Original subtitles

In this episode of American Greed.

Money, greed, lack of moral values.

Maybe he's a sociopath, I don't know.

Bill Mastro helps turn a niche hobby into a multi -million dollar criminal

enterprise.

He's referred to by some as the godfather of the industry.

He really, on his back, brought this industry into what it was and what it

And it isn't about kids getting baseball cards in packs of gum anymore.

Any hobby, business, whatever, where money can be made, the cockroaches

fly in.

And like baseball itself, this industry has winners, losers,

and cheaters.

And you had 10 % of schmucks like me who just was walking in and getting my head

handed to me.

But when the game is over, will Bill Mastro end up triumphant?

Sadly, the big lesson is that crime absolutely pays.

And it pays a lot.

Jeff Evers has the collector's bug.

He wants to turn pieces of Americana into cash.

In around 1998 or so, I started to watch the Antiques Roadshow.

And I thought, well, that seems like an interesting hobby.

So I basically collected collectibles.

The idea was to treasure hunt, basically.

And one day in 2007, an elderly man hands him a small box of gold

at a simple garage sale.

He marches me into his garage and he points up at a box and on the side is

handwritten baseball cards.

So I open it up and on the top of the box, there are four stacks of cards.

Evers only sees the top four cards, but he quickly realizes time is of the

essence. Another gentleman started to walk up the driveway.

So I thought, well, I'm not going to like open up this box and start going

through all this because I want to buy it.

So I took a risk and I said, I'm going to offer you $500 for the whole box.

And he looked at me with a smile and said, sold.

And I had scored big. I mean, there were amazing cards that were in that box.

I had a Hank Aaron rookie card, an Ernie Banks rookie card, two Al Kaline rookie

cards, a 1958 Roberto Clemente card. I had a Napoleon Lajoie 1933

Gaudi card, which apparently is the second rarest card in all of card

collecting.

Evers decides to make use of the gold mine he's uncovered.

My second oldest son had some health issues, and I wanted

to sell the cards and basically cash in, so to speak.

At the time, the place to cash in is clear.

Mastro Auctions.

Over the past decade, Mastro Auctions has sold over a quarter of a billion

dollars of high -value collectibles, establishing itself as the largest and

respected sports and Americana collectibles auction house in the world.

Mastro Auctions, people can consign memorabilia to have it auctioned to

collectors across the country and around the world.

Bill Mastro was one of the early pioneers of the sports memorabilia

Bill Master was a collector growing up as a kid who turned his hobby into a

business. You have to remember that when we grew up in the 60s and the 70s,

everybody collected baseball cards.

Jeffrey Lichtman starts collecting baseball cards as a kid.

But as he grows up, so does the memorabilia industry.

You've got some money in your pocket and you want to relive your youth.

And instead of being able to spend a nickel on a pack of cards, now you're

spending perhaps thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of dollars on a

single baseball card, all to recapture joy, that innocent joy of your youth.

And Bill Mastro finds a way to exploit that innocent joy.

He loved the wheeling and dealing. He loved the trading and sort of that, you

know, that horse trading. He got a taste of the business.

pretty early in his life.

By the 70s and 80s, the entire hobby gets a taste of the business, and the

innocence begins to fade as it is replaced by dollar signs.

There's a greed factor here, too, where all of a sudden, the cards that my mom

put in the basement 35 years ago were suddenly going to allow me to retire and

buy an island in the Caribbean.

And it just doesn't make sense, right? Because at the end of the day, these

cards are just, they're pieces of cardboard.

But to Bill Mastro, these pieces of cardboard are gold.

And one piece of cardboard in particular.

I was in our newsroom one day, and I'd just gotten to work, and the sports

editor at the Daily News said, they're auctioning off some baseball card, and

they say it might go for a million dollars.

The card is a Honus Wagner, made between 1909 and 1911.

And as reporter Michael O 'Keefe arrives at the auction, he sees what will soon

become the most famous and infamous card in sports collection history.

It was a funny -looking card. It was narrow. It was much smaller than the

baseball cards that I had collected as a kid. But what really impressed me was

just how beautiful it was, how clean it was.

It's referred to as the Holy Grail of baseball cards. It's the card that every

little kid who collects baseball cards knows this card.

But it's not just the beauty of the card that makes it valuable.

It's also because of Honus Wagner himself, a beloved hero who played from

to 1917.

That locker belonged to Honus Wagner, one of the great hitters in the game's

history, and a fellow most people consider the greatest shortstop who ever

lived.

When Wagner played, baseball cards were a new phenomenon, inserted into packages

of cigarettes and candy.

But despite the mass production of cards, very few Honus Wagner cards were

Precisely why it's so rare is a mystery, but there are some intriguing theories.

There's a version where Honus Wagner did not want children to...

desire his card because it came in a package of tobacco.

There's another version of the story that goes that Hannes Wagner wanted more

money than other players were receiving.

Whatever story you go with, the truth is that there are very few Hannes Wagner

cards in existence today.

But Bill Mastro finds one.

In 1985, he pays $25 ,000 for a stack of cards.

that includes the Honus Wagner.

A few years later, he sells it for $100 ,000.

It's an outstanding profit.

But the real benefit comes a few years later, in 1991, when the buyer comes to

Bill Mastro to auction the card once again.

Mastro arranges to sell the card through the high -end auction house Sotheby's

in New York City.

an auction house renowned for selling fine art worth millions of dollars.

It's an auction unlike anything baseball cards have ever seen.

The atmosphere was electric. It felt like a World Series game. People

that to me. One guy described it was like being at the Ollie Frazier fight at

Madison Square Garden where you just had this anticipation something was going

to happen.

And the bidding kept going up and going up. And, you know, it passed $300 ,000,

$350 ,000, $375 ,000. And then ultimately it sells for $451 ,000. And

anonymous buyer turns out to be Wayne Gretzky and Bruce McNall.

Wayne Gretzky, a .k .a. The Great One, the most famous hockey player in the

world, and the owner of the Los Angeles Kings, Bruce McNall.

So the fact that Bretzky buys this card and it goes for a whopping $450 ,000,

unheard of amount of money, and other auction houses are suddenly interested

this market, the media is interested in this market, that really was a turning

point.

It's also a turning point for Bill Mastro.

He becomes known as the man who facilitated the sale of the most

in the world.

It was the house. It was the auction shop that sold the card.

And through that is where he's really gained his notoriety.

For nearly two decades, Bill Mastro is an industry leader in sports memorabilia

trading.

Mastro and his chief operating officer, Doug Allen, hold multiple auctions a

year, featuring thousands of items up for bid.

They advertise with high -quality catalogs.

and later take advantage of everything the Internet has to offer.

By the early 2000s, hundreds of millions of dollars passed through the seemingly

innocuous walls of Mastro Auctions headquarters.

But in a highly competitive industry, it's hard to stay on top.

In order to continue getting the great product for your auctions, you've got to

have the best.

And how do you get the best prices? Well, you either can advertise well, you

have a great pitchman, or you can commit a massive fraud on a large scale.

Bill Mastro does all three.

Like many avid collectors, Ryan Kristof starts collecting baseball cards at an

early age.

I think I have that collector's bug.

I think it's a genetic thing. You either have it or you don't.

Kristoff's youthful passion for collecting takes on a narrow focus when

visits a card show in Southern California as a teenager.

He sees a man he doesn't know selling autographs.

I eventually got so curious, I went over to him and I just asked, I'm sorry, I

don't mean to bother you, but who are you?

He said, my name's Lou Diles. I play in the Negro Leagues. He started to tell me

all about the Negro Leagues. And that changed my whole life and took it in a

whole different direction because then I just became like I wanted to gobble up

any information I could.

This is a 1923 -24 Beacon card of Hall of Famer Oscar Charleston,

who would be in the discussion for the greatest all -around baseball player of

all time.

African Americans couldn't play in the major leagues, but they could go to

countries and make a living as professional ballplayers, and they were

They were celebrities, just like they should have been here.

And it turns out that some of those countries even made baseball cards of

Kristoff travels through Latin America, searching for any cards he can find and

trade. So I was just trying to keep my stuff and then...

Sell enough to make back what I spent.

Wasn't really making money necessarily.

I was just sort of breaking even, but my collection was getting bigger and

bigger.

At one point in the late 90s, he sells part of his collection to a trader in

Miami. But when that trader decides to auction off that collection, Christoph

notices something suspicious.

He consigned it to Mastro.

I had sold it to him in a private sale, so no one knew what the prices were.

And I wound up winning one of the cards back that I had sold. It wound up going

for almost exactly what I sold it for.

When Christoph looks at the sales of his other old cards, he notices time and

again, sale after sale, card after card, they are sold for almost precisely what

he sells them for originally.

It would be too coincidental for all these cards to be closing at the exact

levels where the private sale was.

I was the only one who knew that information.

The odds of all his cards selling again for nearly the exact same price as

Kristoff sells them for originally are astronomical.

Kristoff suspects that someone behind the scenes is artificially inflating the

bids to reach a minimum price so that the seller is guaranteed not to lose

money.

And he's right.

But this is just one case of rigging an auction.

And Mastro knows it.

They're a number.

of favored consignors, people with close ties to Mastro and the auction house,

who were complicit. And it was to their benefit.

They were able to increase the value of the cards and the memorabilia that they

sold so that they made more money. And because the auction house took a cut of

every sale, the auction house also benefited.

It's a win -win, except for the honest bidder getting duped.

When American greed returns No one who trades with Bill Mastro is safe It

was almost like there was some maniac sitting behind a computer.

I knew immediately that something was off

I

felt it was very important to recognize

that we're a service industry.

No one really needs collectibles, but they want them.

By the early 2000s, baseball cards are a $3 billion a year business.

And Mastro Auctions is at the forefront, selling thousands of items a year live

and online.

Mastro Auctions is the leading sports in America auction house in the world.

And we back that up with our numbers. But Bill Mastro and his chief operating

officer, Doug Allen, are playing with a stat deck.

He was a highly aggressive, I would call him a bully, in our hobby where he had

to get the best cards, best, the best, the best. And the reason why people

respected him is that he had the best cards to sell. And that's really what

matters in our hobby is who has the best cards to sell.

As a criminal defense attorney, Jeffrey Lichtman deals with people charged with

serious crimes on a daily basis.

He once won an acquittal for alleged mob boss John Gotti Jr.

and has been retained by accused Mexican drug lord Joaquin El Chapo Guzman.

He's also an avid collector, and he bids on dozens of items through Mastro

Auctions.

And his experience with con men tells him something's not right with Bill

Mastro. There would be a tie cobble, and the card would be sitting at a $2 ,000

value for two weeks.

And I would then go on the computer. I would see the card I wanted. So I'd put

my bid in at, let's say, $2 ,100.

I would turn around, and 15 seconds later, I had been outbid. And it would

happen time and time. It was almost like there was some maniac sitting behind a

computer inside the Maslow offices waiting for people to bid so they could

the bid.

I knew immediately that something was off.

That's because Mastro is cheating.

The mysterious bidder upping Lickman's bid isn't trying to win the car.

It's a conspirator trying to raise the prices through a scheme called

shill bidding.

Shill bidding is fraud, basically.

Let's say you've got the high bid. You want to pay $100 for the item.

But I know you'll pay up to $200.

So I'll use either an employee account or I'll make up an account name, and I

will say that that person bid $150 on it. And then you'll see that, so you'll

bid $200.

So I've effectively gotten you to pay twice what you should have paid for

But the scheme comes with some risk.

A shill bidder might accidentally place the winning bid if no one tops it.

That's why it's imperative that they have Mastro auctions on their team.

Just in case they win an item, Mastro can get them out of actually buying it,

either by simply booking the sale or by awarding the sale to the second highest

bidder. Either way, Mastro and the consigner can't lose.

And so you'd have the benefit of increase the price through this bill bid

without the risk that you might actually have to pay the price if someone else

in the market doesn't bid higher than you.

But that is a worst -case scenario.

What Mastro truly intends is for the unwitting collector to buy the item for

jacked -up price, one bid at a time, all to Mastro's benefit.

As an auction house, they take a percentage of the seller's commission,

get a commission from the seller that comes out, and then they also are paid a

premium by the buyer, so the buyer's premium. So really, they're making money

off both ends of the transaction.

But it also worked in a less direct way for them.

They could go to collectors and say, you want to sell your stuff through Mastro

Auctions because we get top dollar.

The only loser is the one actually purchasing the item.

But that isn't the last strike.

First and foremost, chill bidding may force an individual to pay more money

an object than what they rightfully should pay.

Second layer to that is it actually creates a false marketplace out there

like objects.

Like a house, you're going to look for what did that house or comparable house

sell for last time it was up for sale.

Right? Baseball cards are the same thing. The auction results were

and people would look to those past auction results to dictate how much they

were going to pay in the future.

But with prices constantly going up, artificially or not, everyone's

is getting more valuable.

It may be in many collectors' best interests to turn a blind eye to the

but not everyone sees it that way.

People you had paid apologists.

People that needed Mastro's business.

And you had 10 % of schmucks like me who just was walking in and getting my head

handed to me.

When American Greed returns, Mastro turns a profit -selling hair from the

famous pompadour in history.

But do these locks really belong to the king?

An individual.

who purchased that hair, decided to get that hair DNA tested.

By the early 2000s, the pursuit of rare baseball cards has become big business.

But it's also succumbed to another pursuit.

Greed.

And while some people long for the good old days, not everyone on collectors'

message boards is so eager to see the light.

I happened to make a comment saying, you know, I don't know what's going on with

Mastro, but something's not right.

And what I expected is that people would say, hey, you know, we've been in

Mastro options. We really want to hear your hypothesis.

We know that you're a criminal lawyer that deals with fraud all day.

what you say may have some weight.

Instead, I was an act in the board and I was shocked, frankly, at the response

because I thought I was helping people. And instead, how dare you say that about

Bill Mastro?

The message board may have defenders, but not everyone is on behind Bill

In 2007, Ryan Kristof believes he's a victim of shill bidding himself.

and wants Mastro Auctions to stop fixing the game.

I spoke with Doug Allen. I told him what I suspected.

He said, nope, no way, no shield bidding at all. Everything was totally legit.

So, you know, I thought about it more, and I just decided, no, I'm not paying.

And after a while, I got an email threatening to ban me, and I fired back

a very unpleasant email just telling him,

I'll go to the FBI. I'll go to whoever I have to.

But according to former Assistant U .S. Attorney Stephen Grimes, law enforcement

is already hearing about the various frauds arising from Mastro auctions.

And it's not limited to shill bidding.

I would say nothing was beyond possible at the auction house.

We heard everything across the gamut in terms of accusations of what was done.

In the early 2000s, Mastro Auctions sold a baseball that is purportedly from the

very first professional baseball team, the 1869 Red Stockings baseball team.

individual had the object in his collection for a number of years and

became uncomfortable with the object, so sent it away for forensic testing,

microscopic paint fleck analysis.

The analysis revealed that the paint used on that baseball was manufactured

-World War II.

Post -World War II.

That's the era of Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams.

In 1869, they wouldn't even be born for almost 50 years.

The ball is a fraud.

Instead of going to law enforcement, the buyer returned it to Mastro for a full

refund. But that's not the end of this ball's history.

Once Mastro Oxen...

Had that ball back in their possession, Bill Mastro reached out to an individual

and asked that individual if he would be interested in purchasing this ball for

his collection.

Mr. Mastro did not disclose the results of the forensic testing that was done on

that single ball.

That individual paid approximately $61 ,000 for that trophy ball.

That's an extraordinary sum of money for an ordinary baseball painted gold.

But apparently, the lure of the national pastime is too much to resist.

And that's really what happened in this field with Mastro and the other

fraudsters, is that people, their brains were simply falling out of their heads,

and their competitiveness and their desire, their zeal to relive the joy of

their childhood when opening up that pack of baseball cards, that took over.

You know, one thing's always certain, baseball's king.

The highest.

selling sports card is a baseball card. The highest selling sports memorabilia

jersey is a baseball jersey.

The highest price paid for a sports autograph is that of a baseball player.

mean, baseball's always going to be king.

But Mastro doesn't limit himself to baseball.

Any collectible can pass through his doors, including that of another king.

avid Elvis Presley collectors out there would be interested in owning a piece of

the King's hair.

Well, smash through auctions claimed to have a jar full of Elvis Presley's hair.

And ultimately that item was tested by the person who purchased it.

And the DNA results of that test showed that not only was it not Elvis Presley's

hair, but it was the hair of four random people.

The jar of hair was returned to Master Auctions along with the DNA test showing

that it wasn't what Master Auctions had claimed it was.

Mastro returns the buyer's money, but only if the buyer agrees to keep quiet.

They signed an NDA agreement in return for the exchange of the money that they

paid for it originally.

What Master Auctions did with the hair after that was they took the one jar of

hair. put it into four smaller jars of hair, and resold each jar subsequent

draw auctions without disclosing the fact of the DNA report seriously calling

into question the authenticity of that Elvis Presley hair.

The jars of hair sell for a combined price of nearly $40 ,000 to unwitting

buyers.

It's an egregious deceit.

But deceit isn't the limit of what Mastro Auctions is willing to do.

If they can, they'll just outright steal.

When American Greed returned,

an Illinois collector believes he struck gold.

But his treasure vanishes into thin air the moment he walks into Mastro

Auctions.

What they're basically running is a jail game.

They get your cards, they're going to pay you what they want to pay you.

What are you going to do about it?

In 2007, Jeff Evers walks into the headquarters of Mastro Auctions just

of Chicago to consign what he believes is a gold mine of classic rare baseball

cards.

They had said that in April of 2007, Mastro had sold a Henry Aaron rookie

for over $16 ,000.

And I had that card in pristine condition.

So I thought, that's the place to go to.

As he sits in the lobby, he thinks all his hopes are confirmed.

And inside this place, they had all the trappings of success.

Fancy woodwork. It was a beautiful facility.

And next to me were some previous auction books with Price is Realized

And I saw that the prices that my cards were going to go for were tremendous.

Evers says that he is soon brought into a conference room with a representative

of Mastro Auctions.

But soon after seeing the cards...

the representative suddenly cuts the meeting short.

Like he's in a big hurry, and, oh, he's got to meet this guy and blah, blah,

blah. He finishes his inventory sheet for me, and it was a skeletal inventory.

He didn't detail the cards. He didn't give me photographs of the cards. I

expected that that would occur, but he didn't do any of that.

It's a lot of red flags.

But Mastro Auctions has the reputation for getting the best prices.

Evers decides to hand over his cards.

He just sold a Henry Aaron rookie card for $16 ,000 plus five months ago, and I

have one.

It's got to be legit.

It wouldn't rip me off.

But after the auction is over, Evers has serious concerns.

They never even mentioned that the Napoleon Lajoie card, the card number

the second rarest card in all the baseball card collection, was even in

So that card outright disappeared.

Not only does Evers believe that some of his cards disappear, he believes that

the ones that are sold are severely misadvertised.

They're given low ratings and treated as second -class cards.

The total gavel price on all 1 ,500 or so cards was a little over $49 ,000.

And they charged me the 15 % to defraud me.

I believe that I got taken for at least another $300 ,000.

And you know what? It could be a lot more.

Evers feels that Mastro Auctions misrepresents the cards.

so that they can buy them themselves on the cheap, at which point they can later

sell them off for much more money.

Well, the catalog on the left is from the December 2007 auction, as they

advertised it for me.

In here, you see the Babe Ruth card that they have graded out with a lesser

grade. And then later, after Mastro took control of my cards, now that card...

is being sold separately, advertised as excellent cement condition, and the

difference between those gratings is exponential.

If you superimpose this card onto that card, that will prove that it is the

same card.

My belief is those cards never left their facility at that point in time

after that sale.

They could be laughing.

When they watch the show, yeah, we got them for a lot more than that.

But they won't be laughing for long.

When American Greed returns, law enforcement raises the stakes for Mastro

Auctions.

While the fraud was going on, while the grand jury investigation was going on,

while the FBI agent was...

beating down doors to find witnesses for Mastro's fraud, they were committing

more fraud.

Bill Mastro and Doug Allen are getting top dollar for baseball cards and other

collectibles. But their numbers are juiced.

And law enforcement wants to level the playing field.

The federal wire fraud statute makes it a crime for somebody to use false

statements for the purpose of gaining money. That's really the main criteria.

And when you boil it down to its elements, it clearly is that.

In every master auctions catalog, there were six pages of rule.

Rule number one, that items will be sold to the highest bidder.

That wasn't true.

All items were not sold to the highest bidder.

Items were only sold to the highest bidder if master auctions or one of

favorite consignors agreed that the highest bidder was paying an appropriate

price. There's where the fraud is.

They also don't tell customers that they may be bidding against people who have

no intention of buying the item in question.

Before long, law enforcement is ready to end this game.

And the entire sports collecting industry knows that Mastro Auctions is

its last strike.

You would go to the card shows and you would see the FBI agent and there'd be a

guy from the IRS and federal agents walking around and they're handing

to people.

And then we knew for certain that the FBI was really interested in these guys.

The FBI learns that using other people's accounts to shill bid is a common

practice at Mastro auctions, particularly for Bill Mastro himself.

And his brazen disregard for concealing his fraud is apparent.

So much so that it became a joke within the auction house, and Mr. Mastro became

embarrassed of the joke.

So he went to this...

IT director and asked that the underbidder records from those auctions

removed so that there would be no evidence of the shill bidding.

If you get rid of the underbidder records, you can only see the person who

the item.

And shill bidding is all about how they got to that price.

That basically not only destroyed evidence related to historical shill

but ensured that from 2003 to 2007 that those records would not be available to

law enforcement.

It's a devious but ultimately effective way to keep investigators from seeing

what is actually going on at Mastro Auctions.

And that created difficulty in this investigation when we decided ultimately

what the loss numbers were going to be. Because the investigation was

handicapped from the fact that during the charging period, there were 56

Auctions. Each auction could have anywhere between 1 ,500 and 2 ,200

auction lots.

That's tens of thousands of auction lots with potential shill bids that law

enforcement may never uncover.

But remarkably, as the FBI begins poking around in 2007, Mastro decides to

become more transparent and issues a mandate to keep a record of all bids.

including shill bids in their auctions.

Even under investigation, Mastro thinks he's unhittable.

My sense was he knew it was unethical and didn't think it was criminal, and he

went forward.

I realize it's wrong, but, you know, show me the rule that says I can't do

Despite keeping complete records going forward, the fraud itself doesn't stop.

could not be satisfied. They did not know when to stop.

And if you're a Bill Master who absolutely cannot control himself, you

again, there's a penny on the ground. That guy is running you over with his

to grab that penny. And then he'll back up and run over you again so you can't

be a witness against him at the trial.

That's the kind of guy Bill Master was, and Allen was the same way.

Whether because of the fraud investigation or the economic downturn

Mastro Auctions suddenly can't get the items or the bids to keep the company

going. They declare bankruptcy in 2009 and shutter their doors.

But this fraud is going to extra innings when American

Greed returns.

Mastro and Alan continue to try to stay a step ahead of the card collecting

community.

But there's one blast for me that cannot be abided.

He bragged about trimming that card.

It was sort of like he couldn't help himself. He had to tell people, I pulled

one on the world.

By 2009, the FBI and the Department of Justice are squeezing in on Bill Mastro

and his associates.

And once again, the valuable Honus Wagner card is at the center of the

The final nail in the coffin for him was the FBI had got one of Mastro employees

to wear a wire, and this guy got... Bill to tell him the story about how

he had trimmed the card.

Bill Mastro discussed the condition of the card when he purchased it, talked

about how it had bowed side borders shaped like a football, and how he

the sides of that card in order to make it more attractive.

To most baseball card collectors, altering a card's appearance,

Honus Wagner, is sacrilege.

I mean, that is like, you know, painting the edges of the Mona Lisa.

To do that to this card really is, I can't even think of words to describe

It's abhorrent.

It's about like a car having all original parts. It's just not the same

had to replace, you know, something on it. So same thing with a baseball card.

The corner got dinged. You want the corner to remain dinged. That's what

happened in the history of that card. That's what happened.

But Mastro seems to care more about money than preserving history.

And to law enforcement, Mastro is guilty of more than blasphemy.

He's guilty of fraud.

Bill Mastro cut the edges of that card with a paper cutter to make it look more

pristine, to make it look better, and then sold the card or was involved in

sale of that card numerous times without disclosing to anybody in the market

that he had manipulated the card.

It took it from something that can't even be graded, it's not even on the

to the most pristine, highest rated Honus Wagner card in the universe.

What's the value of that card right now?

You don't know. I mean, it's worth what somebody is willing to pay for that

card. It was sold privately for $2 .7 million.

So it's still a beautiful card, but it's a beautiful trimmed card.

In addition to that fraud, the Department of Justice determines that

Auctions conducts shill bidding in 2 ,463 auctions in just over six

years. But before that, it could have been much worse.

Nevertheless, Mastro's legacy on the sports collectible industry is still

today.

He certainly popularized this hobby.

But at the same time, he made it where, because of his greed, that a card that

sold for $1 ,000 that perhaps should have sold for $500, it then ruined all

card sales going forward.

And really what happens is now, if you've got a collection and you've

over the last 10 or 15 years, consider the fact that you probably have about a

25 %...

tax off the top, a fraud tax, because you've been duped, you've been shilled,

you've been defrauded to, I would guess, probably at least 25 % of your

collection.

There's really some fitting sort of bookends on this.

In large part, he created this industry.

And then I think what the mark he ultimately left as he left the industry

equally as important.

This was the first time that the federal government had really stuck its nose in

and put its foot down and said, this conduct is illegal.

And I do believe this sent a strong message to the industry, and we're

that it has cleaned up actions that have been subsequent to this and other

auction houses operating in the same space.

In August 2014, Doug Allen pleads guilty to wire fraud.

After the contentious sentencing process,

His punishment puts him behind bars for a long 57 months.

Bill Mastro, however, cooperates with the government.

He pleads guilty to mail fraud and receives a brief 20 -month sentence.

He is now free.

It's a fact that doesn't sit well with some of his victims.

Well, I'll say this. If someone wants to give me millions and millions of

dollars to...

spend 20 months in a minimum security federal penitentiary i've signed me up

that so the big lesson you know in a lot of this sadly the big lesson is that

crime absolutely pays and it pays a lot but both of them have to live knowing

that one is bill mastro and one is doug allen i wouldn't want that for i i mean

i'll take being broke any day or being bill mastro or doug allen

A cruel Internet fraud leaves a trail of broken hearts and empty wallets. Every

day they're out there trolling the Internet looking for unsuspecting

All new American Greed next Monday, 10 Eastern.

CNBC. Get yours.

The early bird gets the worm. And the corner office, too.

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