Key Trump booster has a history as a con man: Stan Fitzgerald, founder of Veterans for America First, admitted he played a role in selling $2 million in fake autographs in one of the largest sports memorabilia scams in history

Veteran Trump chief Stan Fitzgerald is a frequent visitor to Mar-a-Lago. He claims to have met the former president twelve times, and his social media feeds are full of photos of the two men grinning together.

His group’s endorsement is coveted by MAGA candidates for Congress, and his website’s endorsement page is a who’s who of the Trump world: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Byron Donalds, Kari Lake and Lauren Boebert are all photos posted there .

But Fitzgerald has a secret history. For five years he ran Stan’s Sports Memorabilia, one of the biggest names in the industry, until it was closed in 1999 during an FBI raid for selling more than $2 million worth of baseball bats, balls and photos with fake signatures.

Fitzgerald, his wife and his mother were even accused of ordering forgeries of athletes when they died, such as baseball star Mickey Mantle, knowing their value would skyrocket.

He was eventually sentenced to eight months in prison after striking a deal with prosecutors.

The case has resurfaced as part of a bitter dispute between Fitzgerald and another Republican activist, Angie Wong, after they fell out over running a network of political action committees and lobbying firms.

She told DailyMail.com that Fitzgerald concealed his criminal past and was less than honest about the way he ran the group, and filed a formal complaint with regulators that he had set up similar for-profit groups to fraudulently solicit donations to pull. He in turn sues her for defamation after she makes her claims public.

“The long and short of it is this: I ended up in a network of scammers,” Wong said.

She laid out her allegations in a complaint to the Federal Election Commission, one of several documents filed in a Georgia court as part of their dueling cases.

“Stan Fitzgerald, Donna Fitzgerald, Jared Craig and others are also accused of defrauding donors to another political organization called Veterans for America First/Veterans for Trump,” it said.

It accuses Fitzgerald and his allies of using a nonprofit to direct donations to companies they control.

“It is alleged that they sold services through L Strategies, a Georgia-based LLC to create fake veterans organizations to solicit charitable donations in at least six states, including VA, FL, GA, CT, TX and others,” the statement reads complaint.

To make matters even more confusing, Fitzgerald’s Veterans for Trump group also uses the name Veterans for America First, to distinguish itself from an official Veterans for Trump coalition that has the stamp of approval from the former president himself.

Wong also accused her former employees of racism, saying they used her Chinese-American heritage to accuse her of working for the Chinese Communist Party.

Fitzgerald and his Legacy PAC hit back, seeking $50,000 in damages for what he said were defamatory statements Wong made after she went public with her allegations. And he in turn accuses her of misconduct, maintaining control of their website to speak against him.

“Wong’s malicious concealment of the Legacy PAC website, social media and fundraising portals has caused Legacy PAC to lose potential donors and continues to prevent it from functioning properly,” it says.

“Wong is intentionally making false statements about Legacy PAC and its members on a site she claims is the official Legacy PAC website.”

He has kept up a steady stream of press releases laying out his case against her. And he has even proclaimed his innocence in the 20-year-old forged signature scam, claiming he was coerced into pleading guilty.

Google searches reveal little of his past life as a fraudster. And even the Wikipedia page on the FBI investigation into his crimes lists a “Steve Fitsgerald” (sic) as “a well-known East Coast distributor of memorabilia.”

But court documents detail how Fitzgerald, his wife Donna and mother Josephine pleaded guilty to felony charges stemming from a vast conspiracy to sell counterfeit sports memorabilia.

FBI investigators with Operation Bullpen shut down their company and more than fifty others with a series of raids in 1999 that covered the country from California to New Jersey – one of the largest multi-location raids in the law enforcement agency’s history.

“The FBI and the IRS seized more than $500,000 in cash and approximately $10 million in counterfeit memorabilia, including more than 10,000 counterfeit baseballs,” the FBI later said. The seized items bore signatures of athletes and celebrities such as Mother Teresa, Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Roberto Clemente and Sammy Sosa. ‘

The indictment describes the method by which the Fitzgeralds obtained counterfeits and the scale of the operation.

“The defendants sold more than $2 million worth of sports and celebrity memorabilia to wholesale and retail customers, falsely representing the signatures of the celebrities and athletes as genuine,” it says.

They were just part of a machine that collected photographs or sports equipment, along with blank certificates of authenticity, before sending them to a forger in California, who would provide signatures copied from a “black book” of originals, according to the indictment.

Gregory Marino, the California forger, later estimated that he had forged more than a million signatures, using pens that matched the age of the player he was impersonating. He and his brother were sentenced to three and a half years in prison and forfeited hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“The Marino defendants used various techniques, such as “dipping” baseballs, to deceive victims and make the items appear appropriately aged,” the complaint states.

The signed merchandise would then be sent to distributors.

“One of the largest primary distributors of the Marinos’ counterfeit and fraudulent memorabilia is Defendant Stanley Fitzgerald,” the indictment reads, using his companies Stan’s Sports Memorabilia and Stan The Man Sports Memorabilia, which they operate from their home in New York. Jersey cattle.

Sometimes they make comical mistakes, such as the moment when the signature of Pierce Brosnan (the fifth actor to play James Bond) is placed on a photo of Timothy Dalton (the fourth Bond).

They were discovered when one of the circles turned informant.

The Fitzgeralds were ultimately charged four and a half years after the raids shut down their business, just before the five-year statute of limitations began. They were indicted on seventeen counts of mail fraud, conspiracy and money laundering.

As part of a settlement, they lost two homes, including one on the Jersey Shore that Fitzgerald had purchased several days after the raid with a $500.00 down payment.

He was ultimately sentenced to one year and three months in prison, reduced from seven years after agreeing to assist in other criminal cases.

But today, Fitzgerald insists that he is the victim of a miscarriage of justice and hired a private investigator to plead his case.

“Whether or not the FBI believed Fitzgerald was guilty, they didn’t have the evidence or they would have charged him in 1999,” Patrick Collis of Spartan Investigations said in a press release shared by Fitzgerald.

“What happened over the next 58 months was an armed government to extract a confession.”

Fitzgerald did not respond to a request for further comment.