Bill Mastro Mastro Auctions Disgraced sports memorabilia exec Bill Mastro gets 20 months in prison Internet

Religion and charitable works were apparently not enough to keep Bill Mastro out of prison.

A federal judge in Chicago sentenced the disgraced sports memorabilia pioneer who pleaded guilty to shill bidding in 2013 to 20 months in prison on Thursday.

Mastro’s attorney, Michael Monico, had asked U.S. District Judge Ronald A. Guzman in court papers filed earlier this month to give Mastro probation, describing the founder of Mastro Auctions as a deeply religious Catholic who has devoted his life to work with alcoholics, the homeless and the needy.

But Guzman, citing a memorandum filed by prosecutors last week, said he was troubled by the fact that Mastro had destroyed bidding records after learning that the FBI had launched an investigation into fraud in the sports memorabilia hobby in 2006.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Steven J. Dollear and Derek Owens said good works by Mastro, charged with mail fraud in a 2012 indictment, did not give him a “get-out-of-jail card.”

Mastro, 62, has acknowledged that he stole thousands of dollars from participants in his memorabilia auctions through shill bidding.

Dollear and Owens estimate Mastro stole as much as $1 million through shill bidding, but they say the true value of the fraud that took place between 2002 and 2009 will never be known because company records were destroyed.

Mastro has also acknowledged that he trimmed the world’s most valuable baseball card, the T206 Honus Wagner once owned by NHL superstar Wayne Gretzky, greatly inflating its value.

Mastro’s links to the T206 Wagner boosted the auction house’s status among collectors, according to prosecutors.

Two Daily News reporters described how Mastro trimmed the Wagner card and his participation in shill bidding in the 2007 book “The Card — Collectors, Con Men and the True Story of History’s Most Desired Baseball Card.”

Two other Mastro Auctions executives, Doug Allen and Mark Theotikos, will appear before Guzman for sentencing in October.

Mastro turned Mastro Auctions into the sports memorabilia’s biggest and most important auction house in the 1990s and 2000s. The company went out of business during the investigation in 2009.