The other name that occurs repeatedly at the head of the provenances is that of John Jay Ford, Jr., born in Hollywood, California on March 5, 1924, and who spent much of his life in Rockville Center, Long Island, moving to Phoenix, Arizona, in 1969. Again and again we have read of Ford propagating false stories in an attempt to defend the authenticity of the bars. Again and again we have found Ford at the center of the marketing of the bars.
John Ford told the New York Times of March 3, 2001 that Franklin was a self-taught mechanical engineer. In 1958 he worked as an engineer for Telewave Labs in Long Island City and lived in Massapequa Park, Long Island (New York Numismatic Club Membership Records). A Saint Gaudens gold medal that Franklin made by restriking old dies without a collar has been donated to the ANS; this shows that Franklin would make phony medals when occasion offered. He created mulings of other medals of which he owned the dies (Stack's 1/2001, page 96). Franklin would approach the U.S. Mint and private refining companies, asking them to make bars for his collection; this led to the creation of the Thorne and Eagle Mining Company fantasy silver bars (Holabird 2002, 17). Franklin had the motive, the means, and the opportunity to make the phony pieces. Franklin's reputation for creating phony items became so bad that the eminent professional numismatist Richard Picker nicknamed Franklin “the Massapequa Mint.” (Franklin lived in Manhattan on West 109th Street in 1939, but by 1958 he was living at 30 Phillips Road, Massapequa Park, Long Island.)
We are not the first to accuse Paul Franklin of trafficking in phony dies for territorial gold. In the 1950s Franklin sold a die that purported to be made by the Colorado private coiner J. J. Conway. Robert Bashlow used the die in the 1960s to make “restrikes.” This die had many differences with the Conway coins. It has been condemned as an outright forgery (Lee 1997, 614-15).
Paul Franklin was buying and selling coins by the late 1930s. One of his contacts was Stephen K. Nagy of Philadelphia. Nagy made several territorial gold forgeries: Templeton Reid, Massachusetts and California, and the United States Assay Office of Gold patterns; the 1913 nickel should be ascribed to Nagy's account too. It may have been Nagy's example that inspired Franklin to go and do likewise.
In 1940 and 1943, two fake gold bars emerged on the market: the Moffat $16 bar with a Roman numeral and the Hentsch & Berton bar. These bars should be ascribed to Franklin. For in the 1950s, the height of Franklin's activity, another of these fake Moffat bars emerged and was authenticated by Franklin's co-conspirator, John Ford (Ford and Taxay 1964).
These initial forgeries failed. Stack's compared the Moffat bar with one in F. C. C. Boyd's collection, and Boyd and Stack's condemned it and published it as fake (Stack's 1940). The Hentsch & Berton bar bore the same serial number as the piece in the San Francisco museum. So that bar, too, was impossible to market (Stack 1943).
At the ANA Sale in August 1952, New Netherlands sold two genuine silver bars on behalf of Wayte Raymond. Both did very well: lot 4533, the Blake & Co. $3.04 sold to Don Keefer for $180 - nearly sixty times melt - and lot 4534 to Abe Kosoff for $39. Franklin was again inspired, and two months later a new phony gold bar appeared on the market - the Parsons & Co. $20 of 1853. But Franklin had learned from his earlier mistakes. Previously he had just relied on his skill as a forger and had tried to copy a bar as well as he possibly could. This caused his bars to fail: for when they were compared with genuine bars they were exposed as forgeries. Now he concentrated on producing unknown bars - bars for which there were no direct comparanda. But how could weird-looking, hitherto unknown bars be marketed so that they could be accepted by the numismatic community? This time the bars were accompanied by stories, letters, newspapers, documents, and research into the backgrounds of the assayers. In the 1940s, the bars without stories had failed. In the 1950s, the bars with stories succeeded. It was John Ford who contributed the vital ingredients of historical research and fantastic stories. Since 1950, John Ford had been the Associate of the New Netherlands Coin Company. Charles Wormser was the President and owned all the stock; Ford, although owning no stock, received a share of the profits.
Ford contributed another vital ingredient: access to collectors whose eagerness to acquire rare and unusual pieces would overcome their skepticism. Every collector has a “dream coin.” If you make a forgery of that “dream coin,” and show it to that collector, their eagerness to have their dream fulfilled will often lead them to suspend their disbelief. Ford regularly described these naïve collectors as “boobs.” The Massapequa forgery group made pieces with specific targets in mind: the Republic of Texas counterstamp for the Texan collector John Murrell, Mexican and Canadian gold bars for Emery May Norweb, Western Gold Bars for Keefer, Murrell, Clifford, Josiah K. Lilly and the Bank of California, the fake St. Patrick's guinea for Mrs. Norweb.
As the 1950s proceeded, Franklin's “Massapequa Mint” became a more and more substantial operation. He acquired medal dies from the collection of F. C. C. Boyd and Joseph K. Davison (Ford 1967), and, in the 1960s, from die manufacturing companies (Holabird 9/2002:1315). Striking medals would serve one of Franklin's purposes - to launder hot gold into acceptable numismatic collectibles, so that U.S. citizens could own them. But Franklin was never able to solve the problem of a decent collar. He struck medals without collars - and they looked terrible. (One such medal, restruck from dies by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, is now in the ANS, donated by Franklin's son.) So Franklin made only a few monetiform forgeries - Blake, Bowie, the Diana Gambling House, George Hall.
The big money was in bars, and even more so, in coins. The closer one could get to creating a forgery of a coin of the U.S. Mint, the more money one would make. But the closer one got to that, the greater the danger.
By the late 1950s Franklin was getting bolder and bolder. He made the phony Republic of Texas counterstamp: the target collector was John Murrell. Walter Breen, who then worked at the same firm as John Ford, New Netherlands, knew about this scheme and was sworn to secrecy. But Ford fired Breen in 1960, and Breen leaked the information to others. The story can be confirmed by the advertisements New Netherlands ran when they needed to accumulate the host coins to produce the forgery: “Wanted to Buy! Mexican, Central American, South American Gold Coins” (Numismatist 1/1957, inside front cover). These coins were also used as the host coins for the fake Kohler counterstamp.
Franklin made the $47.71 fake Kohler bar, and John Ford sold it to Mrs. Norweb. In the mid-1950s Franklin made three bold moves, which would lead to three scandals. He created the phony Mexican gold bars. He created the phony USAOG items. He made the fake Saudi Arabian gold discs.
With these last two items he was on the Mint's doorstep. The United States Assay Office of Gold was a branch mint of the United States in all but name. The Saudi Arabian gold discs were struck at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia.
The USAOG $20 pieces were an extremely sophisticated piece of work. A peculiarity of these forgeries is that although the obverses have the characteristics of forgeries made with transfer dies, such characteristics appear to be lacking from the reverse. A possible reconstruction of Franklin's forgery method is the following. Stephen K. Nagy, who died in 1958, and who was connected with the creation of many of the most crooked fantasy pieces in U.S. numismatics (including the 1913 nickel), acquired from the U.S. Mint at least two hitherto unused reverse dies for the USAOG $20s. Nagy used the reverses to make fantasy pieces - like the double reverse nickel “pattern.” Franklin, whose link with Nagy went back to the 1930s, acquired these dies before Nagy died in 1958. He decided to make $20 USAOG forgeries; but he lacked an obverse. Fortunately for his plan, the USAOG $20 for 1853 is common in circulated condition. So he smashed one into a die to make an obverse die by the transfer process, and now could produce his own USAOG $20s. The reverses, however, were struck either from original dies acquired from Nagy, or from copy dies prepared from the Nagy originals. Copy dies made from original dies have a higher quality than dies made by the transfer process - one needs only think of the recent high quality copies made of Kellogg $50s from copy dies that were made from a set of original dies.
John Ford was the publisher of what was then a rival to the Guide Book of United States Coins (the Red Book), called the Standard Catalogue of United States Coins. Ford, although a competitor, was willing to help out, suggesting new “discoveries” in territorial gold for the Red Book. Once the Franklin forgeries had been laundered through the Red Book, they could be adopted by the Standard Catalogue. Only two forgeries made it into the Standard Catalogue before Ford stopped publishing in 1957: the Blake & Co. double eagle and the Parsons $20 bar (Standard Catalogue 1957, 181, 184). Similarly, no Franklin forgery was sold at public auction by New Netherlands; although the forgeries were salted into foreign auctions, such as Hess-Leu and Glendining's. Ford kept his own house clean. Because of gold restrictions, it was also easier to auction gold bars in Europe; it is not until the restrictions on owning gold were lifted in the 1970s that gold bars begin to appear in U.S. auctions.
But the Red Book bulked up with one Franklin forgery after another: California & Sierra, Blake & “Agnell,” Cal 49 Gold, Meyers & Co., Jas. King of William & Co., and the USAOG oddities. In the 13th edition of the Red Book, a revealing comment was added about a USAOG gold disc: “The modern counterpart of this issue is the 1947-48 Saudi Arabian gold discs made by, and bearing the stamp of the Philadelphia Mint” (Guide Book 1960, 205). That statement rang truer than many realized - for that USAOG gold disc, like the fake Saudi Arabian 4 dinar gold discs, was the creation of Paul Gerow Franklin of Massapequa Park, Long Island.
The Saudi Arabian 4 dinar gold disc forgeries began to appear in Hans Schulman auctions around 1958. In late 1958 Harry X Boosel bought three from Hans Schulman but found them to be forgeries. He continued to look for 4 dinar discs. At an auction in New York, he ran into John Ford:
In July 1959 Boosel published an article in the Numismatist identifying and condemning the 4 dinar forgeries. Careful comparison of the fakes with real discs showed that Franklin had omitted the stippling inside the loops of the Ps and the D of PHILADELPHIA. Once this was published the market for the pieces dried up (Boosel 1959).
Franklin may not have made all these forgeries himself. We know he would approach private refineries and mining companies, asking them to make bars for him (Holabird 2002, 17), and this is the probable source of some fantasy silver bars. In the mid-1970s, Franklin and Ford had replicas of the Libertas Americana medal made in Italy, which were sold as replicas by Stanley Apfelbaum. Italy, or other countries, such as Lebanon, may have been the source of some of Franklin's fakes. This would account for the diversity of types and punches.
Ford wrote a column for the Numismatist about forgeries. In 1964, he published two forgeries of Moffat $16 bars. Both were crude, obvious casts. It was easy to condemn them both. One of the casts was of the standard genuine Moffat $16 gold bar. The other was of the Moffat $16 gold bar with the Roman numeral I (“I6.00”). The latter bar was the Moffat forgery of 1940 that the Stacks had condemned. Ford never mentioned that this bar had been published and condemned by the Stacks twenty-four years previously. He wrote, “The rarer $16 piece was examined, photographed, and authenticated by John J. Ford, Jr., several years ago” (Ford and Taxay 1964, 312). Ford condemned the crude cast fake, and by implication, authenticated the struck fake Moffat bar - the classic “fake of a fake” ruse. This ruse was also used for the Mexican gold bars.
In 1963, Paul Garland, who had bought one of the “Franklin Hoard” USAOG 1853 $20 “proofs,” suspected his coin was fake. Another collector who thought he had been stung was Dr. James Sloss. A USAOG study group was formed to examine these “proofs.”
In 1967 the matter went before an arbitration panel of the Professional Numismatists' Guild (PNG). The PNG cut the baby in half: they feared the consequences if they were to condemn the “Franklin Hoard” USAOG pieces as outright fakes. On the other hand, they could not authenticate them either. So the panel declared that the USAOG $20s were “not true proofs,” and those who had bought them were entitled to their money back.
Josiah K. Lilly, of the pharmaceuticals firm Eli Lilly & Co., put together a superb collection of world gold. His estate administrators arranged to give the gold collection to the Smithsonian Institution in exchange for a $5,534,808 tax break in 1967-68, as reported in the New York Times for June 23, 1968. Senator Vance Hartke from Indiana pushed the bill through. Unfortunately what was ostensibly the most valuable part of the Lilly collection had been made in Massapequa Park: the Lilly collection contained “Franklin Hoard” USAOG pieces; phony Mexican gold bars; and phony Western Gold Bars.
The controversy over the USAOG pieces led many people to look anew at Franklin's other “discoveries.” The Guide Book of United States Coins had included more and more new bars in its issues from 1953 onwards. Now it separated out the new western bars and listed them as under study; and from 1970 it de-listed them entirely.
Professor T. V. Buttrey began researching the Mexican bars in the 1960s. The coin dealer Henry Christensen pointed out the elements of the Mexican gold bars that indicated they must be forgeries; the ANS curator Henry Grünthal confirmed them. After further research Buttrey presented his findings to the International Numismatic Congress held in New York and Washington in 1973. The cat was out of the bag.
John Ford and Emery May Norweb were close friends in the 1950s, as Mrs. Norweb built up her coin collection and Ford became a leading coin dealer. But although Ford sold Mrs. Norweb many great, genuine rarities (notably the Brasher doubloon), he also sold her Massapequa Mint products - his profit margin on those forgeries was so large that he could not resist the temptation of betraying his greatest client. Mrs. Norweb bought the Brasher doubloon on January 12, 1957 for $1,450. She bought the $140 pioneer gold bar ostensibly from Dawson City (actually from Massapequa) on August 21, 1955 for $5,250 (Norweb Ledgers 4:99, 5:113). Mrs. Norweb was also sold the phony $47.71 Kohler bar and fake Mexican gold bars. When she learned about the Mexican gold bar forgeries, she was furious. After February 1961, the friendship was over.
Although Franklin could no longer sell his forgeries to Mrs. Norweb via Ford, he could funnel them through other intermediaries. Mrs. Norweb was furious that Ford would not sell her the St. Patrick's farthing struck in gold from the F. C. C. Boyd estate, b't retained it for his own collection. Franklin decided to help Mrs. Norweb out. Probably by using a copper farthing to make transfer dies, he prepared a fake gold St. Patrick's coin, and through an agent in England, Brian H. Grover, salted it into an obscure auction at Lewes in Sussex. Spink's, the leading English coin dealers and one of Mrs. Norweb's preferred agents, were told about the unusual piece and went to bid on it. Grover shilled them up to £500 ($1,400). It does not appear as though Franklin used Ford as his agent in this and in his sale of a fake G. Blake ingot through Hess-Leu - both were done through Grover. Ford, eager to keep Franklin in line, condemned the two forgeries.
Another batch of forgeries prepared by Franklin in this later period were the F. G. Hoard and Star Mining bars. These were first introduced to the public through an auction at Glendining's in London in November 1969. This auction was only a partial success. It was catalogued by Spink's, Mrs. Norweb's numismatic advisors, so she got stuck with two Star Mining bars. Most of the lots were bought by Superior Stamp & Coin. The United States Treasury was leery of allowing the importation of these bars, suspecting they were hot gold. Fortunately for the forgers, the Smithsonian curator Vladimir Clain-Stefanelli, who never met a fake gold bar he didn't like, gave his imprimatur to the bars. The Bank of England took a simpler approach: no United Kingdom resident was allowed to buy the gold bars. Once they had imported the bars, Superior then had much trouble placing them with collectors. Worse still, four lots of the Glendining's auction remained unsold, and went back to Spink's. Without Ford's marketing talent, Franklin could never get very far.
Criminologists say that an essential characteristic of the criminal mind is that the criminal feels sorry for himself. Paul Franklin was no exception. As he complained in a letter to John Ford of 23 November 1964:
Unfortunately the trend of calling me the “Massapequa Mint” started with the trading to me of the small collection of medal dies formerly owned by F. C. C. Boyd. This worsened with the purchase of the large Jos. K. Davison estate consisting of thousands of medal and decoration dies. The funny part is that the nearest thing to coin dies that I had and sold to such persons as Empire Coin Co., R. Bashlow etc (the impaired Wuesthoff XX shilling to Empire, the Continental Dollar to Empire, the Conway to Bashlow to name as you well know just a few), were used by them to strike thousands of restrikes or replicas. They do the dirty work, reap all the money and I get the bad name from people who do not even know the truth. (Ford 1967, appendix 13) Franklin moved to Scottsdale, Arizona around 1963. He died in 2000.
As is almost always the case with forgeries, the bulk of the profit went to the dealer - here, John Ford - who provided the authentication and the access to wealthy collectors (Arnau 1961, 12). Franklin sought, on occasion, to break free of Ford, but Ford always brought him back into line. When Franklin thought he could market Thorne bars through R. Green, Ford's condemnation of the Thorne 231 forgeries put a stop to that. Ford likewise condemned the G. Blake ingot and the St. Patrick's guinea - both pieces that Franklin had marketed through Brian Grover, rather than directly through Ford. The Glendining's auction was another failure.
Franklin would never have been as successful as he was without John Ford's assistance. In the process, Ford became an extremely wealthy man. Throughout this article, we have seen that Ford produced story after story surrounding the phony Massapequa products. When examined closely these stories contradict themselves. This fog of disinformation has helped protect the Massapequa products from the scrutiny they deserve - the scrutiny that must lead to their condemnation as forgeries.
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