Annapolis, Md. Fox Auctions has been appointed the official auction for this year’s event. The auction is open to the public and all interested collectors are welcome. The Internet live bidding will be exclusively provided by LiveAuctioneers.com
This live and Internet auction is being held Aug. 14, at Lowes Hotel, Annapolis, starting at noon EDT.
This is one of the largest and most diversified auctions of Antique beer steins and other drinking vessels to come to the market in more than 50 years. Every type and manufacturer of beer steins is represented in the 452 lots of this phenomenal sale. Some of the examples are Mettlach, character, regimental, Russian enamel, military, pewter, sports themes, glass, silver, ivory, wood, faience, early stoneware, souvenir, Whites Utica, Lenox, Rookwood, Royal Vienna, Meissen, Viennese enameled silver and more.
“It is a sale not to be missed, if you have the slightest interest in antique beer steins. This is the type of sale that collectors talk about for years,” said Fox.
Some rare examples in this sale are:
– Lot 287, a Russian enameled, gilded silver tankard, Moscow, 1883, maker’s marks with imperial warrant. The cylindrical body has stylized flowers, trelliswork and scrolling foliage with pinecone finial and engraved inscriptions. Rare and in mint condition. Estimate: $20,000-$30,000.
– Lot 300, a 11-inch-tall silver tankard with hand-chased scenes of Pan. Eight bubble- shape Viennese enamel panels of cherubs and Pan on both the fabulous lid and the base. Figural silver cherub finial. Silver marks. Wonderful quality on both the enamel and hand-chased decoration. Estimate: $8,000-$12,000.
– Lot 278, an exceptionally rare basket weave stein dated 1702. It is a large wide tankard shape, made of tightly woven reed material. It has a pewter lid, base rim, top rim and handle straps. Excellent condition. Estimate: $10,000-$14,000.
For details contact Ron Fox at Fox Auctions 631-553-3841 or email Foxauctions@yahoo.com. Bidders are invited to post absentee bids early on LiveAuctioneers.com.
Photo courtesy of the Winter Fine Art & Antiques Fair at Olympia.
LONDON – The Winter Fine Art & Antiques Fair at Olympia, now in its 22nd year, will run Nov. 12-18 at Olympia Exhibition Centre.
The Winter Fine Art & Antiques Fair at Olympia is considered one of the most important annual art and antiques events and is the only fair of its caliber scheduled between October and February. Attracting over 24,000 visitors, the fair features approximately 140 exhibitors in an elegant setting and is popular with anyone looking to buy art and antiques as well as those seeking individual Christmas gifs.
Visitors can expect to find such delights as Chippendale chairs, Lalique vases, Cartier earrings, Lowry paintings, 18th century farmhouse tables, silver teapots, fine dining tables, Art Deco lights, William de Morgan vases, letters from Queen Victoria, 18th century tapestries and more.
Visitors are reassured by the strict vetting process that sees 100 experts across all the categories inspect every item at the fair before it opens.
The Winter Fair has become an event in the annual social calendar. Previous attendees have included Bono, Claudia Schiffer, Jemima Khan, Jools Holland, Jasper Conran, Bryan Ferry, Nicky Haslam, Kay Saatchi, Sir Paul Smith, Sir David Tang and Sir Peter Blake.
Supported by the UK’s top trade associations, the British Antique Dealers’ Association and the Association of Art & Antiques Dealer, every exhibitor has been approved by a panel of experts and these include some of the UK’s top dealers.
For details visit the event website: www.olympia-antiques.com.
The Winter Fine Art & Antiques Fair at Olympia takes place at Olympia Exhibition Centre, National Hall, Hammersmith Road.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Photo courtesy of the Winter Fine Art & Antiques Fair at Olympia.
Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, a U.S. Historic District, in New York City. Image by Matthew Jesuele, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
NEW YORK (AFP) – A contentious plan to expand the New York University campus in the heart of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village won the city council’s near-unanimous go-ahead Wednesday.
NYU, which says it needs more space to remain a top-flight institution, will be allowed to add nearly two million square feet of new teaching, lab and other facilities.
The expansion is sharply reduced from an initial proposal by the university in the already crowded neighborhood.
Activists had bitterly opposed the construction plans, saying they would ruin a neighborhood famed for decades as the haunt of writers and artists.
Vocal protesters attending the council vote were ejected from the chamber, local NY1 television reported.
The Small Business Coalition, which represents more than 100 shops, restaurants and other businesses, welcomed the scaling back of the expansion, but said it was still not satisfied after the council’s 44-1 approval.
“We appreciate the reductions in the bulk and size of the buildings,” said the coalition’s Judy Paul, CEO of the Washington Square Hotel, which has been operating in Greenwich Village since 1902.
“However, the overall scope and 20-year time frame of the project is still a daunting prospect for the community and small businesses alike.”
According to the coalition, Greenwich Village is already one of the most built-up areas in New York, while also featuring a vacancy rate more than three times the city average, meaning that more construction is unnecessary.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, a U.S. Historic District, in New York City. Image by Matthew Jesuele, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Movie poster for ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.’ Image courtesy LiveAuctioneers.com Archive and the Last Moving Picture Co.
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) – Police say two guns used in vintage movies starring John Wayne and William Holden have been stolen from a Portland video store that features movie memorabilia.
Sgt. Pete Simpson says the shop owner at Movie Madness told officers that a man spent about 25 minutes in the store Tuesday afternoon before breaking into a locked display cabinet and stealing the guns.
Simpson says one gun is a Winchester rifle used by John Wayne in the 1962 film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and the other is a shotgun used by William Holden in the 1969 film, The Wild Bunch.
The man is described as in his 30s or 40s, stocky and bald, wearing a white T-shirt, shorts and riding a mountain bike.
Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-07-25-12 0307GMT
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Movie poster for ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.’ Image courtesy LiveAuctioneers.com Archive and the Last Moving Picture Co.
