Evans responds to Bushing

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Posted By: Josh Evans

I read the recent post of Dave Bushing on this forum with mixture of both amusement and anger
Because Dave has lashed out at me personally and publicly I will reply to him/you in the same form.

To add to your list of shortcomings I will now add paranoia
It seems that you Mr. Bushing are of the opinion that I am the lynchpin in the recent furor over your business practices

You have opined that I am “personal friends” of the New York Daily News writers that have blasted you publicly. I assume you are referring to the writers of the recent New York Daily News articles on you, Michael O’Keefe and Bill Madden. While I wish this were the case (ahhh to be able to influence the press) this is simply not true and actually quite funny. Not that this is any of your business, I have never even met Michael O’Keefe (at least not that I know of). I may have met Bill Madden once in my life (he is a hobbyist), but this could have been around the time of my Bar Mitvah or at least a decade or so ago. I have spoken to each of them on the phone a handful of times (we spoke of nothing “personal” by the way); I provided background to a few of their stories on a variety of topics (mostly not about you Dave).

As for the reason they are not writing about myself or Lelands, that you would have to ask them. But you will notice they are not going after any of the other auction houses or authenticators either. Are they “personal friends” with the other auction house owners they do not mention or are they “personal friends” with authenticators John Taube and Steve Grad? Gee Dave, maybe they are going where the biggest problems are.

If I were to render an opinion as to why they do not attack Lelands (although this will sound self serving) it is that they do not need to. We go after ourselves. Most in the industry (who I assume these writers speak to for their content) know our track record. They know that we not only stand behind everything we sell but we own up to mistakes quickly, affirmatively and fairly whereas in the case of the Joe DiMaggio Bat debacle you Mr. Bushing did not and still have not.

You still just don’t get it. The way you handled that situation was flat out wrong. You used your relationship with the winning bidder, your influence as a grader and your influence within the industry to act on a litany of conflicts of interest. And you and your partner earned hundreds of thousands of dollars doing it. That sale should never have gone through as after the full information came out the bat was not the same animal that was sold. At the time you graded it a “10” while now there are significant questions as to what it truly is. I am not saying it was not used in the streak (although I have my doubts) but it is definitely not an unblemished, 100%, “10 of 10” entity. Especially not when the streak element depends upon the following info raised from some of your friends and your own partner: it depends somewhat upon the dating of when the Henrich’s lived in the house it came out of (oh please), the memory of a very old Tommy Henrich who previously did not say it was the streak bat and whose family was cut into the profits only after it became a streak bat, and the word of a company executive who has been selling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bats out the back door of H&B since the 1980s. And the coup de grace, at what point and by whom was that bat professionally restored.

You say that we at Lelands have a conflict of interest by authenticating our own stuff. Wow that is a head spinner. Well then every dealer that sells something, every collector that sells something going back to the dawn of time is in this same conflict. Christ, when my Dad sold his AMC Gremlin (crappy car) and told the guy it was in good condition (it was) he was in a conflict of interest. YES!!! But that is why we do not pose ourselves as a third party, a disinterested party, to help us to sell our stuff.

We at Lelands.com are an auction house that does not use nor need third party authentication services to sell our stuff (the only major sports auction house in the country that can say this). We don’t need to because we know more than the authenticators (and with a little help from our friends at times). We do not cower behind the expertise of third party authenticators who many times do not have the knowledge, the expertise or the STAKE in the stuff to provide the necessary opinion. It is us that refunds the money when we make mistakes, and pulls the lots when the calls come in from people that might now something that we did not. We are the ones with our names on the door, on the catalogue, and on the business cards. Wait, to put it more clearly that is MY NAME Joshua Leland Evans on the door and my partner Michael Heffner who is and feels a part of that name every bit as much as I do because we built this together. We built it from a flea market operation to a $15,000,000 a year enterprise that although flawed is something that we take daily pride in.

Our track record not our reputation should stand as a symbol, the ultimate symbol of what we are and what we have done in our 15 plus years of running sports auctions. Remember, Lelands is the model that most of not all the current auction houses today used to create their businesses. There was a Lelands before there was an auction house gleam in the late great Don Steinbach’s eyes. Any reader of this is welcome to pay the postage and I will gladly send a set of the dozens of catalogues we have put out dating back to 1988. This is some years before when you Dave Bushing were hanging out at Art Jaffe’s authenticating as real a fake Joe Jackson bat that was the tip of the Johnny Fang iceberg that all those fake Louisville Slugger‘s came from. You probably remember that I actually screamed in frustration while you laughed foolishly at the prospect that the bat was fake. I will never forget as Dan Knoll (your now partner) and I went down in the elevator shaking our heads at your naiveté.

There was no industry back in the early 1980s when I started in sports memorabilia. There were no books. WE made the mistakes, corrected them, and moved forward. And when you snidely accuse of me of “fraud” in my authentication of a Joe DiMaggio glove that I erred on remember it was Dan Knoll that sold me that glove that he got from his buddy Tony Cocchi. And where is Dan while you take all the heat. Where is Dan while Troy Kanunen takes all the heat? I remember Troy as the guy that used to carry Dan’s bags around for him. Not Troy as some big wig (yes that word again) who is running the show at SCDA while conflicts abound and you hide behind rhetoric.

But I am not the one waging this campaign against you Dave. Look around you. It is the industry on this forum. Be it a slice of that life it is still a representative sample of the hobby that made us wealthy. And whether or not you realize it you have a responsibility to these people. So get rid of your conflicts and stop pussy footing around about the degree you do or do not have from whatever school you went to (Columbia? As in Bogotá?) and get rid of your conflicts. If you want to be a dealer fine; if you want to be an authenticator fine; you want to be a grader fine. But not all three.

And get your head out of your ass and realize that I am not the cause of your problems, and neither is Robert Plainchich, and neither is the New York Daily News. YOU ARE!!!
Yes you are going to make mistakes, I make them every day. Just own up to them and just don’t say you own to them. If you did, that DiMaggio bat would not be sold, at least not for a half a million dollars. Just own up to who you are, and what you are in this little hobby of ours.