The Greatest Fakes: Inside the world of forged Muhammad Ali autographs

Shawn Anderson remembers the first time he got swindled into buying a forged Muhammad Ali autograph.

“You just get that sick feeling,” he said. “Like getting your car broken into — years ago, I had my car broken into and they stole a radio. The radio actually wasn’t working, but just the fact that somebody broke into my car and ripped out my radio. You know, you got that violated feeling.”

Now an HVAC repair specialist from Miami, Anderson caught the boxing bug while growing up during the 1980s when Mike Tyson was arguably the most captivating athlete on the planet. Anderson began looking into the sport’s recent history, and before long he found himself transfixed by Ali — his achievements in the ring, his principled stand against the Vietnam War, and that weapons-grade, Ali charisma which shone through whether the champ was needling an opponent, delivering a commencement speech at Harvard or lighting the Olympic flame before the 1996 Summer Games.

Before he became interested in Ali memorabilia, Anderson set his collector’s instincts on obtaining footage of every Ali fight. YouTube was not an option in the ‘90s, so Anderson built his video library by trading tapes with other boxing fans and scouring TV schedules for replays of classic fights. He even got his hands on an old reel-to-reel projector to watch bouts he couldn’t find on VHS.

In 1999, Anderson bought his first autograph: Ali’s handwriting in blue ballpoint pen on the cover of a religious leaflet titled “Concept of God in Islam.” Throughout his life, Ali signed hundreds — if not thousands — of the folded paper handouts, to help spread his faith and teach Americans the basics about Islam. To devout Ali fans, the easy-to-obtain and reasonably priced pamphlets served as starter kits to burgeoning memorabilia obsessions, and Anderson was no exception.

“You always want something a little better than the last item,” he said. “I started with a pamphlet, then I probably bought like a postcard-size picture and then a bigger photograph.”

Anderson kept vacuuming up any piece of Ali memorabilia that caught his eye and that he could afford, and in that early fit of exuberance, he got ripped off.

There was nothing remarkable about that first forged photograph. Ali fakes are so common on the memorabilia circuit that Anderson recalls the sting of victimization more than the details of the bunko object he purchased.

“Like I literally just took my money and threw it away,” he said. “I don’t remember the amount but it was more than I would have liked to have thrown in the garbage. After that, I said I’m never gonna buy another forgery.”

He began reading anything he could find about the sports memorabilia business; he scoured the internet for examples of authentic and forged Ali signatures; he traded observations with collectors he met in online forums.

“I just kept studying and looking and looking and studying,” Anderson said, describing the years-long process of examining Ali’s handwriting and training himself to recognize its unique traits.

As Anderson’s expertise grew, he sought to help other Ali aficionados avoid falling prey to fake-autograph scams.

In 2004, he launched AliAutos.com, where curious memorabilia shoppers can review hundreds of examples of Ali’s authentic signature and writing samples through the years, as well as descriptions and images of common fakes. For $5, visitors can send Anderson an image of an Ali autograph they’d like to buy and he’ll render a spot judgment on its authenticity.

“The quick opinion’s an opinion,” he explained. “I’m gonna go based on whatever they can provide as a photograph. Now, if I’m going to issue something like a certificate of authenticity, I definitely have to see it in person. I need to look at it under a light, different angles — under black light if I have to.”

On June 4, 2016, the day after Ali’s death, the quick opinion requests started pouring in at the same time as Anderson’s friends were texting to ask how he was handling the loss. He barely had time to mourn the man he’d followed and studied for decades.

“Since I was young, one of my goals was to meet him,” Anderson said. “I pretty much knew I was never gonna meet him because of his health issues, but at least he was there. He was alive. When he died, it hurt.”

As Anderson scrolled through the images people had sent, it became clear that the spike in interest and demand that followed Ali’s death would be matched by an increase in new and old forgeries hitting the market, and that scammers would capitalize on the worldwide outpouring of love and grief for “The Greatest.”

The weeks and months following an iconic athlete’s death are the forger’s version of a gold rush. These are the rare occasions when casual sports fans enter the sports memorabilia market en masse, doubling and tripling and quadrupling normal prices with their demand and serving as easy marks for online sales of bogus merchandise.

The pattern played out most recently after NBA great Kobe Bryant’s death in a January helicopter crash.

“It was a huge rush of people,” said Tom Poon, an autograph authenticator for PSA DNA, a leading third-party sports memorabilia authentication and grading firm. “Because Kobe died so suddenly, they wanted something associated with him, and they would just jump on eBay and buy anything.”

Authentication requests flooded PSA’s inboxes.

“The month after Kobe passed, we must have gotten 300 to 400 items right away,” Poon added. “And the overwhelming majority were bad.”

It was a similar story in the days after Ali died, but in addition to the flood of forgeries made in response to his death, authenticators also had to sift through hundreds — perhaps thousands — of inauthentic Ali signatures that already existed. Ali’s is among the three most-forged autographs of any athlete, along with Michael Jordan and Mickey Mantle, according to James Spence III, vice president of the authentication firm JSA.

“When people who don’t know anything about the sports memorabilia business hear about the passing of a very iconic athlete, they naturally want to own a piece of him, to have some kind of memento,” Poon said. “Unfortunately, they were venturing into the wild, wild West. People just forge autographs, put ‘em on eBay, and sometimes they go for a couple hundred dollars. That’s quick, easy money to, unfortunately, take advantage of Ali’s passing.

“They generally target the big-name guys. There’s not much money in forging Derek Fisher.”

Ali’s autograph poses unique challenges to authenticators because it transformed so often during his six decades in the public eye. Before Ali converted to Islam in 1964, he signed under his given name, Cassius Clay. Once he began signing as Muhammad Ali, the champ experimented with several different versions of his autograph throughout the late ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and early ‘90s.

At PSA DNA, the company recognizes 12 distinct variations on Ali’s authentic signature.

“When Ali first came into prominence in the ‘60s, it was a very flamboyant, large signature with great detail,” Poon added. “There was a lot of loops going on. A ‘Cassius Clay’ signature, it jumped out at you. His signatures were beautiful, almost like works of art. When he transitioned to ‘Muhammad Ali,’ it was still a big, flowing signature. But even within that he would change. For example, there’s a particular signature of Ali’s that he experimented with that can only be found in the early ‘70s, and then he went back to a different signature. Every couple of years, his signature would change a little bit, but it was noticeable.”

Then, as Parkinson’s disease took its toll on Ali’s motor skills and overall health, his autographs became more compact and difficult to read.

“After he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, his signature started to deteriorate and get smaller,” Spence said. “It got more rigid and a lot more angular, and you could see, it looks very deliberate. You could see that he struggled every time that he would have to sign an autograph, and that had everything to do with the disease.”

Late in Ali’s life, his signature became so inscrutable that authenticators could only verify it by attending private signings and issuing certificates on the spot.

“We saw Ali sign it, so it was OK. But compared to his early signatures, it was night and day,” said Poon.

The variability of Ali’s autograph through the years makes it one of the most difficult to judge for untrained eyes, but experts like Poon, Spence and Anderson use that same specificity to identify fakes. If a signed glove is dated to 1993 but bears a version of Ali’s signature closer to the style he used in 1975, then it’s probably not legit.

Professional authenticators tend to describe their work in nebulous terms. Industry leaders like JSA and PSA DNA have proprietary databases packed with thousands of images of real and fake examples of athletes’ autographs, but when experts like Spence and Poon describe their work, the true source of their authority comes via decades of experience, observation and trial and error. That type of training, they say, can’t be bought and can’t be distilled into a three-day course on how to spot forged Ali signatures.

Through repetition and study, they teach themselves to detect qualities like speed, flow and conviction in a sportsman’s autograph — concepts that the lay observer probably can’t even imagine in terms of handwriting.

“What I look for in an authentic Ali signature is not just the shape of the lettering,” Poon said. “Anybody can copy the shape and the size. What they cannot replicate is the natural bounce and flow to a signature, coupled with Ali’s unique pen pressure. There’s a natural speed to anyone’s signature that is evident in the finished product. You’re going so fast that you’re making loops that you’re not even thinking about.”

“Just look at your own autograph,” Spence added. “You see how much speed is throughout, the stroking of the autograph. There’s not an even pen pressure all throughout. You’re going to see little ticks at the initial stroke and the terminal stroke or wherever. A signature picks up its pen and shows speed and usually has a feather to it, and that flow is apparent with almost every real autograph.”

Uniformity, then, becomes one of the telltale signs of fake signatures.

“When a person forges an autograph, they’re essentially drawing it,” Spence said. “They’re going to draw it over and over and over again, so consistency is one of the things we look for because no one is consistent with their autograph. If you sign your name right now, five times, it’s going to be slightly different each time. A forgery is almost identical every time, so that’s a red flag for us.”

“In an authentic Ali signature, there are certain muscle memory traits that he wouldn’t even realize,” Poon explained. “Like the way you sign your checks. You don’t think to yourself, ‘OK, let me spell out my name.’ You’re signing so quick, so fast and natural, that it’s unique. Same thing with Muhammad Ali, there’s a certain flow and pen pressure to his signature that if you study enough, you’d be able to pick up nuances that are almost impossible for the forgers to replicate.

“With an Ali signature, there’s certain tricks that we watch out for,” Poon continued, “but we try not to tell anybody because we don’t want the forgers to know.”

There’s no shortcut to developing this kind of expertise. Anderson developed his eye for Ali autographs through decades of self-learning. Spence, whose father helped found PSA DNA before branching off with his own firm, was born into the profession. As such, he’s been the recipient of a lifelong apprenticeship. Poon earned his stripes as a memorabilia dealer before becoming an authenticator.

“I had to get it right,” Poon said. “My business model was finding Ali autographs that were “raw” — meaning not yet authenticated — then sending them to a third party and having them certified so I can resell them. If I’m buying bad autographs, I go broke. I would lose money on the purchase of the fake autographs, then I would lose money on the authentication price.”

This means that the autograph authentication business — whether applied to Ali, Mantle or even Fisher — requires a leap of faith from sports memorabilia collectors. In most cases, a certificate of authenticity from a recognized third-party expert like JSA or PSA DNA does not confer airtight confirmation that an Ali autograph is genuine, but it guarantees that a group of experts who have devoted their lives and careers to studying Ali’s signature have vouched for it. And that approval generates the difference between a signed eight-by-10 that’s worth $200 with certification and the same exact photograph that sells for $20 on eBay without it.

After Ali’s death in 2016, one of the most common forgeries that Anderson, Poon and Spence encountered was a fake they’d been seeing since the late 1990s.

“Muhammad Ali AKA Cassius Clay,” read the false inscriptions, many of which could be traced to convicted forger John Olson, who served as a cooperating witness in “Operation Bullpen,” the FBI’s sprawling crackdown on sports and celebrity memorabilia fraud in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. By the time the investigation closed in 2005, Operation Bullpen had shut down 18 forgery rings and seized more than $15 million worth of fugazi merchandise.

One of the more prolific scams unveiled was a long-running Muhammad Ali forgery racket helmed by Olson, memorabilia dealer Brian Ginsberg and former Ali opponent Chuck Wepner. Wepner, the “Bayonne Bleeder,” supposedly inspired Sylvester Stallone’s “Rocky” screenplay and was later memorialized in the 2016 biopic “Chuck,” starring Liev Schreiber. He also served as the linchpin in Ginsberg’s scheme, vouching for the authenticity of posters, photographs and gloves that Olson signed in Ali’s name.

The trio’s most notorious forgery was the “Champions Forever” poster, featuring Ali, Joe Frazier, Ken Norton, George Foreman and Larry Holmes. Olson signed all five boxers’ autographs, and Ginsberg leveraged Wepner’s name to sell them. As author Kevin Nelson wrote in the 2006 book “Operation Bullpen:” “Wepner’s reputation — the fact that he knew all these guys and had sparred and fought against three of them — would provide the cover.”

This was one of the most forged “autographed” photos that came out during Operation Bullpen. (Courtesy of Shawn Anderson / AliAutos.com)

Wepner, who cooperated with the FBI investigation, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud in 2005 and was sentenced to 90 days of house arrest, three years of probation, and one day in prison, time served. Olson, who also cooperated, told the FBI that he had fabricated roughly 10,000 signatures, most of them belonging to Ali, for Ginsberg to sell.

Eleven years after Operation Bullpen had wound down, many of Olson’s forgeries resurfaced when people who had unknowingly purchased the bunk memorabilia years ago tried to sell their autographed memorabilia in the aftermath of Ali’s death.

“That’s where a lot of the bad Ali stuff still circling around out there all these years later comes from,” Poon said. “It was something that was purchased in good faith, by customers thinking they were real years ago. And now that Ali passed, they’re thinking maybe their autographs are worth quite a bit more now. So they try to sell them, and unfortunately, we have to break the news to them that these are just total, outright forgeries.”

Authenticators also saw a spike in autopen signatures after Ali died. A machine often used for bulk fan club mailings, the autopen was a machine that mimicked celebrities’ authentic autographs. The process wasn’t intended to scam anyone, just give a memento to kids.

But after Ali died, when the value of his autograph briefly doubled, or, in some cases, tripled, people who had held onto old letters bearing his autopen signature became interested in selling their memorabilia, whether or not they knew he’d signed it.

“This is not a real signature,” Poon said. “It’s shaky. It’s very slow. Sometimes I wonder when they submit it to us if they know.”

Even though it’s been years since Ali died, the flood of inauthentic autographs that saturated the market in the summer of 2016 has had a lasting effect. Today, the value of certified authentic Ali signed merchandise is lower than it was prior to his death.

“Fight-worn material — gloves, trunks, boots from his bout — that does better each time it’s listed. But his autographs, those haven’t done as well,” said Brendan Wells, an auction director at the sports memorabilia auction house SCP. “With these big guys, the main reason why stuff flattens or flatlines or even goes down in value is because their autographs are heavily fabricated.

“What’s happening is that people have been holding on to these autographs for 10, 15, 20 years, and they’re thinking that they’re real. Then, when they want to sell it, they have to get them authenticated by a legitimate third party, and they realize — they find out the hard way — that they’re not real autographs. That happened a lot with Ali. So much fake stuff got exposed that his value got hurt.”

Real or not, however, the photos and pamphlets and gloves and posters keep selling.

“Despite how many signatures are out there, there are just a ton of fans who still want a piece of Muhammad Ali,” Spence said. “And the supply just doesn’t meet the demand.”

(Top photo: Barratts / PA Images via Getty Images)

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