THE FAKE AUTOGRAPHS

Author

Matthew Garringer
July 03, 2023

Good evening. This is Dead Legends. The daily newsletter that loves baseball like Wade Boggs loves slammin’ brewskis.

Let's dive in.

Today's story is about a fake memorabilia scheme that turned out to be one of the largest eBay fraud cases in US history.

Cliff Panezich had big-league aspirations, but never made it past the try-out phase with any of the affiliated clubs.

He’d done well in the Can-Am league in ‘08 and earned an invite to workout with the Phillies, but an exam of his arm revealed that he had two partial tears in his rotator cuff.

Cliff opted for a surgery that was going to keep him off the field for at least two years.

Shortly after, he started a memorabilia business; totally legit at first.

But then he took a trip down to Alabama.

Panezich and his buddy Adam Bollinger drove down to Tuscaloosa to get some autographs from the Crimson Tide football players.

Based on what he'd seen other sellers get on eBay, Cliff thought he could make at least $500 a piece for footballs signed by the whole team.

They arrived in Tuscaloosa during winter break, when the football team wasn’t practicing, so they had to get creative to find the players.

They "bumped into" Marquis Johnson outside a dorm, and asked him if he'd sign some balls.

After stroking a few autographs, Johnson allegedly asked to be paid for the rest.

Not only did they pay him, they used Marquis to recruit everyone else on the team.

By the end of the trip, Panezich had around 40 footballs signed by the entire Alabama roster.

Only problem was, when he returned to list them on eBay, the market was flooded with what he believed to be fakes; most balls were now selling for less than $150.

The whole experience really pissed him off, and ultimately he says this was what made him want to start making forgeries.

Eventually, the fraud was making enough money to support several assistants who managed the printing, listings and shipping.

In ‘12, Panezich moved to Houston to take another crack at his baseball career, and he brought three guys along with him - CJ McCormick, Jason Moore, and Joey Cummings.

Panezich would come home from Pecos League games, and his roommates would have a stack of merchandise for him to sign with names like Mike Trout and Bryce Harper.

He told his Pecos League teammates that he was an "eBay entrepreneur."

The next year, a detective named Brian McGivern was responding to a typical call - two drug addicts were found with a crack pipe in their car and dozens of gift cards; all of which had been purchased with stolen credit cards.

The addicts had been unloading the gift cards for cash to a buyer on Craigslist.

McGivern worked with detectives from three nearby towns, tracking surveillance footage at the stores where purchases were eventually made with those gift cards.

A strange scenario revealed itself.

The Craigslist buyer, Steven Durkin, and another unidentified suspect were seen at a Walmart with a cart full of footballs and baseballs.

Then, a third guy, Anthony Sattarelle, was stopped outside a different Walmart around the same time, for stealing a cart full of baseballs.

Sattarelle quickly flipped and told police he was given $120 to steal the Walmart balls by an associate of Durkin’s, C.J. McCormick, who had some kind of “sports memorabilia business.”

McGivern started digging deeper.

In ‘14, he coincidentally found an agent in Ohio who was working on a sports memorabilia case.

FBI agent Anthony Sano and McGivern compared notes and realized the unidentified suspect from the surveillance footage was none other than Clifton J. Panezich.

Panezich’s aunt also called police when eBay mailed her a tax form that referenced $64,000 in profit she said she knew nothing about.

In February of ‘14, she got a return from one of the eBay buyers and provided a baseball to investigators, inscribed with what appeared to be Mike Trout’s autograph.

The FBI Subpoenaed eBay for access to any account whose profits flowed to Panezich, McCormick or Jason Lenzi.

That's when they realized how massive the scam was.

There was 26 different PayPal accounts in both Cliff and his mothers' names.

Panezich had moved his whole family to Las Vegas at this point and was living large.

McGivern and Sano had been ordering trash pulls from outside of Cliff’s Nevada home, and they found fake certificates of authenticity along with scratch paper that had practice autographs on it.

That was all they needed to make a move.

On December 1, FBI and local law enforcement served Cliff, his parents, and his associates with search warrants.

When they entered into Panezich’s house at 832 Sandhill Sage Road, they found a treasure trove of fake memorabilia.

Just look at all this shit.

Everything from Tim Tebow autographs to basketballs with fake Kobe and LeBron signatures.

There was even a baseball with Barrack Obama’s forged signature.

They also found texts on Cliff’s phone explicitly discussing the forgery.

In addition to that, they discovered over 30 burner cell phones with names written on the back for when customers called in.

It took the search team almost 16 hours to log and pack up all the evidence, which ended up being eight pallets worth.

The only thing they didn't find was the cash.

The FBI and the Mahoning County prosecutor’s office decided to pursue RICO charges due to the number of participants in the scheme.

Panezich was able to speak to police with proffered protection, which means he had certain assurances that they wouldn't use the information against him.

He said initially it took 10 to 20 tries before he would put a name on a ball, but towards the end, he became so proficient at it that he could do 100-plus signatures from memory.

He argued that his operation was less of a criminal enterprise, and more like a network of freelancers who sold his forgeries and kept 60% of the profit, often to sustain drug or gambling addictions.

More than 27,000 eBay items were sold - over $2 million in revenue.

The prosecution attributed $1.4 million of the sales to Panezich, and most of the rest to CJ McCormick, who branched out on his own as a forger in Youngstown, OH.

Panezich got sentenced to six years; McCormick got three.

As for the money, he says most of it got blown on clubbing, gambling, and drugs in Vegas.

At the end of the hunt, all they seized was $18,200. 

As a silver lining, Canfield police donated the sporting goods in evidence to local charities.

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And there’s a lot more where that came from…

STRANGE NAMES

If you're just joining us, we play this game every day where we try to find the weirdest names throughout baseball history.

Why? Don't ask us, it's just something we like to do.

If you've been rocking with us for awhile now, you know what time it is.

Today's winner is:

Rivington was good with the glove, but he couldn’t hit the side of a barn.

In 102 AB’s, he batted .118 with a .189 OBP.

He wasn’t that bad in the minor leagues, but some guys just can’t handle the show.

Bisland bounced around and played partial seasons on three different squads before hangin’ ‘em up.

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