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Besides slamming PIX11’s reporting, the prosecutor is offering refunds to anyone who bought $36,835 worth of memorabilia from William Stracher’s collection sold by Caspert Auctioneers of Englewood Cliffs for his office on May 3 and Sept. 27.
“The right thing here is to make sure that you have confidence in our office, regardless of the fact that we still believe that the signed item which you purchased is based upon a valid certificate,” Molinelli wrote in a five-page letter to more than two dozen buyers late last week.
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UPDATE: PIX11 is reporting that the New Jersey Attorney General’s Division of Criminal Justice “has taken over an investigation into Bergen County Prosecutor John Molinelli’s office.” READ MORE….
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Investigators seized the collectibles from Stracher at his Vermont home seven years ago while charging him with illegally peddling prescription drugs from his Paterson pharmacy.
Stracher laundered his ill-gotten gains by buying up huge amounts of collectibles, some of them autographed, the prosecutor said. He then arranged to have them sold by Robert Lifson and his company, Robert Edward Auctions (REA).
Lifson, in turn, hired James Spence Authentication (JSA) to examine 41,678 items for authenticity.
Spence split the collection, taking what he deemed genuine to auction and leaving behind in Vermont what he considered fakes, as well as items that he said weren’t worth assessing.
Authorities later arrested Stracher there in November 2007, seizing the remaining pieces.
In court papers, Lifson said all of those items, except for one, were “not genuine and had no value.”
Molinelli hired his own expert to determine whether any or all of the items that Lifson examined were, in fact, bogus. He found his man on the History Channel program “Pawn Stars” — Las Vegas-based authenticator Drew Max.
The Bergen County Chosen Board of Freeholders awarded a $10,000 contract to Max on Molinelli’s word that he couldn’t find another suitable authenticator.
PIX11 reporter Howard Thompson, in his report, quoted another expert saying that he’d have taken the job — and met all of the specfications — for half of Max’s price. Two more experts whom Molinelli said he spoke with gave differing accounts in Thompson’s report from the prosecutor’s claims.
Thompson also interviewed people who questioned Max’s reliability. He cited six major sports memorabilia auction houses that he said don’t accept Max’s certificates of authenticity as a basis for auctioning items.
Thompson zeroed in on items autographed by Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio, the great baseball-collectible trio.
He got opinions from two companies — including Spence’s JSA.
Spence — who had examined Stracher’s items years earlier and found them wanting — this time deemed a Mickey Mantle baseball and a Ted Williams ball “non-authentic,” sayng they came from a large forgery ring busted by the FBI in 1999.
He called the signature on a DiMaggio print genuine, however.
In the end, Thompson said, Molinelli had Lifson’s warnings about the collectibles in the court papers and still went ahead with this year’s auctions.
Thompson did note that not all sports memorabilia experts agree on authenticy and that Stracher could have obtained some of the items between the time Spence did the initial authentication for Lifson and the raid on his home.
“We do want to be clear. The prosecutor’s auction did include some legitimate items,” Thompson said in his report. “And even the best authenticators can make mistakes.”
Molinelli said that was too little too late. He accuses Thompson of “shoddy investigation and reporting,” leading to “some disturbing misstatements and conclusions” that he called “irresponsible.”
In his letter to buyers last Friday, the prosecutor says that Thompson “made the representation that every single item sold by our office through Caspert were forgeries,” which he said was “based solely upon a statement made by REA six years ago” from JSA’s findings.
“We were not present when JSA did its examination. We did not hire JSA in 2007 to do the examination,” Molinelli wrote. “I do not believe that REA was present and watched JSA conduct its examination in 2007. We know that Mr. Thompson from PIX11 was not there either.
“There were thousands of items seized, both signed and unsigned,” he continued. “[Seven] years later, it would be impossible for anyone to state whether or not the signed items seized were authentic or not.
“To blindly accept a statement from a third party given [seven] years earlier when it was likely that the authenticator could be mistaken or might never have seen what was seized would not be responsible.”
So his office retained Max, an independent examiner who, Molinelli said, was paid “the same amount of money whether he found that every item was authentic or every item was worthless.”
Max, who the prosecutor said has testified in both state and federal courts as a document and handwriting expert, declared 25% of the items genuine. These were sold at this year’s auctions, while the rest were destroyed, Molinelli said.
The prosecutor noted that interviews done by Thompson in which he allegedly told buyers “that everything that they purchased at our auction was a forgery.”
“PIX11 was no longer reporting the story but was in fact putting themselves inside of the story, a grave error by any responsible journalist,” he said.
In doing so, Molinelli tells buyers in his letter, they created “a clearly false impression to you to get you to think that you had been duped and defrauded.”
Molinelli emphasized that one of two independent examiners who authenticated signatures on several items for PIX11 was JSA itself. “It appears that there were items seized by our office that were authentic even by PIX11’s own admission,” he added.
The prosecutor said he was also miffed at Thompson for saying that the proceeds of the auctions were “spread around Bergen County on what they called choice projects.”
The money, he said, “is deposited into the government seized asset fund and used to support law enforcement efforts throughout Bergen County, including but not limited to equipment, training, as well as important citizen and youth education programs dealing with our serious heroin addiction problem and domestic violence.”
Even though buyers are told in writing that no guarantees or warranties are made — and that neither Caspert nor his office are bound by experts’ opinions — Molinelli said he wants the public to have confidence in his office and not have its reputation tarnished in any way.
“For this reason, if for any reason you are uncomfortable with our purchase, you can return the item purchased at any of the auctions conducted and our office will refund you entirely for your costs paid for the item,” he tells buyers in his letter. “This offer even extends to items that were not signed and which were not sold at auction with any certificate of authenticity.”
Molinelli’s letter, dated Dec. 12, gives recipients 30 days to contact Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor Thomas McGuire for a refund at (201) 226-5647 or tmcguire@bcpo.net.
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