Every Rascal is not a Thief, but Every Thief is a Rascal : Getting Ripped off Trading Cards (1984, 1987)

 

Thievery is as old as America itself.

            You could almost say thievery is an American pastime.

            Like apple pie.

            Like baseball.

            If you’re reading this blog post somewhere in America, the chances are very good that you’re reading this blog post on stolen land.

            Don’t @ me on that one.

            It’s the truth.

            There’s thievery in the sports card world. Sports cards are very American. In fact, there’s been a lot of thieveries over the last year. Thievery comes with expansion and growth. Just ask the Founding Fathers. 20K in merchandise was stolen from a card shop in Brunswick Maine back in April. 10K in a sports card store in Alabama. A card store in Knoxville got jacked for 50K+ in sports cards. And one in Louisville got 54K ripped off from them.

            Those are just the examples that I found doing a basic Google search.

            I’m so glad The Hobby is expanding.

Just recently at the last Dallas card show there was thievery. Some dude stole a Luka Doncic 1/1 rookie card worth 5K. How a much sought-after card worth 5K got out of the sight of the dealer, well, that’s not for me to judge. But The idiot thief got caught. Because the idiot went back to the card show the next day and tried to sell the card to another dealer.

            Idiocy is as American as apple pie too.

            Can’t wait to see what gets stolen during this week’s National!

            I was a thief. Here’s a tale about a Robin action figure if you need proof. But I was a petty thief whose reign of terror went mostly unnoticed.  When I was seven, I stole some 1980 Topps cards from this kid named Donny. Donny was five years older than me but let me pal around with him because there weren’t really any other kids in our West Virginia neighborhood. I think Donny’s mom made him befriend me. Donny didn’t like me much. I didn’t like him as a result. So, one day when we were looking though his cards, I hid some underneath my knee, scooped them into my pocket when Donny wasn’t looking, and then took them home.

            That’s what you get Donny, for not letting me play Atari.

As I got older, I stole some wax packs here and there. Mostly packs that were already opened, the gum taken, and the cards messily sitting on a shelf in a drug store candy aisle. If you want to put a positive spin on it, I was providing those cards a home. They were trash otherwise. The elderly drug store clerk wasn’t going to give those cards a home. You think she cared? My biggest drug store score was a cello pack of 1985 Fleer that someone had opened.

I’ve stolen. I’ve been with people who have stolen. Stolen drinks. Stolen cash. Stolen gas from gas stations in small towns. Stolen cigarettes. Stolen pitchers of beer under heavy winter coats and then drank them in cars. That Beavis and/or Butt-Head figurine I stole in Spencer’s Gifts? The bored teenaged clerk wasn’t going to miss it. The beer Bottles from a rich kid’s fridge? There was plenty more where that came from. I even bought a stolen Nike hat from that back of a truck in a questionable section of the city of Pittsburgh.      

I’m not proud of it.

            It happened.

            To use a phrase that I loathe: it is what it is.

            But this blog post isn’t about my nefarious past life of crime. No, this post is about me being the victim of theft. My friends being the victim of theft. I’ve written about Dmitri Danielopolous before on Junk Wax Jay. About Dmitri always having that year’s new cards first. How he had an older brother who gave him all of his old cards. Dmitri’s hot sister who liked to sunbathe, and seemed always at the ready to drive him to suburban cards shops that me and the rest of us collector kids got to go to maybe every other month.

But there was something else about Dmitri.

Something my old friend, Miller, reminded me of when I was recently back home in Pittsburgh.

Something deep and dark.

Sinister, if you will.

            Dmitri Danielopolous…was a thief.

            To unpack this, let’s initially go back to the summer of 1984. The Olympics were all the rage. Bruce Springsteen’s music poured out of every car. Madonna was on every boy’s mind. I was getting into card collecting. Like heavy into card collecting. Rebuilding my collection really. Every day seemed to include a trip to Thrift Drug to buy a cheap pack of cards. And they were cheap back then. You could couch dive and come up with the change for a pack of cards in 1984.

Us kids had just discovered the American Coin in the Monroeville Mall. A store full of surly men who sold baseball cards to noisy, half-broke, rambunctious kids by day, and then went home to drink away their nights. Aside from packs of cards and single cards, the American Coin sold team sets. I’d never seen team sets put together as one. Team sets were always something that you had to build via buying pack after pack. I’d only built one team set and that wasn’t even of my doing. Though they were garbage in 1984, I wanted a Topps Pirates team set.

            With my kid allowance I bought one.

            I loved that team set.

            I looked at it every day.

            I took it with me wherever I went.

            I stupidly took that team set with me to trade cards with Dmitri.

            I don’t know why Miller and I went to trade cards with Dmitri. We weren’t friends with him…at least not yet. I don’t think either of us really liked him. But that was the thing with cards a lot the time. You collected and traded cards with friends, but because cards are transactional you also did the same thing with kids you weren’t so close to. Kids in school. Kids on your little league team. Maybe kids you didn’t even really know. Or like. Other kids in the neighborhood.

            That’s how we ended up in Dmitri Danielopolous’ backyard trading cards.

            With his big goon friend Nick.

            Who kind of looked like this at twelve-years-old.

From my memory Dmitri and Miller did most of the trading. In the summer of 1984, because I was building up my collection, I didn’t really have anything worth trading, Dmitri had his brother’s cards. Miller a few good ones he’d come across. Dmitri gave my stuff a cursory glance. While he was doing that, Nick asked me if he could look at my Pirates team set. I let him. Then I went back to watching Dmitri and Miller haggle over something else while D flipped through my cards.

Nick had my cards.

Dmitri had my cards.

Maybe I could see why someone would lose sight of a 1/1 Luka Doncic rookie card.

People get distracted.

And even though I was distracted, I was still able to turn back in time to catch Nick trying to steal my Pirates cards. At least the few good ones on the team. The big goon was dropping my Pirates card onto the grass in Dmitri’s backyard. Like it wasn’t a big deal.

My Dave Parker card.

My Tony Pena.

My goddamned Johnny Ray.

When I caught him, Nick laughed it off. I laughed it off. Nick was two years older than me, about double my size, and had greasy hair cut into a bowl haircut.

            In my head he still looks like this.

            To be honest, Nick could’ve outright taken my Pirates team set and there really wouldn’t have been a goddamned thing that I could do. But he didn’t. He just handed me back my team set and left me to pick up the cards on the grass. That’s when I noticed that Dmitri had been doing the same thing with the stack of my cards he’d been looking at. About three or four of them on the grass underneath him.

Nothing special.

1984 Topps stars.

Cards Dmitri already had.

Cards he’d had weeks before Miller or I.

Thankfully nothing was destroyed by being dropped. Not that what I owned at ten years old was in great shape. I manhandled my cards enough that nothing I owned was ever in mint condition. At least not at that age. I was always looking at them. Examining them. Reading the stats. But deep down I was still upset at the attempted thievery. Upset at the sheer audacity. The blatantness of the act. How out in the open it was.

            The fact that I could do nothing about it.

            The fact that all I could do was go home.

            The funny thing is, Miller and I did become friends with Dmitri. Kind of. His parents stopped allowing him to hang out with what they considered the “wrong” crowd from a few blocks away. Dmitri began showing up in the cul de sac to play wiffle ball or Nerf football. He’d tried getting us into soccer, but we weren’t having that. I ended up having the kind of relationship where I could go to D’s, knock on his door, and come inside. He always came by when the new cards were out to show me. When my family’s cat got pregnant, D got one of the kittens.

            His hot sister even let me come on a trip to TnT collectibles.

            Flash forwards a few years and everyone is neighborhood friends, right? By 1987 we were full swing into The Hobby. Everyone had some kind of little job so they had extra cash. I delivered newspapers and was able to buy my first wax box with the money. 1987 Topps. Dmitri was older, less into cards, but he still got the new year’s release before any of us. We still traded. He still ripped me off in value. But no one stole.

            Until.

            Exhibit A: A 1974 Hank Aaron Card.

            Exhibit B: TWO 1983 Wade Boggs rookie cards.

            And worst of all Exhibit C: A 1963 Lou Brock rookie.

            These were all cards that Dmitri Danielopolous stole from Miller during one trading event. Sure, they’re not a Luka Doncic 1/1…but they’re more valuable in my eyes. Fourteen-year-olds didn’t come by cards like that, that easy. Thinking about this moment, one that Miller reminded me of, I remember him finding out about those stolen cards after the fact. When we were back at his house. Dmitri denied everything We weren’t able to prove anything. All those years of wiffle ball and Nerf football in the cul de sac, and the little bastard still did that to one of us.

            All we could do was drift from Dmitri.

I’d ask the question why. Why did Dmitri steal from us? He had more cards than us. He had more cards that were valuable. He had access to cards in a way that we didn’t. His family had money. My family didn’t. Miller’s family didn’t. Most likely Dmitri had those cards anyway. If he didn’t have the Brock, he most certainly had that Aaron. He definitely had those Boggs cards.

            Dmitri Danielopolous stole those cards because he could.

            Because he was a red-blooded white American male who came from money.

            The world was his to take.

            Suckers like me and Miller, we had to take our loses from guys like that. The playing field is never level. We had to go back to the Thrift Drug and buy packs to recoup our loses. Go to the American Coin and hope they had a beat-up version of what we lost. One that was affordable. One to fill that void. Ease the pain and embarrassment. Quell the helplessness that we felt. Pledge to be smarter next time.

            Keep those cards away from Dmitri Danielopolous.

            Miller said to me…that’s why I never brought my Tony Gwynn or Rod Carew cards to that little prick’s house.

            Because deep down we knew.

            As for that 1984 Pirates team set? Well…I still have it. In fact, it's the first picture you see on this week's blog. When I stopped collecting in 1992, I gave all of my cards to my brother. But I kept my Pirates teams sets. I’d collected Pirates teams sets from 1980 to about 1992. Just Topps. I kept them in a red binder that I used in high school. Every move that I made (and there were a lot) from 1997 on, that red binder has found a place on my shelves. That is, until last year when I upgraded. Those Pirates team sets now reside in a nice new black binder that isn’t thirty-plus years old.

            When I got back into collecting, aside from building complete sets from my youth, I wanted to buy and build Pirates team sets. But not just from my era. From all the decades of Pirates baseball reflected on Topps sports cards. I have grand dreams (or grand delusions depending) of those sets all snug in black binders, decorated with corresponding Pirates logos and the decades adorned on the spine.

            Probably never gonna happen.

            Why?

            Because of this guy. 

            Because of this card.

            But one can dream.

            And Dmitri Danielopolous wherever you are tonight…I hope that Lou Brock rookie card burned a hole in your ass.

            I’d like to say that I don’t steal anymore. I’d like to say that I too am reformed. But...let’s just say my weekend newspaper carrier isn’t the best at delivering my papers. And let’s just say when I lived in my last place the guy in 3M was pretty lazy about getting his paper. Maybe I’m up early. Maybe I’m up on a Saturday or Sunday before most people. And I see 3M’s paper just sitting there. And I don’t see mine.

            And…

            Thanks for reading! Happy Collecting!

            NEXT FRIDAY: Where shall we go? What shall we do? Let's talk about 1989, shall we? The Upper Deck Griffey. The Donruss and Fleer. My first trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Newspaper delivery. Girls. And the usual existential crisis that met an overweight 15 year-old kid who was growing out of things and growing into things....should be fun, right?