Steven Spiegel didn’t enjoy gambling in general. He was an investor in real estate from Brooklyn. As a child, he got a $50 Shaq rookie card at a local toy store and learned early on that the sports card market had its own way of making sense. They didn’t buy the 2003–04 Upper Deck Exquisite LeBron James Rookie Patch Autograph for $35,000. He and his brother Alan planned to. The bet was well thought out. Card No. 44 out of 99; BGS grade of 9. A jersey patch with many colors. Many people didn’t believe Steven when he called it a “million-dollar card” for years.
It turned out that he wasn’t wrong. There was a lot of money in the card market in early 2021, thanks to crypto fever and a new wave of investors who saw cardboard as an investment. A 99-card set of LeBron James sold for more than $1.5 million. A more unique gold version sold for $5.2 million. The Spiegels gave their card to Goldin Auctions, a company based in New Jersey. Ken Goldin, the company’s founder, had become famous by that time for opening packs with Drake on Instagram and later appearing in a Netflix reality show. It felt right when Goldin told Steven that the card could “smash records.” On June 10, 2021, the card went live. The highest bid was $690,000 in just one day. The call then came.
Goldin was getting the card from the trade. There is no clear reason or satisfactory explanation. “I couldn’ believe it,” Steven said. “It didn’t make sense.” It still doesn’t, at least not fully. That’s one reason the Spiegels eventually sued Goldin and his company. They said that pulling the card during the auction gave credibility to rumors that the patch inside had been switched, which, according to the lawsuit, made the card practically useless. Goldin’s lawyers have said that the company did the right thing and that the suit has no basis in fact.
The patch-swap claims had come up a few years before, in a way that was so strange it felt like something out of a movie. After the brothers put the card on eBay in the fall of 2019, Steven got a direct message on Instagram from an account he didn’t know. The person said the patch had been replaced and sent two pictures of card No. 44. One showed the Spiegels’ card with the bright multicolored swatch, and the other showed white fabric. The account was gone when Steven asked for more information. Taken out. “User not found.” Soon after, someone on eBay brought up the same patch-swap rumors and made an offer of $150,000, which is less than half of the asking price. When Steven thinks back, he thinks that those two contacts were linked.
The most interesting thing about this case is what it says about trusting a hobby that has only recently started to act like a business. Beckett, which is one of the best authentication services in the business, made the grade and sealed the card. It was kept in a safe. Still, a few anonymous messages on the internet were enough to make people doubtful enough to stop a deal worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. This market has a unique weakness: rumors spread quickly, and whisper campaigns can move faster than any auction.
Some of the old unwritten rules in the world of sports cards don’t seem to apply anymore, but there aren’t any new ones either. Dick’s Sporting Goods spent more than a million dollars on a Paul Skenes rookie card, and companies are starting to see collectibles as assets for their brands. These days, baseball cards often sell for seven figures. The infrastructure for authentication has grown up. Still, two brothers from Brooklyn are in court over a card that used to be locked away and can’t be sold because of an Instagram message from an account that doesn’t exist anymore.
The lawsuit might or might not work out. But it does raise questions that the industry probably needs to answer no matter what the verdict is. These include how auction decisions are made public, how rumors are dealt with when millions of dollars are at stake, and what accountability looks like when high finance and hobby collide. It’s still not clear if this is a clean end for the Spiegels or for anyone else who is paying close attention.
