July 2nd, 2015: Baseball Card

[xoxoxoBruce]

I know you were pissed at your Mom for throwing out your baseball cards when they became valuable. But then the market crashed and they became trash, so call her and apologize.

You can start a new collection buying this card of the Brooklyn Atlantics in 1860, the middle year of their three consecutive national championships.



The bidding is currently at $20,000(with Buyer's Premium, $26,290), however the sale doesn't end until the end of July.
In 2013 a similar card from 1865, which some experts claim was a forgery made from material stolen from the A. G. Spalding Baseball Collection in the New York Public Library’s Fifth Avenue Branch, sold for $92,000.

The History Blog tells of a side story about the Brooklyn brothers who made the original cards.

Twenty-five years after the Atlantics had their picture taken by him and his partner, John Farach made the news when his brother Carmel was found stabbed twice, a small wound to the chest and the fatal one in his back, by a sword cane on Staten Island in 1884. Suspicion alighted on Carmel’s boon companion Antonio Flaccomio but he was released when the coroner declared the death suicide, as one does with backstabbings. Two years later Flaccomio confessed to John Farach that he had killed his brother during a duel. Farach didn’t buy it — his brother was left-handed, the sword cane was found in his right hand — and he told Flaccomio never to set foot in Brooklyn again or he’d kill him.

Two years after that on October 14th, 1888, Flaccomio was stabbed in the heart with a stiletto in front of Cooper Union in Manhattan and died. Farach was at first suspected of killing him in a vendetta, but the police soon refocused their attention on “the powerful secret Sicilian society known as ‘the Mafia’” who were thought to have ordered the hit because Flaccomio killed Carmel Farach without authorization or because he snitched out their counterfeiting operation to the cops. One Vincenzo Quartararo was arrested on the testimony of three supposed witnesses which was contradicted by other witnesses. The trial concluded with a hung jury, nine for acquittal, three for murder in the first, with the three holdouts insisting that Quartararo had to be guilty because he was Italian and Italians were always guilty of whatever crimes they were arrested for.)

Ah yes, worst case of suicide I ever saw.