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lol, what prompted this revival?
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Westfield man posts manifesto of $350 million sports memorabilia scam then dies by suicide Portrait of Dana Hunsinger BenbowDana Hunsinger Benbow Indianapolis Star What we know about Brett Lemieux's $350 million sports memorabilia scam; including questions about the size of the operation Lemieux illegally gained access to holograms, a security feature used to authenticate autographs What to watch for when buying sports memorabilia to avoid being scammed INDIANAPOLIS – It was 9:30 p.m. in Seattle when Scott Mahlum got what he thought was "a really weird" call last week from a friend in the sports memorabilia business telling him that Brett Lemieux had just admitted to a massive scam in a manifesto he posted to Facebook. "And I remember just reading it, and my first thoughts were, 'Why is he burying himself? Why is he giving the FBI and police all the information, everything they need?'" said Mahlum. "It made zero sense." Mahlum knew all about Lemieux, 45, who lived in Westfield. Just about everyone in the sports memorabilia world knew of Lemieux, he said. Lemieux was known in the industry as a scammer, pushing out counterfeit autographed items en masse, a shady character who operated as "Mistermancave" and several other entities. He was single-handedly helping to dilute prices and, in turn, the profits of legitimate sellers. Mahlum's company, Mill Creek Sports in Seattle, and other big names in sports memorabilia had been going after Lemieux for years. They say he was illegally gaining access to their holograms, a security feature used to authenticate autographs and other collectible memorabilia with a serial number. Lemieux would then replicate items, he wrote in his Facebook post, using an autopen to forge autographs and then sell signed items – jerseys, footballs, baseball bats, photographs – by the thousands. Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle. Get the IU Insider newsletter in your inbox. The latest Indiana Hoosiers news from IndyStar IU Insider Zach Osterman. Covering all things crimson on the court. Delivery: Sun-Fri Your Email Among the big names he made his fortune on — which Lemieux claimed in his confession was $350 million – were Tom Brady, Kobe Bryant, Russell Wilson, Patrick Mahomes and Aaron Judge. Mill Creek Sports and other companies had been meeting to talk about Lemieux as long as eight years ago, Mahlum said. They had filed cease and desist orders against Lemieux, called police and hired lawyers, and they went to the NFL Players Association, mostly to no avail. But when Fanatics, a multibillion-dollar company that sells sports memorabilia and collectibles, spoke out about what Lemieux was doing, authorities listened. "On July 15, the Westfield Police Department executed a search warrant in the 16800 block of South Park Drive regarding a counterfeit sports memorabilia scheme," Westfield police said in a statement, the only one the department has made publicly regarding Lemieux. "The next day, the search extended to the 300 block of Hoover Street. Upon arrival, officers found the individual deceased with a self-inflicted gunshot wound." The coroner’s office in Hamilton County confirmed that Lemieux’s body was found at the 300 block of Hoover Street in Westfield and that he died by suicide. Lemieux's death occurred hours after his Facebook post, at the location where law enforcement conducted search warrants July 16. The FBI is assisting with the investigation, said Chris Bavender of public affairs with the FBI field office in Indianapolis. The FBI referred media questions to Westfield police. Westfield's assistant chief of police Billy J. Adams told IndyStar on Monday there were no updates on the case. "We hope to be able to release more this week." Back in Seattle, midnight struck hours after Mahlum had gotten the call about Lemieux's confession. It was a different friend telling him Lemieux had died by suicide. "I'm like, 'Well, that explains why he confessed to doing millions of dollars worth of counterfeits,'" said Mahlum. "We'd been trying to stop him. It's been an ongoing really big pain in all of our businesses." 'He wanted to go out in a blaze of glory' Hours before his death, in a since-deleted confession on the Facebook group Autographs 101, Lemieux boasted about the scheme he said he pulled off, alleging to have "the largest framed jersey inventory on the web." He wrote that the money was "too good" to pass up and that he wanted to stop the fraud, which had been going on for the better part of two decades. "Mistermancave has sold over 4 million items. Yes million. Surpassed 350 million in sales," Lemieux wrote. "When Kobe died, we put out 80,000 items into the marketplace." While Mahlum believes some of the missive Lemieux posted, he doesn't believe Lemieux’s operation was as big as he claimed. Mahlum has been in the business for nearly 35 years as owner of Mill Creek Sports, a full-time retail wholesale sports memorabilia dealer that opened in 1991. "I think he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory and it's just like anybody else bragging about how much money or how many girlfriends they had," he said. "So I imagine (his business) was a lot smaller scale." Take the 80,000 Bryant autographs Lemiuex claimed to have sold, which after Bryant's death in 2020 were going for an average of $2,000 to $5,000 each. Even if Lemieux sold them for $1,000 each, that's still $80 million. "And if he had 80,000 of them, we would have seen them being offered everywhere," Mahlum said. "And we do see a lot of fakes, we saw many, many, many of his fakes, but 80,000? That's a greatly exaggerated number." As for the $350 million Lemieux claims to have made, Mahlum says the market wouldn't have absorbed such a massive financial infusion of fake items. But the exact number doesn't really matter, he said. Lemieux "was destroying a lot of people," said Steve Grad, with Beckett Authentication Services, a third-party company in Plano, Texas, that authenticates autographs. Grad also appears as an expert on the television show "Pawn Stars." How Lemieux managed to pull off his massive scheme will be revealed as more information from the investigation is released. But if Lemieux's claims are true, he outlined it clearly in his confession, saying he had a source in China duplicating holograms. He would then take that serial number and use an autopen to replicate autographs on items and sell them en masse. "He was able to duplicate the numbers from signings and knock off the autographs," said Grad, who said he has known about Mistermancave for years. "So instead of, let's say Patrick Mahomes did 2,000 signings, he could make that 2,000 into 10,000 or 15,000. He's got the numbers and he could just keep pumping." Lemieux would then seek out items being sold by reputable companies like TriStar Sports, Mounted Memories, Steiner Sports, Fanatics, or Mill Creek Sports, said Grad. "And then what he did is he went in and he started duplicating their shirts and taking their exclusive athletes." In his post, Lemieux showed no remorse for the scheme he allegedly pulled off, saying, "I always took it as a challenge. I spent sleepless nights planning what items to counterfeit next." "We are going to be what records are made of. No one's ever sold the volume of items in holograms ever. It was an addiction. How many items can I sell? I did it for years," Lemieux wrote. "Every company I've touched is now my (expletive). That was my goal." Started seeing weird Tom Brady jerseys Fanactics, which was a key force in the investigation of Lemieux, said it never bought and re-sold products from Lemieux or Mistermancave. "Unfortunately, bad actors harm fans and collectors, and that is why two years ago we began implementing the newest, most secure hologram technology available, and we believe our new hologram has not been replicated since," Fanatics said in a statement provided to USA Today Sports. "The best way for collectors to know that they are buying officially licensed, 100% authenticated memorabilia, is to buy from a reputable primary source." The problem is, Mahlum said, Lemieux made himself look very reputable. Once he had the holograms for Brady jerseys, he would have that same number counterfeited and put that hologram on a jersey with a forged Brady signature. "So the unknowing customer, whoever bought that item, would then take it and go to whatever company it was, PSA, JSA, Fanatics, Beckett," he said. "They would go to that company's website, type in that number, and it would come up as a Tom Brady signed jersey with all the details. And nobody had done that before that I was aware of." As an authenticator, Grad said he saw the scheme playing out in real time. "We had started seeing these really weird looking Tom Brady (jerseys) and we kept saying, 'These don't look right. There's something really off here,'" he said. "Well, it turns out, we were right. He did this with Aaron Judge. He did this with anybody you could really think of, Derek Jeter. These are all really big names." The counterfeiting of those big names was worrisome to those in the industry because companies pay millions of dollars to get exclusive autograph rights to star athletes. "So what was happening is that the price of Tom Brady starts getting diluted in the marketplace because they're putting out so many fake ones," said Grad. "They're watching their exclusive client who's their number one client, they're watching his value go down and they're saying, 'What is going on here?'" The most frustrating thing for those in the industry since the Lemieux case came to light is that some people believe they were buying items they resold from Mistermancave. "No, we never bought anything from the guy. I never met the guy before. We sent cease and desist to him. We've never talked to this guy," said Mahlum. "We got him removed from eBay on any Russell Wilson stuff." The message reputable sellers and authenticators want to come from the Lemieux case is to use common sense when buying autographed items. "If Fanatics, Tristar, companies like ourselves are priced at $2,500 on a signed Tom Brady Jersey, but yet you can buy them on eBay, Amazon for $700, $800, there's a problem," said Mahlum. "There's a reason it's that price. There's a problem." While Lemieux's fraud coming to the forefront is a good thing, Grad said, it's been a black mark on the industry. "You know, we do the absolute best job we can," he said. "We try to add more and more security features as we go along to our (holograms) because they're being reproduced as we speak." For Mahlum, he's been thinking a lot about Lemieux's death. "I don't know if he just couldn't live with the guilt, his embarrassment to his family, what it was, but it's still a white-collar crime," he said. "And my guess is that if he would have been prosecuted and everything goes to trial, it'd probably be a plea bargain. I'm guessing the guy does a couple, two, three years in a kind of country club-type prison." But Mahlum also says no one could know what was going on in the mind of Lemieux, a master manipulator. Lemieux ended his Facebook post, hours before his death: "Enjoy the industry all." Follow IndyStar sports reporter Dana Benbow on X:@DanaBenbow. Reach her via email:dbenbow@indystar.com. See post above
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I like how everyone has their first name listed except him, despite the fact that he wasn’t president at the time of that club tournament.
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What the fuck is wrong with you, Austin?
MissingInAction replied to crash_davis's topic in Daily Texan
Cameron rd will be the new bar hopping spot. Mark it down. -
Texas Football 2025 Fall Camp - Kicking the Sonofabitch In
Hookem2147 replied to closetojumping's topic in Football
Sark and Flood have traditionally been good at scheming things in the run game to where we were beating teams by alignment/numbers a handful of times a game. I'm going to guess those tricks may not work against the Georgias and Ohio States of the world, but they seem to work against a lot of the other defenses. Even in the 2023 Bama game, we really didn't run the ball super well (92 yards in 29 attempts from the RBs). Same thing with Michigan last year (88 yards on 27 carries). The passing game drives the offense in the big games against the great defenses. That appears to be a feature and not a bug at this point and I would assume this year will be no different. -
We were definitely locked into Maui. There was no getting out of that. We have to do the return trip to Connecticut We got lucky and go a home game in the SEC/ACC thing, it just sucks that we got Virginia who isn’t nearly as good as they used to be. Couple that with the Duke “neutral site” (which I’d love to see how we got selected to be Duke’s opponent on that) and there you go.
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Mopar gonna Mopar.
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it was the oakland A's in the past, this was the sacramemto A's
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also srt-10 in oklahoma so lol
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The one guy is right about the street where everyone gets drunk and tries to kill each other.
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Florida Karen gets her fake-police husband fired
Scheiss Meister replied to 52-80's topic in Daily Texan
Helluva first post. -
I was in st louis once. not that impressed tbh
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I know, it's breaking news.
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Texas Football 2025 Fall Camp - Kicking the Sonofabitch In
cafe society replied to closetojumping's topic in Football
Taaffe is back. Practice reports say that he isn't allowed to call the signals much of the time so everybody learns to recognize and make those calls. We have several coaches devoted to just the secondary. We have - by my count - 16 scholarship players in the secondary, and those scholarships are hard-earned. They are aggressive, intelligent, coached-up and hungry. Our entire defense is going to be a fucking abattoir. Think '85 Bears. -
This era of astros baseball...it's always darkest right after getting swept by the A's in the 2nd half
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My initial assumption is still that we were already locked into Maui and the UConn away game after hosting them when Miller was hired. A lot of schools seems to be committed to Players Era or other tournaments or their own 2 year home/away teams and may have told us no, too late to get you on the schedule now.
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Yeah, I think it’s just timing. That’s all. I don’t think this is Miller giving us a shitty home slate on purpose. I was also hoping we’d get Nawf Carolina or NC State at home for the SEC/ACC thing. It’s too early to determine if this is his scheduling philosophy. I’m betting there were things behind the scenes that we don’t know about. It’s also possible that this is just one of those years where we play all the name teams in a tournament or neutral. I think with more tournaments coming on board, more and more teams will see their home schedule be shit unless you’re one of the big 5.
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Texas Football 2025 Fall Camp - Kicking the Sonofabitch In
Hookem2147 replied to closetojumping's topic in Football
I am pretty bullish on this secondary, but I expect our pass defense stats to dip a bit based solely on the fact that we are about to face a better group of QB's than we saw last year. -Davis Warren pretending to play D1 football for Michigan -Van Buren in his first career start for Miss State -Hawkins who couldn't throw a forward pass for OU -Florida's third stringer -Brock Vandagriff for a half before Stoops yanked him You would think one or two of Reed, Pavia or Green will take some steps forward as returning starters. I also think we are going to see a lot of teams try to dink and dunk against our pass rush so we will need to try our best to avoid getting dragged into the mud by some of these teams who want to control time of possession and shorten games. We fell victim to that in a few second halves last year where it felt like we barely touched the ball (although some of that blame falls on our own offense). -
I am Jack's quickly growing group source ban.
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I know man. I was teasing you. 212 is skeletors charity I think. I think it’s a Sandusky thing.
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What were yall throwing?
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40 mile ride + 4 mile run yesterday 11 mile run today. First brick since Florida yesterday was solid. I signed up for a short sprint tri here in Tyler second weekend of September. This was my first tri a few years ago. I bet I’ll do better this time.
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