BILLY CRYSTAL AND PENNY MARSHALL WERE DUPED BY SPORTS COLLECTIBLE DEALER
A top collector of baseball memorabilia in New York has been exposed as a fraud and he cheated sports crazed celebrities out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Six years after Barry Halper’s death, it turns out he was a con man who sold replicas and forged autographs as one-of-a-kind gems. Among those burned are sports fanatic Billy Crystal, who paid $239,000 for “Mickey Mantle’s 1960 glove” and Penny Marshall, who paid $387,500 for “the last glove Lou Gehrig used in 1939.” Both were judged to be fake. We imagine these items were framed and displayed on the walls of their homes with considerable pride.