Stealing First Base

Inspired by the true story of the largest sports memorabilia fraud in American history.Between 1997 and 2005, an FBI investigation called Operation Bullpen tore the lid off a national racket and produced more than sixty convictions. By the Bureau's own estimate, most of the autographed baseballs, balls signed by Ruth, by Mantle, by Williams, that changed hands in those years were fakes. Stealing First Base is the novel that finally puts a family at the center of that crime.It begins in 1920, on a train platform in southern Italy, where a nineteen-year-old porter named Russo Massena throws a rock at the back of his employer's head and has to run. He runs all the way to America, all the way to Yankee Stadium, carrying nothing but a love of a game he has never seen played. That love becomes an inheritance, passing down through the Massenas and the Messinas, each generation twisting it a little further from the boy on the platform, until it arrives, warped almost beyond recognition, in the hands of his grandson.Gavin Messina grew up on his great-uncle Silvio's gift, the ability to sign a dead legend's name so perfectly the legend himself would doubt it. Silvio never sold a single signature. Gavin built an empire on them. From a warehouse outside Bakersfield, he and his partner assemble the most prolific signature-forgery operation in the country, aging paper in shellac baths and sealed bags of dog food, turning out DiMaggios and Mantles and Williamses by the hundred.But Gavin is not the hand behind the ink. That is Gregory Marino, the quiet boy from the old neighborhood who could already out-forge Gavin at eight years old, and who has spent the thirty years since perfecting an iron gall ink formula that produces signatures more flawless than the men themselves managed in their final, tired years. Gregory believes he is an artist, not a criminal. He is about to learn how thin that line is.What none of them know is that one of their best customers is a fictitious Japanese trading company, and that every transaction is being recorded by federal agents who have been patient for nine months and are running out of patience fast. They do not know about Steuben Razzburger, the obsessive collector whose complaint started it all, or about the retired umpire who spent thirty-one years watching these men sign their names and never once forgot what he saw.Moving from a Pullman card game in 1952 to a Las Vegas card show to a federal courtroom in San Diego, Stealing First Base is a sweeping, warmhearted, slyly funny saga about fathers and sons, faith and fakery, and the specific American sadness that arrives when love and ambition meet in the wrong kind of room. The characters are invented. The crimes are not.For readers of Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding, and the true-crime spirit of Catch Me If You Can.