N.J.Corruption Update: Confiscated baseball treasures used in money-laundering scheme going to auction

03/26/2014

They say crime doesn’t pay. But come May 3 the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office stands to reap a six-figure windfall when the county auctions off a cache of baseball memorabilia collected by a man convicted of selling stolen prescription drugs.

DON SMITH/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Bergen County Prosecutor John Molinelli holds a baseball signed by Joe DiMaggio.

The items include some rare vintage collectibles such as:

• Baseballs autographed by Hall of Famers Lou Gehrig, Walter Johnson, Rogers Hornsby and Napoleon LaJoie.

• One baseball signed by Mickey Mantle, Duke Snider and Willie Mays.

• Several century-old tobacco trading cards, featuring ballplayers like New York Giants manager John J. McGraw and Chicago infielder Johnny Evers of “Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance” fame.

The collection once belonged to William Stracher, a former Paterson drug store owner who was accused in November 2007 of buying the memorabilia to launder money he made by selling stolen drugs and doctors’ samples obtained from a pharmaceutical salesman.

The county is preparing to auction off the items at a hybrid live/online auction to be held in the auditorium at the Bergen County Law & Public Safety Institute on Campgaw Road in Mahwah.

While the items carry minimum bids totaling $40,000, experts say the auction should bring in more than $100,000 for the prosecutor’s seized assets fund.

“If I get $200,000 or $300,000, I’ll be very happy,” Bergen County Prosecutor John Molinelli said in a recent interview. “If I get $40,000, that’s fine with me, too. It doesn’t matter to me.”

Ron Caspert, vice president of Caspert Auctioneers and Appraisers, the Englewood Cliffs company that runs the county auctions, said sports memorabilia is not as hot an item as it was 10 years ago. But he still expects the auction will bring in at least $100,000.

“I think it’s going to do well,” Caspert said. His company has overseen sports memorabilia auctions before. But over the years he said items put up for auction by the Prosecutor’s Office tend to attract more demand than other items that the county auctions offers.

He said the individual items will be auctioned off in 300 to 400 lots. They will be available for preview at 9 a.m. followed by an 11 a.m. auction. The 50 items with the highest appraised value will also be available to bidders elsewhere via an online simulcast auction, he said.

While the auction is expected to take a few hours, the winding road leading to it took more than six years and offered a few unexpected twists, including the discovery of a trove of items in Vermont, a lawsuit filed by an auction company with which Stracher had contracted to sell some of his collection, and a side trip to a celebrity authenticator in Las Vegas.

The investigation, which started with a tip about the sale of stolen prescription drugs, led to the arrests of Stracher, then the owner of Sussman’s Drugs, and Luther Manning, a Wyeth Pharmaceuticals sales representative from Union County.
Prosecutors accused Manning of stealing doctors’ samples and selling them to Stracher.

Stracher eventually pleaded guilty to distributing prescription drugs and money laundering. He was sentenced to two years probation. Manning pleaded guilty to distributing prescription drugs at cut-rate prices to pharmacies. He was sentenced to one year of probation.

Prosecutors claimed Stracher converted the profits from this scheme into money orders that he used to buy the baseball memorabilia.

Molinelli said investigators did not realize the full extent of that collection until they executed a search warrant at a house that Stracher owned in Peru, Vt. Inside a basement with a keypass access door, investigators found a room with Yankee Stadium blueprints on the walls and neatly arranged plastic cases of baseballs.

“Oh, it was amazing,” Molinelli recalled. “When I saw Evers, Tinker, Chance, when I saw Rogers Hornsby, Lou Gehrig, I knew these were items of significant value.

Molinelli said Stracher was a savvy enough collector to amass items that actually grew in value. The prosecutor said that is unusual. He said most money launderers will take a loss on a transaction in order to obtain “clean” money.

But auctioning off some of the items was not as simple as Molinelli had anticipated. At the time that Stracher was arrested, he had a consignment contract with Robert Edward Auctions to sell off a portion of his collection of autographed signatures from well-known athletes.

Molinelli took the position that his office was not obligated to honor any contract with Stracher because the items were considered “contraband.”

The auction company, based in Watchung, sued the prosecutor. A Superior Court judge ruled in the company’s favor, allowing it to auction off the items and take its commission before turning the net proceeds and any unsold items over to the Prosecutor’s Office. The auction company did so, giving $315,000 to the prosecutor’s seized assets trust fund.

That still left Molinelli’s office with enough items to fill three 15-by-45-foot storage racks in the prosecutor’s evidence room. But it also left him with a problem: many of the remaining items could not be completely authenticated.

For example, Molinelli said there was a time when baseball teams had secretaries sign the signatures of ball players when their autographs were requested. If the Prosecutor’s Office were to put such memorabilia up for sale, buyers could come back and sue the county, claiming they had been sold fake items.

Molinelli said the solution arrived one night while he was at home watching “Pawn Stars,” a History Channel series about a family-run pawn shop in Las Vegas.

“They needed someone to authenticate something and in walks Drew Max,” Molinelli recalled, referring to a Las Vegas handwriting analyst who appears on the program.

The next day, Molinelli asked his staff to begin researching Max. They discovered that he was a forensic handwriting specialist who had been qualified to testify in several federal courts. And he was willing to authenticate items for a fee without wanting a portion of the auction proceeds.

Molinelli made a side trip to meet with Max while attending a national prosecutors’ conference in Las Vegas in September.

So at Molinelli’s request, the county approved a $10,000 contract with Max’s company, Authentic Autographs Unlimited:

$2,500 for storage fees and $7,500 for authenticating the items. The fee also covers Max testifying on the county’s behalf if anyone files a lawsuit challenging an item’s authenticity.

The items were shipped to Las Vegas where they were unpacked and cataloged before Max began the authentication process, said Marc Goldman, president of Authentic Autographs Unlimited.

While a large part of the collection wasn’t deemed authentic, “one of the parts that passed was sizable and a lot of names were pretty rare,” Goldman recalled.

Molinelli said he asked Max only to authenticate items he was absolutely sure about.

The rest will be destroyed even though they may have some marginal value, Molinelli said.

“Do I believe that I’m probably going to be burning some authentic stuff? Yes,” he said. “But I don’t want to assume that risk. We’re in the business of fighting crime and prosecuting cases. We’re not in the sale of memorabilia business.”


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