FAKE
ronald
FAKE: An introduction
In late 1998 my life was kind of a mess, although you might not have
recongnized this if you'd met me then. On the surface, everything seemed to
be going well. I'd recently graduated from law school and had a decent job.
I was in a stable relationship, enjoyed relative material comfort, and had
great group of friends I socialized with regularly.
The truth, however, was that I was bored to tears and was living
paycheck-to-paycheck. I felt like I'd made the wrong career choice and I
didn't see a way out.
Into my life stepped Ken Fetterman, a guy I'd known in the Army and hadn't
been able to shake in the intervening years. Fetterman, the product of a
difficult childhood spent in Camden, New Jersey, had somehow (after
finishing a stint in military prison for posession of LSD) become a dealer
of high-priced fine art. Entirely self-taught, he possessed an encyclopedic
knowlege of art and earned a six-figure income peddling antique paintings.
I was baffled by Fetterman's career path and, to be honest, somewhat
impressed by what he'd made of himself, but I never thought his art trading
was was anything I could ever get involved with. Until he showed me his eBay
auctions, that is. In 1998 he'd begun selling art on eBay, and what he was
doing looked easy, not to mention lucrative.
So I decided to try it, and on my first batch of paintings (which Fetterman
dismissed as crap), I earned over $1000 in profit. I was hooked. I began
spending my weekends trolling thrift stores and antique shops looking for
art I could resell.
Fetterman, noticing my eagerness, began allowing me to sell some of his huge
inventory of paintings in exchange for a share of the profits. Most of them
were ordinary, and brought in a typical sum of one or two hundred dollars.
But some of them brought in shocking amounts. $1300 for a small pastel
drawing of geometric shapes? What gives?
I quickly learned that buyers were looking at the signatures on the
paintings and making assumptions about the artists who painted them,
sometimes assuming a piece was by a particular artist even if I hadn't
claimed it was. In fact, if the buyers spotted a signature they thought
looked familar, and thought I didn't know what it was, they went nuts, and
got into a bidding war in the hopes of "stealing" a painting whose true
value I did not know.
It didn't take long for Fetterman to spot this phenomenom and use me to
exploit it. After awhile, I relased he was probably tampering with
paintings, and in some cases adding signatures, and letting me, the "naive"
seller, put them up on eBay.
When I caught onto this, however, it was too late. I was making thousands of
dollars a month and already thinking about quitting my day job. I told
myself that if I wasn't actually lying about the paintings, I wasn't doing
anything wrong. I was just letting buyers make their own conclusions. Caveat
emptor.
Indeed.
The stakes grew larger, and eventually, I was in so deep I lost any sense of
right and wrong when it came to eBay. Which led me to do one of the most
profoundly reckless and stupid things I've ever done.
In early 2000 I forged the signature of Richard Diebenkorn onto an
early-1950s painting that resembled his work. I posted the painting on eBay
and played dumb about it, doing my best to convince potential buyers that I
was a hapless rube who'd unknowingly stumbled across a masterpiece.
It was a shameless ruse and it worked. The painting auctioned for $135,858.
It caught the attention of the New York Times, which ran the story on its
front page, as well as other newspapers, magazines, and television stations
around the world.
Within a few days the world discovered that I was not a hapless rube, but an
experienced eBay seller with a trail of unhappy customers. When eBay learned
I'd bid on the painting myself (something Fetterman and I did all the time),
it kicked me off its site.
Then the FBI took notice, and started laying the groundword for the world's
first federal prosecution based on "shill bidding" on eBay.
I cooperated with the investigation and pled guilty, agreeing to testify
against Fetterman in exchange for a lenient sentence. Fetterman, on the
other hand, went on the lam, and it took the feds over 3 years to catch up
with him.
Meanwhile, stripped of my legal career, I began learning to program
computers. Unable to find a job because of my notorious recent past, I
started my own software company, HammerTap. Ironically, we made tools for
eBay users, and developed the first eBay market research tool.
Within a couple of years I had 5 employees and robust sales, and this is
when eBay discovered I was the wizard behind the HammerTap curtain. They
threatened to sue me if I didn't sell the company.
Faced with no other option, I sold HammerTap and moved on. The feds finally
caught Fetterman and sentenced me to probation in 2004, which was when I
began work on FAKE, the book that tells the story of everything you've read
in this post so far (in much greater detail, of course).
I decided to write FAKE for personal reasons, really. It was a chance for
me, several years down the road, to sort through all that had happened and
finally put things in perspective. Writing was a cathartic process, and was
often unpleasant, but has succeeded in pushing me further down the path of
coming to terms with what I did.
I wanted FAKE to be more than a taudry tell-all. I wanted it, on some level,
to have enduring literary merit, and this is what I strove for as I wrote.
It was my one chance to write and publish a book, and I wanted to make the
most of it.
This ambition was a source of great frustration because the writing I like
best is characterized by rich, masterfully wrought prose, and I am not,
despite my best efforts, an artful prose stylist. I do not write the sorts
of beautiful, finely hewn sentences that make other writers sigh with envy.
Not very often, anyway. I write simply and clearly. I write
conversationally. My writing, while easy to read, is not poetic.
But when I let go of the notion of becoming the next William Vollmann, I
realized that I do have my strengths. I have a strong, rhythmic,
storytelling voice. My narrative flows and keeps the reader reading, and I
have a good ear for dialog.
And, most importantly, I had a good story to tell.
I hope I've done it justice. I've gotten very good feedback from people
who've read the story -- friends and strangers alike -- who've said it was
"engrossing," and told me they couldn't stop reading it. If this indicates
some sort of literary merit, so be it. I still can't read a paragraph
without finding something I wished I'd changed ("why didn't I join those two
sentences?"), but I'm nevertheless satisfied with the outcome.
I hope you like it too.
chris...@ddmcast.com
Can anyone help
Chris
Chris...@ddmcast.com
"ronald" <r...@msn.com> wrote in message
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AudiTT
Kenneth Walton
Author, FAKE: Forgery, Lies, & eBay
http://kennethwalton.com
Mitch Dickson
I got to hand it to you Ronald, you do spin a great yarn LOL! I have been
an ebay member since it's inception and frankly, EBAY was just not that big
in 1998. I was still running a "Lynx" browser based in UNIX in 97. The WEB
as we know it was just starting, most were still using Windows 3.1 and DOS
was not an unkown word. It was the days of "Archie" and "Veronica" searches
and File Transfer Protocol and Text browsers.
You are talking the days when lots were still using the 386 and the 486 and
EBAY just didn't run like it does now. Infact YAHOO auctions was still
trying to overtake EBAY and some still thought they had a shot.
This dribble you are talking just does not seem plausable.
In disbelief,
Mitch
"ronald" <r...@msn.com> wrote in message
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