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New York, New York - July, 2006 I recently reported for Real Sports on rampant fraud in the booming online sports memorabilia market involving huge auction sites like eBay. To put it mildly, it was an eye-opening experience, beginning with the fact that industry estimates are at least half the signed sports memorabilia sold online today - hundreds of millions of dollars worth - is fake. Think about that stat for a second: an estimated one out of every two signed items for sale online today is worthless - worth nothing more than the cap, ball, bat, photo or jersey it's placed on. So odds are, when you're searching for your next birthday present or graduation gift, there's a damn good chance you're buying something created by guys like Greg Marino, an aspiring artist in San Diego we profiled in our piece, or other unscrupulous sellers whose sole purpose is to separate you from your money. To those who knew Greg Marino, he was nothing less than a signing savant - a bit of a burnout with a gift for knocking off nearly flawless forgeries for hours at a stretch. He "worked" as part of a forgery ring filling orders supplied by the likes of "Eddie," a key distributor featured in our piece.  Babe was the real thing, but every Ruth signature isn't. "He did Marilyn Monroe. He did Mother Teresa. He did the Pope," Eddie told me. But most of all, Marino did athletes, hundreds of them, every name a work of art, but none finer than his very own Mona Lisa: a flawless "Mickey Mantle." "He was just an amazing person to watch," Eddie said. "He was a genius. I would call him and say, 'you know, I need 20 of this, 50 of this, 100 of this.'" "I need 20 Mantles. I need 20 DiMaggios?" I asked. "Correct," admitted Eddie. From the consumer perspective the good news is that in 1999 the FBI broke up the San Diego ring as part of something called "Operation Bullpen," sending Eddie and Greg and some 30 others to jail. Along the way the feds confiscated a warehouse full of fake bats, balls, shirts, photographs and small sheets of paper, known in the memorabilia business as 'cut' signatures. The bad news: According to FBI agent Tim Fitzsimmons, who headed the bust, Eddie and the gang told him that 90 percent of their high-quality fakes had already entered the market and were about to be distributed like never before. "What was interesting when we debriefed these people," said Fitzsimmons during an interview at the warehouse in San Diego, "is they had started experimenting with selling items on the Internet. And they all agreed - that was where the crime was going to move." And so, seven years later, it has. Today Fitzsimmons estimates there are at least three million phony signatures being peddled online. Why online? Because, as Eddie said, the Internet is the "land of the disappearing" - a vast, largely unregulated universe where your money goes in and good luck getting it out if there's a problem. To insure some sort of credibility, most knowledgeable online buyers look for a so-called "Certificates of Authenticity," or "COA," a piece of paper that routinely accompanies a listed piece. The COA, a staple of the industry, sounds - and often looks - impressive. In essence, its purpose is to assure a buyers they are getting the real thing. But, as we discovered during our Real Sports investigation, far too many COAs aren't worth the paper they're printed on. The ring in San Diego, for example, basically bought off several so-called "forensic experts," who routinely, for a price, certified large amounts of fake merchandise, taking up to $150 to certify a signed DiMaggio uniform. And when that wasn't enough, the Marino gang created their own authentication company, called SCAA, to, in essence, guarantee their fakes as real.
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