John Jay Ford, Jr.’s position in the history of US numismatics is that of the greatest forger ever, a corrupter of numismatic fact: a man who, in association with Paul Gerow Franklin, Sr. (1925-2000), made and marketed fake prooflike USAOG $20s of 1853, fake Western bars and coins, fake Mexican gold bars, and fake Saudi Arabian 4 dinar gold discs. (A detailed discussion of the evidence that these pieces are fake may be found at http://www.fake-gold-bars.co.uk.) These fakes provided Ford with the money to collect real coins, the collection that is being auctioned now, realizing around $30 million. In financial terms, Ford is the most successful numismatic forger in history; he may be the most successful forger of any type of art anywhere. Certainly famous forgers like Becker and Van Meegeren never profited on this scale, even when we take account of inflation.
Why did he do it? Greed is an obvious motive. But Ford acted in strange ways, hoarding his collection until he took to his deathbed, so that he and his family never cashed in and enjoyed the perquisites of being multimillionaires while Ford was up and about. Even as he profited from his scam, he realized that there were more important things than money: he wanted to be recognized as a numismatic scholar. As Ford wrote to one associate in 1996, "At this stage of my life, my reputation is of paramount concern to me. I want to be remembered for the work I have done and for the esteem the numismatic world has held me in." Yet his career resulted in him being remembered not for the work he did, but for his notorious habit of hoarding information and never publishing it; and for the forgeries he created, which made him a numismatic leper someone who made you shudder, if he got too close. One New York collector sought for years to obtain certain items from a numismatic publisher. Finally he met the publisher at a convention, and the publisher apologized profusely and promised to send the items. "You have to understand," said the publisher, "I am reluctant to deal with anybody I don’t know who writes to me from the New York City area, because they might be a front for John Ford." Ford’s numismatic expertise was praised to his face, and mocked behind his back. Looking at a Civil War token overstruck on a silver dime, a Civil War token expert commented to me, "That’s the sort of rarity that even John Ford would recognize."
Perhaps Ford’s real motive was not greed, but a tremendous chip on his shoulder. He was a man of intelligence and talent who never succeeded in a regular career; but he had a great sense of entitlement. His father was a broker on the Consolidated Stock Exchange (now the Amex), who lost much of the family’s money during the Depression. Ford grew up in straitened circumstances, but remembered that there had been a period the first five years of his life when the family had been wealthy. Ford avoided combat in the Second World War by talking his way into a cryptography unit, which reinforced his natural predilections for secrecy and intrigue.
Ford threw away the chance of a college education that was available to him from the G.I. bill, dropping out of Adelphi after one year. Ford at one point turned down a gift of a new encyclopedia, arrogantly commenting, "I already know what’s in it." Although he was a talented autodidact, because of his arrogance and lack of patience he never learnt anything in enough depth to be a serious scholar. This explains why he published so rarely: a study of article length would expose woeful ignorance. One example was his lecture about the work of Francis Gardiner Davenport, where he confused the Julian and Gregorian calendars, and missed the point that the chief reason for the discrepancy between Old Style and New Style years is not because of the eleven day difference between the two calendars, but because the Old Style year began on March 25th. It was safer for Ford to publish only ephemeral auction catalogs, and to pontificate before uncritical admirers.
A career as a photographer was brought to an untimely end by a plane crash; a period as Sales Analyst for Lehman Brothers ended in unemployment. By 1950 Ford was boxed in. He returned to his teenage hobby, persuading Charles Wormser to take him on as Associate at New Netherlands, a New York coin auction firm. Ford had no ownership interest, but was entitled to a share of the profits. Emotionally he remained a teenager ever after a prankster, cliquish, always ready to badmouth people.
In 1949, William Herbert Sheldon, Jr. (1898-1977) published Early American Cents, which gave a new impetus to collecting by die variety, and introduced the seventy point grading system. Sheldon had an M.D. and a Ph.D., but after he wrote a crazy, abusive letter to an ex-girlfriend whom he called "Starlight," he had been squeezed out of the medical profession. Unable to make a living after leaving the military in 1945, Sheldon began to steal large cents, switching cents of the same die variety but of lower grade for finer cents. He is currently known to have stolen cents from the American Numismatic Society, from Abe Kosoff, from Stack’s, from the T. James Clarke Estate, from the Gaskill collection, and from New Netherlands. Sheldon wrote and published Early American Cents as part of his plot, for if he could become the expert on cents and on grading, he would be less likely to be found out. It is the same principle as that you will never know how cold it really is, if I manufacture the thermometers. John Ford later followed a similar approach: just as Sheldon, the coin switcher, became the great expert on grading to conceal his thefts, so John Ford, the forger, became the great expert on authentication to conceal his fakes.
An assistant with Sheldon in the writing of Early American Cents was Homer K. Downing. As time went on, Downing began to figure out what was happening, but did not dare to confront Sheldon. Sheldon had an M.D. and a Ph.D.; Downing worked for the telephone company. Downing worked on putting together a photographic record of all the more important large cents, and got nearer and nearer to the solution. Downing unexpectedly dropped dead of a heart attack on May 29, 1951 a very convenient death from Sheldon’s point of view. Downing’s library and records were taken over by his close friend John Jay Ford. Ford now had the information in his hands that could lead to the unmasking of Sheldon yet Sheldon would not be unmasked until decades had passed.
When the collector T. James Clarke died, Ford used Sheldon to negotiate with the widow, Hazel, for the Clarke’s large cent collection. This was a mistake in two ways. First, Sheldon sought to cut out Ford on the collection and make a deal for himself. Secondly, every time Sheldon finished grading the Clarke collection, the cents in the Clarke collection were slightly worse in grade and those in Sheldon’s collection slightly better; for Sheldon had switched the coins. Finally the tragicomedy was brought to an end when Abe Kosoff showed up in December 1954 and bought the cent collection from Hazel Clarke.
In 1948 Ford began corresponding with a young man in a Veterans Administration hospital, Walter Henry Breen, Jr. (1930-1993), who had an extraordinary intelligence and memory. Breen commenced work at New Netherlands in 1952. His research made New Netherlands auction catalogs greatly admired for their numismatic scholarship. But Breen had a serious problem. In 1947, when he was in the military, doctors diagnosed him as a pedophile, and Breen began to accumulate a criminal record, beginning at least as early as 1954, when he molested a boy below the boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey. (This information comes from depositions in the litigation against Breen’s widow, Marion Zimmer Bradley.) Ford, who worked side by side with Breen for nearly a decade, must have known of this. In a later job, Breen kept child pornography at his place of work, and he may have already had this habit at New Netherlands.
Around 1952 Ford met at the Brooklyn Coin Club a man almost the same age as he, whom he knew when they had both been teenage wheeler-dealers of the 1930s: Paul Gerow Franklin, Sr. In the 1930s Franklin had got to know Stephen K. Nagy of Philadelphia, the producer of many of the most notorious numismatic forgeries of the early twentieth century. Nagy’s example inspired Franklin to go and do likewise. Trained as an engineer, Franklin was an expert tool and die maker. Ford’s politics were those of the extreme rightwing, almost survivalist. He built a bomb shelter below his house, accumulated guns, and hoarded gold; but from 1933 until 1975 it was illegal for Americans to hoard gold, unless it had a collectable premium. Manufacturing fake Western gold bars would provide a collectable premium for bullion that was trading in the black market. But Franklin’s first attempts at producing fake gold bars a fake Moffat bar and a fake Hentsch & Berton bar had failed miserably. A fake gold bar on its own, exposed to the hot lights of numismatic research, would soon be exposed. Ford’s trappings of pseudo-scholarship and a gift of gab enabled Ford and Franklin to market forgeries cloaked in an atmosphere of marvelous stories Mrs. Keenan and her prostitutes, a stagecoach robbery that went awry, a treasure map and a Spanish shipwreck that so bedazzled the "boobs" (as Ford called the gullible collectors that were his customers) that they bought without thinking. Franklin lived in Massapequa Park, Ford in nearby Rockville Centre, Long Island, New York. The eminent colonial dealer Richard Picker dubbed the activities of Ford and Franklin "the Massapequa Mint," since the more natural term, the Franklin Mint, was already taken.
By the middle of the 1950s these three numismatic luminaries Ford, Sheldon, and Breen were among the most admired scholars in the US field. Breen assisted Sheldon to update his cent book in 1958, when it was entitled Penny Whimsy; and Ford republished Penny Whimsy in 1965. Yet each was a criminal. Breen was a child molester. Sheldon was a thief. Ford was a forger. Each had access to information about the others and the intelligence to figure things out that should have led them to blow the whistle. But each stalemated the other. Breen knew much about the activities of Sheldon and Ford; but Breen could always be blackmailed into silence because Breen was a pedophile.
Ford’s charisma and gift of gab attracted many wealthy numismatic clients: Frederick Charles Cogswell Boyd, Mrs. Emery May Norweb, John Murrell. He sold them many fine pieces, including a Brasher doubloon to Mrs. Norweb. Yet his desire to get rich led him to betray them, stuffing their collections with products made up by Franklin in Massapequa Park. The profit on Massapequa fakes was so much greater: Ford sold the $140 pioneer gold bar ostensibly from Dawson City in the Yukon (actually made in Massapequa) to Mrs. Norweb for $5,250. A misanthrope to the end, he regarded everyone with contempt as a "boob." They were too easy to fool. Every collector has a dream coin; and if you create that dream coin for the collector, their eagerness to acquire it will often overcome their skepticism. Ford and Franklin played on this weakness, making the Yukon bar for Mrs. Norweb (who put together a great Canadian collection), and a Republic of Texas countermark for the Texan John Murrell.
Although as the editor of the Standard Catalogue Ford was the competitor of the Red Book (the Guide Book of United States Coins), Ford was always willing to "help out," suggesting new "discoveries" of Western Americana for the Red Book. Once the new Franklin-Ford fakes had been laundered through the Red Book, they could safely be taken up into the Standard Catalogue. Likewise, although the Ford-Franklin fakes occasionally appeared in advertisements in endpapers of New Netherlands catalogs, they were never auctioned. Ford kept his own house clean. But the Red Book bulked up with Ford-Franklin fakes, until the jig was up in the mid-1960s and the items were removed.
At the end of the 1950s two episodes nearly unraveled Ford and Franklin’s scam. Franklin had made Saudi Arabian 4 dinar discs; the originals had been made by the U.S. Mint at Philadelphia. Yet he had overlooked the stippling in the fields of the enclosed letters (notably P and D), and Harry X Boosel condemned the pieces as fakes. Franklin had also produced the Republic of Texas countermark to sell to John Murrell. Anticipating a windfall in selling these fake countermarks, New Netherlands began to accumulate the host coins by advertising to buy Latin American 8 escudos. Yet in 1960 Ford got into a fight with Breen and fired him. Breen threatened to reveal the Republic of Texas countermark scam. In the end Breen did not print what he knew probably pressured by threats that he would be revealed as a pedophile but he did leak the information to colleagues in the trade. Only one Republic of Texas countermarked piece surfaced, and the piece remained controversial, never being accepted into any of the major numismatic references. Brunk listed it in his book on counterstamps, but that was only to condemn it.
In March 1964 Ford took a particularly arrogant step. In that month he published in the Numismatist, in a column on authentication that he wrote with Don Taxay, two fake Moffat bars. The bars were obvious, crude casts. They had been cast from two varieties of Moffat bars: the standard variety of Moffat bar and a non-standard variety, with a Roman numeral "I" in "I6.00." The non-standard variety was actually the fake Moffat bar that Franklin had made in the late 1930s (that is, made from the same punches, although not the exact same specimen). The piece had been forthrightly condemned by Stack’s and F. C. C. Boyd in the Numismatist for June 1940. Ford tried to authenticate the Moffat bar with the Roman numeral "I" by this "fake of a fake" ruse, condemning a second generation fake to authenticate, by implication, a first generation fake. Although Ford did not succeed in duping researchers into including the fake Moffat bar in numismatic reference works, no one took him publicly to task for this ruse. Ford seemed untouchable.
In addition to his forgery operation, Ford cut other corners in his drive to get rich. Although an employee of New Netherlands, he would cut his own coin deals on the side; Charles Wormser, well-intentioned but weak, was powerless to prevent this. When Ford wanted to engage in numismatic enterprises and hide them from Wormser, he would use his Long Island friend, the car dealer Werner Amelingmeier, as a front. Knowing that most collectors were too devoted to their coins to sell them during their lifetimes, he concentrated his attentions on their wives, aware that the widows would have the final say over the disposition of the collections. Ford was handsome in an oily way, and he was extraordinarily vain: the historical record is littered with posed photographs of Ford, many with him adopting a pseudo-scholarly front by holding a pipe. Many widows succumbed to these charms: Anna Downing, Hazel Clarke, Olga Raymond, Helen Boyd. In the process Ford picked up numismatic properties at attractive prices. From Olga Raymond he bought the rights to Wayte Raymond’s publications. Unfortunately, since Ford had a phobia about publishing, this resulted in the deep sixing of many useful numismatic series, such as the Standard Catalogue and the Coin Collector’s Journal. When Frederick C. C. Boyd died in 1958, one of the most valuable coin and paper money collections ever assembled came on the market. Using his hold over Helen Boyd, Ford bought the collection. Many New Netherlands clients, such as Eric Newman and Emery May Norweb, wanted items from the collection. When Ford grabbed the collection for himself, they felt he had acted unethically. In later years Ford said that the Boyd collection was the reason for his fights with Mrs. Norweb and Eric Newman. This is not correct. Ford emphasized that reason to conceal the true reason for the disputes: his manufacture and marketing of forgeries. His dispute with Mrs. Norweb began with the Mexican gold bars. His dispute with Eric Newman began with the USAOG prooflike $20s.
Ford told stories about Mrs. Norweb in later years, many of which notably the Milky Way bar story could not have happened the way he described them. Ford added little details to narratives that made them seem true: "I was having lunch with Wayte Raymond at the Dover Hotel on 56th Street…" "I was going to see Around the World in 80 Days that night…" When, however, documents have survived from that period, it becomes clear that Ford creatively re-wrote the episodes. The Norwebs were too well bred to contradict Ford, regarding him as beneath them. Mrs. Norweb’s daughter-in-law, however, once told the account of the breakup with Ford in these words (as near as I can remember them): "Mother had a very dear friend called John Ford. She bought many coins from him. Then he sold her some Mexican gold bars. Later it turned out that the Mexican gold bars were forgeries, and John Ford had added copper to the bars by melting down old American pennies! After that John Ford was Mother’s enemy." This must be the true reason for Ford’s breakup with Mrs. Norweb: she figured out the Mexican bars were fake. In his interview in Legacy, Ford dated the breakup with Mrs. Norweb to February 1961.
Franklin produced his most spectacular forgeries in the late 1950s: prooflike $20 pieces of the United States Assay office of Gold. Franklin and Ford claimed they came from a hoard found in Arizona, which was dubbed the "Franklin Hoard." These were sold to some of the wealthiest collectors in the United States. But in the early 1960s some researchers began to apply non-destructive testing to stem the flood of gold fakes, many made in Lebanon, that were destroying the US coin market. George Fuld found that when x-rayed, cast planchets gave a different pattern than planchets that had been punched from strip. He analyzed a USAOG prooflike $20 for the collector Paul Garland, and concluded that its planchet, too, had been cast. Garland demanded his money back from the dealer; yet the Chicago dealer who had sold it, Thomas Fortune Ryan, refused to make the refund. The matter went before the Professional Numismatists Guild. Eric Newman was brought in to expertise the matter, and condemned the coin. Ford then wrote a lengthy diatribe in defense. The PNG committee, intimidated, split the baby in half by not pronouncing on the genuineness of the USAOG $20s but said that Garland was entitled to his money back because the piece had been sold to him as a proof, yet it was not a true proof. The pieces have subsequently been condemned by most of the experts who have examined them, notably in the Numismatist for February 1994.
After Josiah K. Lilly died intestate, the administrators offered his coin collection to the Smithsonian in lieu of estate taxes. Unfortunately the Lilly collection was stuffed full of Massapequa fakes: Mexican gold bars, Western gold bars, and USAOG prooflike $20s. Congress considered investigating the matter, but Ford was able to intimidate his opponents and the Lilly collection went on display at the Smithsonian, there to deceive generations of Americans with a false view of the American west. Ford would abuse the litigation process to make his opponents back down; another threat was his large collection of firearms. Ford’s behavior was so erratic and his ethics so divorced from regular morality that some opponents backed off, only too ready to believe that Ford might resort to violence.
In the mid-1960s, when he was curator of the coin collection at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, Professor Theodore Venn Buttrey, Jr., received a letter from a New York coin dealer he had not heard of before. The coin dealer, who was Ford, asked Professor Buttrey if he would be interested in examining and authenticating some recently discovered Mexican gold bars. Buttrey had specialized in Mexican coinage, but he was more a Republican guy than a Colonial guy. But he knew something of the Mexican colonial field and would be willing to take a look. He was, however, shrewd enough to know that if he wrote a letter on Yale University notepaper saying, "Yes, I’m interested," the dealer would use this to market the bars, saying, "Look, Yale University is interested in the bars," so he did not reply to the letter. After a while the bars arrived. Buttrey consulted curator Henry Grünthal at the American Numismatic Society and the widely respected coin dealer in Latin American material, Henry Christensen of New Jersey. Henry Grünthal told Buttrey that the bars had been knocking around the New York coin trade for several years, and had been thought to be not entirely kosher. Henry Christensen was more blunt. "Look, Ted, you may be a Republican guy rather than a Colonial guy, but even Republican guys should know that in 1761 the pillar dollars adopted the royal and imperial crowns on their reverses, and they didn’t have that before; therefore there is no way these bars can be from the 1740s." So Buttrey telephoned Ford, saying he could make nothing of the bars, and Ford told him to send them back.
The International Numismatic Congress for 1973 was held in New York and Washington, and Buttrey sought out a topic with a western hemisphere connection. He thought of writing about the Mexican gold bars. Ford took Buttrey to dinner, told Buttrey that the bars had been recovered from a shipwreck, and they then returned to Ford’s house. Ford’s guard dog attacked the car as they rode past. Ford set Buttrey down at a desk with a light, brought the bars up from the bomb shelter, and Buttrey examined the bars very carefully. Buttrey spotted a die crack on the coin die, which showed that all the Mexican gold bars were dielinked thus they were part of the same forgery operation. Finally Ford came up with one more item, and said, "You know, Professor Buttrey, these bars are extremely desirable, and they have become so desirable that people have been making forgeries of them," and Ford showed Buttrey a crude copy. At this point Buttrey was overcome with admiration for Ford’s shrewdness: the man had made a fake of his own fake. The brilliance of this technique lies in that one can condemn the second generation fake, and by implication authenticate the first generation fake.
After the dinner Buttrey wrote a letter to Ford thanking him for his hospitality, and saying that he had not been able to get all the details of the discovery of the bars; would Ford write him a letter? Ford did so, laying out the discovery of the shipwreck of the 1740s which contained bars with designs that did not exist until the 1770s, thereby cutting his own throat.
At the New York session of the International Numismatic Congress, Buttrey delivered his paper demolishing the authenticity of the Mexican gold bars. Buttrey had been trying to examine the bars in the Lilly collection, but the curator, Vladimir Clain-Stefanelli came up with all sorts of excuses it was very difficult to take the glass off the exhibit cases, the bars were affixed to the background, etcetera. The congress moved to Washington. Eric Newman and Buttrey looked at the Smithsonian exhibit, making fun of the ludicrous Massapequa Western gold bars as they did so. Then they came to where the Mexican gold bars should have been. They were not there; but they had been there once, for their faded outlines were visible on the background cloth. Good old Stef had run down the night before and taken the bars off display. After the turmoil died down Stef returned them to display, so that they were there to deceive the American public for another thirty-one years.
Buttrey received very little credit for his work publicly, but a number of people congratulated him privately. Calicó, the eminent Spanish dealer, came over and said in a low voice, "Professor Buttrey, you are quite right about those bars; I have been suspicious of them for many years, and have always warned my clients against them." Buttrey said, "Well, why didn’t you do anything about them? I prefer to study Roman coins, and when it comes to Mexican coins I’m really a Republican guy." Calicó dropped his voice to a whisper, almost a hiss: "Professor Buttrey, you are young…"
The eminent Mexican collector, Clyde Hubbard, tried to get Margo Russell, then the editor of Coin World, to publish Buttrey’s lecture. Ford responded with his usual threats. As one co-worker at Coin World described the episode, "Margo was virtually impossible to buffalo; but Ford buffaloed Margo Russell." Buttrey’s article was finally published in the Memorias de la Academia Mexicana de Estudios Numismaticos.
Ford sought to compel Breen to write a refutation of Buttrey. Breen began the article, but soon put it aside. Breen was terrified of what Ford might do if he said anything bad about the bars. Writing to Stanley Apfelbaum, Breen stated that he was so frightened of Ford that he could not control his bowels. Explaining his fears, Breen noted Ford’s fondness for guns, referring to Ford’s home as "the arsenal," and commented, "Ford is entirely capable of violence."
Like most criminals, Ford felt sorry for himself. In his worldview, all evil came from one spider who spun a web and who lived in St. Louis, Missouri: Eric P. Newman. In a letter of October 3, 1979 to the metallurgist Vince Newman (no relation) of London, Ford wrote, "This pattern of selective interest and activity [by Buttrey] is greatly admired (if not fully orchestrated) by a particular individual in St. Louis, Missouri, who is utilizing the entire exercise, among others, in the implementation of his personal vendetta."
During the 1960s the protagonists in Ford’s life began to leave New York. Franklin moved to Scottsdale, Arizona around 1963. He died in 2000. Breen moved to Berkeley, California in 1964, partly with the encouragement of the New York Police Department, who, like many authorities in that period, dealt with pedophiles by expelling them from the jurisdiction. After many narrow escapes (including a plea bargain in 1989), Breen was finally sent to prison for child molestation in 1991, and died there of cancer in 1993. Sheldon left New York for New England in 1972, and fell into a state of dementia, dying in 1977. Ford moved to Phoenix, Arizona, partly because of his wife’s asthma, partly because things were getting too hot in the New York area. Although his forgeries and other unscrupulous activities made him very wealthy, the stress caused repeated breakdowns in health: colon cancer, a heart attack, prostate cancer, and his final collapse, which left him in a state of dementia for at least two years before his death.
The attacks on Ford’s Massapequa forgeries continued, even though he commenced lawsuits and made other threats. In 1996, Professor Buttrey was awarded the Huntington Medal by the American Numismatic Society, the highest award for numismatic scholarship. Buttrey used the occasion to deliver a lecture demolishing the authenticity of the Western gold bars. When the Society took steps to publish the lecture, they received one of Ford’s usual threatening letters, this one dated December 11, 1997:
"I have seen an original draft of the article the A.N.S. plans to publish on the subject of ’False Western American Bars.’ "I notice that on some pages my name, as well as the names of others, is mentioned in a very uncomplimentary fashion. "If the innuendos and comments about ingots continue to include my name, without conclusive evidence to prove each allegation, then anything that defames me or the materials I may have been associated with that the Society prints will be published at their peril."
Happily the Society ignored this bluster and Buttrey’s article duly appeared; Ford thought better of his threats and did not commence any litigation regarding it.
Although Ford persuaded some of his acolytes to attempt refutations, the responses were weak and contradictory. The charges were rehearsed in a debate at the American Numismatic Association in 1999. Ford sued Buttrey for his utterances in 1999, but his litigation ran into the sand. Buttrey sought to interest prosecutors in pursuing Ford, but did not succeed, and so Ford went to his grave never having paid the debt to society for his crimes. Ford proved to be unstoppable, even though some of the finest people in numismatics Eric Newman, T. V. Buttrey, Mrs. Norweb, Clyde Hubbard did their best to stop him. Ford did succeed in impressing some younger numismatists as a numismatic scholar, who hung on his every word. We can easily guess what Ford, the misanthrope, really thought of these acolytes: a new set of "boobs." They were "boobs" because Ford convinced several of them to defend Ford’s Massapequa forgeries.
Ford’s coin collection and his library were auctioned beginning in 2003. Collectors were astonished. Here were coins, paper money, books, and research papers that they had not seen for half a century. Many researchers were deeply angered by Ford’s dog in the manger attitude, which had hidden away from them items that were vital for their research. Henry Grünthal used to say that many collectors are afflicted with "havaritis," namely they must have an item. Ford had a more negative version of this disease. He delighted in owning the coins, not so much for himself, but because he could deprive other people of them; and he could hide the items away so that many people would not even know of their existence. Ford did not collect, in the end, for the love of coins or for profit, but because it gave him power over people, who would beg him to reveal the information he had hoarded away.
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