Reprinted from
ehistorybuff.com"All professions are a conspiracy against the laity." George Bernanrd Saw
"There are three things in the world that deserve no mercy ; hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny." ----Frederick Robertson
History is littered with frauds the foundation of which are issues of authenticity : for example, many European cathedrals were built on the basis of a supposed knuckle bone of a saint, enough nails from 'the' crucifixion were sold in early Rome to construct an entirely new city and hair samples of the 'famous' were sold to the unsuspecting but modern forensic DNA analyses showed each sample came from many individuals not necessarily named George, Abe or Napoleon; that is, unless they were regulars at the local baber shop. As Mark Twain said, "History may not repeat but it does rhyme."
In contrast to Part 1 This article is exclusively devoted to PSA/DNA one of the most prominent of the TPA's.
PSA/DNA is a subsidiary of Collectors Universe a NASDAQ (CLCT) traded company the stock of which has gone from over $30.00/share in 2000 to $7.00 and change/share recently ( a greater than 60 % decline over 5 years).The company reports 28 million in cash and a book value a little north of $3.00 /share. It pays a quarterly dividend of 25 cents, a nice yield.
PSA /DNA (P/D) began life in the early 1990's primarily as a TPA devoted to authenticating sports items. At that time, PSA stood for Professional Sports Authentications. In a recent Book by Michael O'Keeffe titled The Card** there is a lot of information about this company's history early on, not all of it laudatory. It is not within the ambit of this article to delve into this early history except to say that questions were raised in The Card about PSA authenticators including their competence and whether they were actually authenticating all the items they claimed.
Somewhere along the way PSA began authenticating historical autograph material nad DNA was added to the name. The Home Page of their web site suggests ,however, the company is still primarily a sports authenticator and there was nothing on the site to change that impression. Individuals who buy historical material authenticated by them should visit their web site.
Since the company launched into authenticating historical autographs it has had some major problems with at least one autograph dealer organization and the autograph 'blogs' have had a field day pointing out their numerous mistakes. In addition, the dealer grapevine is 'buzzing ' with, among other things, anecdotal stories about autographs that were initially authenticated by P/D but when the same autograph was resubmitted for authentication to P/D at a later date it was ruled " likely not authentic." I have been unable to verify these allegations thus far. But, if true, it seems P/D have Jekyll and Hyde authentications at least on some occasions. Furthermore, at least one of these problems apparently got resolved when a dealer involved called a high visibility P/D consulting authenticator who told the dealer, "don't worry, I'll get it fixed." If that story is not apocryphal and if you can "fix a ticket" with such an organization then what kind of rigor and integrity do they bring to their discipline? Some auction houses were using P/D as authenticators in the past but hved terminated that relationship apparently because of problems with P/D authentications according to one prominent auctioneer with whom I spoke.
In order to further evaluate P/D I talked to numerous dealers and some collectors, I visited the P/D web site and I had an amicable interview both with Joe Orlando President of P/D as well as three P/D consulting authenticators.A more comprehensive evaluation of P/D would of necessity involve paying them a site visit as detailed herein.
First, the P/D web site (http://www.psadna.com/). Every link on the web site was checked .There was a lot about stickers and logos and sports items on the site but nothing about historical material per this example posted on the web site:
Therefore in 1998, PSA initiated PSA/DNA. PSA/DNA is the world's leading third party autograph authentication company. Using state of the art technology, PSA/DNA created a four-level security system to prevent counterfeiting, forgery and piracy of high-value collectibles. In fact, PSA/DNA has been used to authenticate many historically significant sports items that include: Shoeless Joe Jackson's Bat, Super Bowl Game-Used footballs since 1999, 1999 World Series Baseballs and Bases, Mark McGwire's 1998 70th Home Run Baseball, and the list goes on. PSA/DNA not only authenticates autographs/events witnessed in the presence, but also previously signed memorabilia. Our years of expertise and knowledge in the trade have established an impeccable reputation for providing professional, unbiased, expert opinions. In addition to grading and authenticating autographed baseballs and other memorabilia, we also offer Professional Bat Authentication and Grading using the same state of the art technology.
The World's Finest Collectibles are Authenticated by PSA/DNA!
Super Bowl Game-Used Footballs since 1999
Shoeless Joe Jackson's Black Betsy Bat
Mark McGwire's 1998 70th Home Run Baseball
Sammy Sosa's 1998 66th Home Run Baseball
Mickey Mantle's 500th Home Run Baseball
Hank Aaron's Career 715th Home Run Baseball
1923 Babe Ruth "1st Home Run in Yankee Stadium"
Here is what is on the web site about the qualification of the P/D Principal Authenticator.
Steve Grad
Principal Authenticator
Expertise: Entertainment, historical, and sports autographs.
Chicago native Steve Grad originally started his career in radio. His major in Broadcast Journalism at Columbia College launched him into the radio world for seven years. Grad worked as an anchor/reporter and show host with One on One Radio Network, now known as Sporting News Radio, the largest syndicated sports radio network.With his roots deep in a city immersed in sports history, it was natural for Grad to begin collecting autographs, which ultimately led him to his future profession. Grad's collecting days started after he acquired his first in-person autograph from Rich Dotson of the Chicago White Sox at Comiskey Park. He was hooked. Thereafter, Grad expanded his collection of in-person autographs from purely baseball to football, basketball, and hockey. Meeting these modern athletes and witnessing their signatures time after time proved to be invaluable!
Grad's interest in autographs unsurprisingly spilled over into entertainment, music and politics. Through his travels in Europe, Canada, and the U.S. in the last twenty years, he has collected over 100,000 in-person autographs. Grad's expertise was put to work when he joined one of the sports industry's best auction houses, MastroNet. He used his talents to assist in the authentication and acquisition of memorabilia for Mastro's sport and non-sport auctions. In addition, Grad was one of the select writers for Mastro's catalogs.
Readers must decide whether this vitae gives them great confidence in the ability of this individual to 'authenticate' historical material since there is no mention of historical autograph credentials such as even a membership in an organization like the Manuscript Society and there is no mention that he has published in the field even though he may have. Furthermore, Mastro is an auction house that does not stand by the material they sell because they apparently resolve the issue of authenticity prior to the auction with a P/D certification. This is # 13 in Mastro's Terms of Sale:
13. ALL SALES ARE FINAL. NO RETURNS ARE ACCEPTED. (THE RED IS THE COLOR FONT USED BY MASTRO).
IF MR. GRAD AUTHENTICATES FOR MASTRO IT APPEARS THAT MASTRO HAS LITTLE CONFIDENCE IN HIS AUTHENTICATIONS OTHERWISE THEY WOULD STAND BEHIND WHAT THEY SELL.( IS THERE AN ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATION?).
The reason we keep punding away at the qulifications of any authenticator is best summed up by the following statement from Ken Rendell- "You have to authenticate the dealer. The principle I stated in the introduction to Forging History: The Detection of Fake Letters and Documents still holds true: “Ask dealers about their experience—not just in terms of years but also how much similar material they have handled. Ask about articles in scholarly journals, papers delivered before authentification and library groups, recognition by their peers of their being experts. But, most important, ask dealers how they authenticated pieces in question."@@@
Zach Rullo another P/D authenticator who, according to the Mastro web site authenticates for their auctions, was recently involved in a law suit that was filed by Bill Daniels a sports dealer who bought a numbered lot of baseball items at a Mastro auction. According Daniels the lot was not as represented and contained many forgeries and the plaintiff also alleged that Rullo had authenticated the lot which he had consigned to Masto in the first place. So in this instance a P/D authenticator was authenticating his own material. If true, that goes well beyond conflict of interest.Daniels lost this law suit but the trial transcript makes clear why.First many prominent dealers refused to testify for him including a prominent dealer who is a big P/D critic behind the scene.Second, the expert testimony was a disaster since the testimony of the two 'experts' was disallowed, in one case because the expert did not, according to the court, qualify as an autograph authenticator. Although P/D attributes many of their mistakes to the inevitable human errors that are a result of processing a high volume of material this case appears to have been much more than that.However, a call to Bill Daniels Sports Collectible company revealed that, according to a representative, Daniels is still offering PSA/DNA authentications as well as his own authentications for what he sells. However, some material being offered by Daniels claim that the authentication is by Daniels Sports Collectibles. Go figure.
Here is a summary of my interview with Joe Orlando, President of P/D. The interview was cordial and he was very forthcoming and helpful and passionate. However, when I showed him my written summary of the interview after the fact and asked him for his comments there was, shall we say, some edge to his response. Nonetheless I thought he made some good points and I changed the final summary of our interview some in response to his legitimate suggestions .
SUMMARY OF THE INTERVIEW WITH JOE ORLANDO OF PSA/DNA
9/11/08
The PSA/DNA company is primarily devoted to sports items and not
historical material. For example if you go to the company web site the whole home page is devoted to sports material: http://www.psadna.com/.My questions were directed at the latter not the former.
We had a wide ranging discussion and the following is my summary of that discussion:
First we went over the proper process of authentication. Joe agrees that a proper authentication should be conducted by someone with demonstrated expertise in a field and that the examination should be a physical examination of the specimen and it should involve careful inspection, evaluation of the paper and ink, dates and names should be checked if present, the writing should be examined under high power, and multiple references and exemplars should be available to the examiner. When appropriate, newer technology like the video spectral comparator should be at hand for the rare case where it might reveal cross outs, the type of ink used on different parts of the document, etc. But I was not certain there is a full appreciation for having an experienced examiner in historical autographs.(One more point about information in The Card. O'Keeffe calculated that, based on the number of autographs evaluated by PSA in the course of a finite time frame DIVIDED BY THE NUMBER OF AUTHENTICATORS the authenticators would have had less than 90 seconds for each sports autograph-that is if they never took a break, never ate and never spoke to anyone).
Second, the company screens their applicants and part of their screening is a test of their abilities. We did not discuss the screening process in any depth. In addition, the new employees undergo a training or apprenticeship period before being turned loose on their own. We did not get into details as to the length of training, etc. I did not ask if they have a personnel manual with details on such matters.
Except in the case of their "quick opinion" service Mr. Orlando claims they do not do authentications based on scans. I told him that when some one sends me a scan for an opinion I perform a image compatible analysis (ICA) following which I state that the image is or is not compatible with the known
image of that person's autograph and that is likely or unlikely to be authentic and that the ICA is not an authentication. It is my experience that scans are useful in spotting obvious forgeries but of little value in making the close call. Mr. Orlando stated unequivocally that they do not provide blank certificates to auction houses to fill in and that some individual from P/D examines every authentication as others have alleged . The in-house authenticators obtain help from their consultant staff as needed. However one consultant told me in three years he had seen less than forty scans and had not examined a single item physically. Another consultant told me he works from both scans and physical examination of autographs and that he sees many autographs per a given time period-even more than he would like on occasions. It is possible that some of the consultants with 'names' in historical autographs are used more often than other.
Although it is not stated on the web site, Mr. Orlando claims to have one of the largest exemplar reference libraries in the world which is reassuring. They also have the latest technology for what it is worth. I told him he should document all that in some way on the P/D web site.
I brought up the question of ongoing quality control and whether the work of their authenticators is monitored and Mr. Orlando claims the authenticators are in fact monitored on an ongoing basis. As far as I can determine the company does not have review or oversight board to carry out periodic independent evaluations as to the quality of the operation.
I agree with Mr. Orlando that the company handles a large number of items, that there are many steps in the process and that administrative as well as professional missteps are inevitable as exemplified by the many errors that have been posted on the net in the various autograph blogs.However, the percentage of cases in which mistakes are made is not documented and it may not be a great as some suspect. Issues like this can only be resolved by an independent audit.
Mr. Orlando was asked if , based on all the bogus material they see, was his company building an archive of forgeries that could be accessed by collectors and dealers ? My interpretation of his response was that they would consider doing just that which could be a valuable contribution to the field.
One other point touched on briefly was the contention by Mr. Orlando that, hold on to your toupee," it is a conflict of interest for dealers to authenticate their own material." Although this deserves little comment let us point out that if making sure your material is authentic because of the moral, legal and financial implications to your business is a conflict of interest then the whole world should operate on such a basis. There is no more over-used phrase than 'conflict of interest' which, like patriotism, is often the last refuge of scoundrels.
In order to actually verify these various contentions of P/D some independent person with knowledge of the field would have to pay the company and its historical autograph authentication operation a site visit to verify the quality of the work in an attempt to amplify details regarding some of the issues raised both in this interview and as well as by others.
Here in summary are the main things I learned from the interview and additional due diligence::
The President of PSA was willing to talk to a skeptical dealer.
Historical autographs are a small part?? of their business.
They do not do authentications from scans except as a so-called "quick opinion".
They have a large exemplar library and other resources (undocumented on their web site).
The company has a training program the exact nature and length of which is unclear.
The main authenticators are in-house and the question is their bona fides in the historical autograph field.There are 7 'experts' listed as in-house employees who are not listed on the P/D certificate of authenticity I examined (below) as part of the "authentication team'.
My guess is that the better known 'consultants' are not used as much as might be ideal.
The issue remains as to just who is doing the historical autograph authentications.As pointed out below, it could be any one of 17 employees some of whom have almost no listed bona fides in the historical autograph field. It is not clear how often the consulting authenticators with expertise in this area are used. Based on conversations with two consultants they do not always examine autographs physically they are consulted about and in the case of two of them they are not consulted frequently on any basis.
Some readers may not have seen a P/D certificate so here is the bottom portion of one from an R& R auction March 2008 that authenticated a historical, not a sports, autograph. I assume one of the 2 signatures under the "Yours In Signatures" is Steve Grad comparing it with the signature over his name below. Although I could not 'authenticate' the other signature John Reznikoff told me later that it was his signature-would anyone know that since it does not match the Reznikoff signature at the bottom of the certificate ? The certificate states that the item was examined by one or more of the P/D 'experts' but it does not specify it was examined by any of the names listed as being members of 'the P/D autograph team'- the ten individuals listed at the bottom of the certificate with the best known names.' If you go to the PSA web site there are 7 additional 'experts' who are not listed in the group of names at the bottom of the certificate (their stated expertise is entertainment x 2, golf, tickets, game used bats x 2, sports , and photographs ) . So in fact the autograph authenticated under this certificate could have been examined and authenticated by any one of 17 individuals only 10 of whom are identified by the names listed on the certificate as representing PSA/DNA's 'authentication team'. Maybe this is nit picking but, as Mark Twain said, "words have meaning-to whit, the difference between 'lightning' and 'lightning bug'." In essence then, it is not clear from the certificate exactly who of 17 possible individuals employed by P/D in some capacity authenticated that autograph and it is possible that it could have been any one of 7 people whose name is not listed on the certificate.The reader can decide by going to the web site and reading the listed qualifications of all the individuals whether they believe these 7 'experts' are qualified authenticators for historical material.
A survey of other auction houses showed that only a few ### use TPA's for their 'authentications'.
Here is my final take on P/D specifically and TPA's in general. First, no one has a good solution to autograph authentication because such authentication is not an exact science. Authentications are opinions and therefore in part subjective and they are therefore not facts. The best anyone can do is to consult with someone with a proven track record and a reputation for good judgment to obtain their opinion about an autograph or manuscript or anything else signed. There is a standard protocol for authenticating an autograph but it starts with experience.The ideal authenticator should have in depth experience in their particular niche, a track record of having been a dealer with a good reputation, and they should have published in the field. Collectors and dealers will have to decide, based on all the available information, whether any organization like P/D or any TPA are groups they want to authenticate their material. If they choose that route I have laid out clearly some of the caveats . Once again, as Steve Koschal has often stated, " it is an individual not a company that does an authentication." P/D is oriented primarily towards sports authentications by origin and history as well as current practice. An organization that does as many authentications as they do is certain to have some mistakes. The frequency of those mistakes is undocumented as is how often they are correct in their authentications of historical autographs.Also lacking are details of how much time is spent on each historical autograph. No one is coerced into using their services and there is now enough information for collectors to make up their own minds as to whether they want to use the services of any TPA including P/D. As far as dealers and auctions go, they also are not compelled to use TPA's and they certainly have the option of stating just how they do or do not use P/D or any other TPA and what role any TPA will play in their businesses. As pointed out in PART 1 of these articles most dealers in contrast to The History Buff have chosen not to take a stand in writing on the issue of TPA's. Yet, some of these same dealers have no problem carping via anonymous stories posted on the internet about the TPA's without offering any solutions to the generic autograph authentication conundrum which is in fact the seminal issue.The anti-P/D crowd also makes the mistake of generalizing and indicting someone from a few anecdotes without really digging into the problem. Finally, dealers who want to create an alternative should come together and find a way to offer a viable option to the TPA's. A company like PASS-CO may be a step in that direction. Finally if you find problems with P/D or other TPA authentications then do not buy from auction houses that do not stand behind what they sell and who hides behind TPA's of any stripe if they sell a forgery by mistake. Any collector who does otherwise has no basis for a complaint.
**The Card: Collectors, Con Men, and the True Story of History's Most Desired Baseball Card (ISBN: 0061123927) by O'Keeffe, Michael; Thompson, Teri.William Morrow & Co, 2007.
#### Auction Houses that use PSA either alone or in part for authentications or allow P/D authentications in their auctions are R&R Enterprises, Mastro, Iconic Memorabilia and ebay among others.
@@@http://www.kwrendell.com/forgeries.aspx
Revised:0/25/08
El Fraley-The History Buff, Inc.
The Problem With Third Party Authenticators - Rangiorouty** Redux - Part 2The Problem With Third Party Authenticators - Rangiorouty** Redux - Part 2
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