While the profile of the relief pitcher has shifted significantly in recent decades from unusable starter and last-gasp late-inning replacement to high-paid lynchpin closer, set-up man, and set-up set-up man, the bullpen notoriously remains a bastion of clubhouse quacks and irregulars. Cordoned off in irregularly designed, hard-to-see and hard-to-see-from quarters of the modern ballpark, relief pitchers usually have very little reason to corral their eccentricities. Thus the ‘pen has housed a host of famous baseball characters, from the crafty, subversive Jim Bouton to the antic Turk Wendell.

Kevin Nelson’s Operation Bullpen takes its name from an undercover FBI investigation of a ring of criminals of appropriately outsider status. A pot-smoking out-of-work cook-cum-expert forger, Greg Marino, and an ex-meth addict and memorabilia store owner-cum-plan mastermind, Wayne Bray, lead a team of low-rent racketeers working out of southern California in the 1990s. As the book’s front cover and promotional Web site advertise, Mssrs. Bray and Marino executed “the biggest forgery scam in American history.” On the day of the FBI raid that finally broke their scam, they had in their possession more than $10 million in cash and forged goods—about one tenth of the total amount the duo and their cohorts extorted from American consumers during their criminal run. From the comparatively humble beginnings of faking the signatures of what Nelson calls “the big-three” of baseball collectibles—Mantle, DiMaggio and Williams—to the grotesquerie of a Mother Teresa-autographed Rawlings, these crooks duped collectors for truckloads of cash and lived it up like drug-cartel dons with their grift.

The high-left corner of the book’s back cover reads, “True Crime/Sports.” If we are to read Operation Bullpen as genre-play, Nelson blends the dogged fact-chashing of new historicism with the intimate, interview-based personality portraits of Wolfe’s New Journalism and the deadpan humor and pulp fiction stylings of Hammett and Chandler. The terse, conversant, tension-free prose of Operation Bullpen engages colloquially while making casual, at time off-color psychological assessments of the main players. But Nelson is not a master stylist, and as in the case of the Britain-born Chandler, Nelson’s assumption of an Everyman vocality is at times humorous in its characiture-ish approximation of his subjects’ plainspeak patois. “Their crazy-ass dreams were coming true,” he writes, when Marino makes his first large scam-money purchase—a sea-cruising sea boat dubbed the Bada Bing.

Although he reserves a degree of respect for all his criminal subjects, Nelson relates the details of their windfall years with a nudge-wink detachment. The name of Marino’s boat, for example, clearly tickles the author’s sides. In this case he gives his subject the benefit of the doubt: “hey, it never hurts to have a sense of humor about these things.” Perhaps there is more of a window into Nelson’s own ethical judgement of his subjects in his introduction of the FBI agent who investigated their crimes and picked the operation’s apropos name. “Possessed of a sharp, sarcastic sense of humor, it was McKinney who coined the code name of Operation Bullpen, fitting because bullpen was a baseball term…. It was also a play on words—the pen referring to the forger’s primary tool and all the bullshit it produced.”

The proliferation of genuine-looking fakeries in Operation Bullpen is as American as the sport industry that serves as fodder for its story (for we live in a culture of collective consumerism). Nelson drives the point home at every turn, parsing out a twisted update on the American Dream-turned-Nightmare his pulpy predecessors wrote in early- and mid-twentieth-century tales of sordid Hollywood crimes. But Operation Bullpen hardly charts the romantic narrative streak of noir narratives like the Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep; and it’s not the rolling hills of Beverly that serve as a backdrop but the funky, wall-to-wall-carpeted interior of Wayne Bray’s W.W. Sports Cards in suburban San Marcos. Who should waltz in? Not Bogey, not even Fred MacMurray, but the bummish Greg Marino, donning an “old and grungy” t-shirt that’s “hanging out of his sweats, which were themselves only in slightly better shape than his beat-up sneakers.”

No, this ain’t your daddy’s noir; Operation Bullpen reveals a colder, more mechanical kind of criminality, fine-tuned for late capitalism. “They were the McDonald’s of forgers,” Nelson writes of Bray and Marino, “cranking out hundreds of thousands of forgeries and peddling them on eBay and the Internet, the cable TV home shopping channels, mail order, auction, card shows and retail shops in every state in the Union.” Despite the lack of tinsel-town sheen in the telling, we ultimately learn that it doesn’t take a Hollywood script to produce a tight ending: all of the criminals implicated in Bray and Marino’s forgery business serve time for their offenses. Despite that convenient denouement, inasmuch as Operation Bullpen remains aesthetically tethered to real, unsavory events (Marino’s soiled t-shirt, Bray’s druggie past), the narrative is as imperfect and inconsistent as the characters’ two-bit, simplistic forgery scam will allow.

Even with these certain fumblings, the forgers’ story raises nuanced metaphysical questions that lend the book surprisingly considerable intellectual heft—almost in spite of itself. If there ever was a line between collector and consumer, Operation Bullpen exposes it as moot. For Bray and Marino mass-produced the Benjamin-esque aura of famous autographs—that specialness and proof of origin collectors crave—to the point that it became replaced, confused, and ultimately rendered unrecognizable. And where is the line between the aura and its impostor shadow? Thus, the criminal mind preys on weak judgement, and without harm so long as the buyer can’t—or refuses to—discern the difference between that which glitters and gold. In one eerily poignant statement—eerily so because neither the speaker nor the author seem to realize its significance—FBI agent (and autograph collector) John Ferreira posits the difference of mass-produced false authenticity and the genuine article as an invisible difference. “You have a baseball with a star’s signature on it and if it’s legitimate, the ball probably has his fingerprints on it. There’s part of that guy on the ball.” The commodity being bought and sold is as intangible as the idea of a collector with print dusters is preposterous.

What is perhaps the most concise articulation of this difference, or lack thereof, comes not from an interview or from the author but from the book’s front cover, which features Warhol-style carbon copies of an FBI evidence photo of a beaming, blond, corn-fed Mickey Mantle reproduced in rows. The fake signature that made the crooks rich appears just below the Mick’s chin. Today on eBay a signed Mickey Mantle baseball goes to bid at $350. But if you buy the book for $18.95 you can add about a dozen authentic-looking Mantles to your collection.

AUTHOR BIO: Richard H. Parks is the Editor of the Martinez News-Gazette. Until he was diagnosed with “water on the elbow” in little league, he was a sought-after starting pitcher.