Scams on Film

John Rogers had a gift. As a teenager in Little Rock, he discovered he could forge signatures—Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Mickey Mantle—well enough to fool collectors. “Probably around 13 is when I became a forger,” he later told American Greed from prison. “I started off as fun, and I learned pretty quickly it was a natural talent I had.” That talent would eventually underwrite a $32 million photo archive business, a 12,000-square-foot home with a hidden vault and a backyard grotto, and a fraud that left victims scattered across the sports memorabilia world. The FBI estimated 26 known victims owed $23.5 million in restitution, though agents suspect there were many more who never came forward.

The Archive That Was Too Good to Be True

Rogers presented himself as a preservationist. His pitch was simple: newspaper archives were undervalued assets. He would take their old photo collections, digitize them, add metadata, and create a searchable digital library. In exchange, he would own the copyrights and share future licensing revenue. “He was going out and sort of rescuing these historic treasures,” said FBI Special Agent Brian Brusokas. Rogers claimed to have purchased the archives of the Detroit News, Detroit Free Press, Chicago Daily News, and Chicago Sun-Times. “We’d like to buy every newspaper in the country,” he said.