I saw a fascinating story on the television about this guy named Wayne Bray, who partnered with Greg Marino to forge and sell millions of dollars worth of sports memorabilia, all engraved with fake signatures. He worked as an “Authenticator and Wholesaler” in San Marcos, California, selling the forgeries to hundreds of dealers.
The show is called Masterminds: Foul Ball. Most of it is an actor playing Bray, but he appears several times talking about what he did.
They said at his peak, he was passing off ten million dollars worth of counterfeits per month. By 1999, the FBI was on to him, and being cautious, he hired a former FBI agent to research if the FBI was actually on to him (he wasn’t sure). He found the answer was yes, so he decided to turn himself in.
I expected him to get life in prison, considering he’d been doing this five years and had made at least 100 million dollars. Then they said he got six months in custody (not even prison) and is still running his sports memorabilia shop, now legitimately. What?
It turns out he turned in everyone he knew. Dozens of people who bought goods off him like signed Babe Ruth baseballs, knowing (or suspecting) the forgery. They were too cheap and there were too many of them to be true. So the FBI put them in jail for years, while letting Bray (the big fish) get away scot-free.
I was amazed at his story and expected to find a lot of information online about him. Searching Google for “Wayne Bray”, I find there’s next to nothing. The t.v. show was from 2006. There’s a book about the operation, but it hardly mentions him. Five reviews on Amazon. None mention his name.
Then I found WayneBray.blogspot.com. “If I Were Wayne Bray… The unofficial thoughts and feelings of a convicted felon, who defrauded 1000 or men, women and children,” it is called. Could 1000 be the number of people he turned in? That’s quite a story.
Reading the blog, there’s only one post from 2006-11-18, comments disabled. He says how unhappy he is being a felon and a snitch, naming dozens of others who went to prison for years because of him. “I am popping pills day and night because being a “SNITCH” makes me sick to my stomach,” he mourns. Then he mentions the show about him on Masterminds, saying that he was “manipulated” into appearing on it, but has “not made a dime,” unlike what was promised him. He complains of his money troubles, then saying his two sons, “Will and Max,” will only know his father as a rat.
While on the show he said he was living life without fraud now, his blog entry says he started a jewelry store called Excalibur Jewelers in Oceanside, California. To pay for it, he and his wife Maria blew up their car (a Corvette) and collected insurance money. Now he’s packed up shop because the insurers are after him. Evidently, he’s not as reformed as he claimed on the television.
He says his wife Maria was his “partner in crime” but didn’t become a felon, remaining a teacher in San Diego county, California.
The picture on his site looks like him from the television show, so I’m inclined to believe the blog is legit.
Wanting to know more, I looked up Maria Bray. The best I could find was her contributions to a site called Helium.com. In one of the articles, she talks about her two sons not enjoying school (matching up with Wayne’s account). The kicker is What qualifies a man as dating potential? , where she says “I could have saved myself 5 years of grief with the wrong guy-complete with divorce-had I known what makes a good ‘long-term partner.’” Five years almost matches up with Wayne’s story. The t.v. show said he got out of jail (or custody, or whatever) in July of 2001, and his blog post is from November of 2006 (five years, three months). She says “R and I had lived together 2 years when I enrolled in ‘Marriage and the Family’ at the local junior college.” Since she references the five years as being married torment, this means they were together seven years. If they divorced in 2006 December (right after Wayne’s blog post), this means they moved in together in 1999, which is quite plausible.
I found this page at Sports Collectors Daily, which talks about Wayne’s involvement in the FBI raid. It was on 1999-10-13 that “(Wayne) Bray (who had begun working with the Bureau) received a day-long FBI escort for security reasons” [Parentheses theirs]. “No one could anticipate how the other memorabilia boys would react upon learning that the man who had most zealously enforced the code of silence was the one who had smashed it to pieces.” Evidently, he was more involved with the FBI than the t.v. show let on. He even called his conspirators to taunt them.
I’m not surprised he wants to keep a low profile, considering how many criminals’ lives he ruined. I’m also surprised he hasn’t been killed yet; someone should’ve done that out of revenge by now.
This article from the Los Angeles Times, 2000-04-13, ties things together:
“There were complaints by ringleaders that the wife of one of the master forgers was doing a sloppy job of applying varnish to baseballs with Babe Ruth’s signature to make them look authentic, the indictment said.”
Ha ha. That must’ve been Maria Bray, Wayne Bray’s wife. She wasn’t mentioned in the Masterminds documentary; it was all Wayne Bray and Greg Marino’s work. She got away somehow, because she should’ve been convicted for fraud if the above is true.
Wayne D. Bray is happily living at either 995 ROBIN CT / SAN MARCOS CA or 1657 MONTE VISTA DR / VISTA CA. That’s what turns up on ZabaSearch.com for him, and the birth year (1964) is correct for both. He must’ve been born after April, because the LA Times article from April of 2000 lists him as 35. His phone number appears as 831-684-2472. I tried calling him, but the number has been disconnected. ZabaSearch often has out-of-date information.
I left a message to Maria Bray on Facebook, asking her if she’s the same person. It’s been a few days and I haven’t gotten a response. I don’t expect one, because if I were her I wouldn’t talk at all either.
What lessons can Wayne teach us?
Firstly, people are inherently trusting. If you do something bold like forging signatures on jerseys and baseballs, and you do a good job of it, people won’t question it. Bray even created two companies which he used to produce phony “authentication certificates,” getting away with it for years.
Inherent trust may seem bad. It isn’t. You have to trust people in life. I trust that when I go to college on Monday, no one’s going to run me down with a campus golf cart or push me down the stairs (I have to go up two floors for calculus class). Trust is the glue that holds society together. Wayne Bray received a lot of trust, and he abused it, so his actions brought down society as a whole.
If Wayne’s goal was to “make a difference” in the world, he did it, and he did a fantastic job of it. The only problem was that it was a negative difference. “Making a difference” doesn’t have any ethical meaning, because it can be good or evil.
The Unconquerable Conscence
The other important lesson is that the human conscence can never be conquered. If you could “conquer” your consence, you would be able to commit murder and other exciting crimes with impunity. It just wouldn’t bother you at all. It would seem completely normal and amoral. Not moral, ethical, immoral, or unethical. Just numbness.
Wayne Bray had this going pretty well for years. Many criminals do. They eventually turn around, if they’re not killed first. We can see this from Wayne’s blog, where he says he is constantly “sick to [his] stomach” and is “clinging to [his] pathetic existence.” If he was a true criminal, of which there are none, he would be able to carry on with his life and seem pretty happy.
Logic & Moving Forward
At this point, there’s nothing Wayne can do to erase his past. So from a completely logical standpoint, he should be happy. While would he grieve over the evils he’s already done? There’s no way to undo them. The only thing he can do now is to do good for this world now.
If you’re a reformed serial murderer, it makes no sense to be haunted by the memory of your crimes. That’s done and gone. All that’s here is the present moment, so worrying about your past is useless.
Illogical behavior is embedded in the human consciousness. Is it logical to think about the meaning of life or the origins of the universe? Is it even logical to concern yourself with personal development? Certainly not. Cats, dogs, squirrels, and lizards do none of what we do. They live happy lives without any deep thoughts. Young children can do this too, before they hit their teen years and move on to bigger, more illogical goals.
Good and bad do not keep score.
I imagine Wayne continues to be haunted by his past, and he probably has no motivation to do anything bad—or good—in this world now. He may even be contemplating suicide to end his troubles.
The fact of the matter is that there are no score counters for good vs. evil. Any good actions Wayne takes now are completely independent of his past. They’re just good actions. Bad people can do good things, just as good people can do bad things. Your past actions do not define you.
Since there’s no going back, the only way to live is looking forward. And that’s a tough lesson for all of us.
If you see any sports memorabilia with an authentication certificate from the “J. Dimaggio Company” or “Sport and Celebrity Autograph Authentication,” it’s one of Bray’s forgeries. His stuff is still floating around all over the place.
