.Misadventures of a Card Shark

Kingsley Barham seems an unlikely candidate for king of crass. The once-handsome 56-year-old sleeps on a sofa bed in a ramshackle Delray Beach, Florida, home from which he barely escaped eviction in 2001. The state of California is after him for more than $75,000 in back taxes. And creditors have won judgments against him for tens of thousands more.

Yet in the last few months, the onetime Berkeley resident has been accused by Britain’s BBC of “desecrating sacred memories.” France’s daily Le Monde cited a “Scandal in New York” after Big Apple Mayor Michael Bloomberg termed Barham’s most recent project “disgraceful and despicable.” And the Daily Sentinel, a paper in upstate New York, opined that it “symbolizes the worst aspect of the entrepreneurial spirit.”

What’s it all about? Earlier this month, Barham began peddling “Heroes” — a set of 202 trading cards featuring victims of the World Trade Center attacks, the firefighters and dogs who searched the wreckage, anthrax, American flags, and Little League. There’s even a fifteen-card puzzle that depicts the towers collapsing.

The cards retail at $2.50 for a pack of eight. Collect ’em all, kids.

Most of the larger set, which is available for $32 at Sportscardswholesale.com, depicts people who perished on September 11. The captions aspire to serious homage but generally offer little more than sentimental clichés. Take, for instance, this pearl of prose from the back of a 2.5-by-3.5 inch card featuring a photo of a Trade Center victim in her wedding dress: “Like the Cyndi Lauper song Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Florence Cohen retained a zest for life’s adventures and pursued them to their fullest. Whether curled up with an engrossing novel or traveling abroad, Florence made sure she had a good time.”

It’s not just crackpot capitalism, Barham says. Survivors will get 8 percent of the proceeds. “When I first started calling the families of World Trade Center victims and explained I wanted to honor their loved ones in a baseball-card format, six of every seven people slammed the phone down, usually after saying, ‘Fuck you’ or ‘You’re an idiot,'” he recounts. “Once they get a look at the cards, though, those people do a 180. They tell me how wonderful the cards are.”

Dozens of news stories have been printed about Barham, and he’s made the rounds on CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and other television networks. Most of these reports have proceeded the same way: “Tasteless and disgusting,” say some survivors. “We’re honored,” reply others. “I don’t call it a trading card: I call it a tribute card,” Barham himself concludes, “a magazine in a baseball-card format.”

On the day after the cards began selling online, Barham’s rented two-bedroom house was literally stuffed to the rafters with boxes of the cards. The man whom the New York Post termed a “WTC Card Shark Sicko” welcomed a reporter and a photographer with fresh cookies, and Moose, his black Lab, eagerly slobbered on the visitors. The entrepreneur wore a blue dress shirt and black running shoes. His manner was nervous, his blue eyes intent. “Yesterday was the first day and we sold $20,000 [worth] of the cards,” he said after opening the door. “That’s how well we’re doing.”

Soon he was characterizing the anchors and commentators who’ve assailed his enterprise as “drunk” (the New York Post‘s Steve Dunleavy), and “idiots” (Fox’s Bill O’Reilly and MSNBC’s Dan Abrams). “They put you in this little room and then they point a camera at you and then they start attacking,” he says. “It’s stacked against you. You have to come up with a bright response.”

Barham says he was born in Manhattan and grew up all over the world — in Chicago, Jamaica, and Denmark — because his dad was a mattress salesman who traveled a lot. He became an Eagle Scout, graduated from the University of Miami in 1975, and then moved to the Bay Area, where he spent most of the next two decades. His company, Chestnut Publications, is named after a street in San Francisco’s Marina district where he lived for a time.

It was here, while Barham was working as a stockbroker, that a client named Dwight Randolph gave him the idea of selling unconventional trading cards. Such memorabilia, particularly vintage baseball cards, can bring in millions from kids and collectors. Collectible cards were branching out back then; Barham recalls seeing trading cards of Corvettes, fire engines — even farm implements. “It was a $2.5 billion business in the early 1990s,” he says. “Opportunity!”

Things didn’t work out as Barham had planned. He says he and a friend from Houston invested half a million dollars. Though his handsome cards picturing vintage motorcycles such as a 1913 Indian Twin were issued in 1993, sales were disappointing. He says Harley-Davidson double-crossed him after he called the company to report his plans as a courtesy. “They put together their own cards and sold 400 million cards in no time,” he fumes. “It really put a damper on my business.”

Indeed, San Francisco court records show that his landlord at the time, the Woo Family Trust, sued to make him pay $900 back rent in June 1993. Though the dispute was settled a couple of months later, Woo won a judgment of $6,818 against Barham in 1995. Barham says the Woos were after him because he led a rent strike over poor living conditions and “I just walked away from it.”

It was the start of a pattern for the trading-card salesman. In 1995 and 1996, he issued a series featuring varieties of marijuana — California Red, Sri Lankan, Afghan … you get the idea. Tasty buds. The prose called for legalization: “It has become a cliché in our times that marijuana should be made legal and taxable. … If the alternative amounts to a police state and/or police state mentality, then we must do something soon to change the status quo.”

He claims he sold 35 million of the cards. “Head shops and hippies, that was my market,” he says. “Then Tower Records began selling them.”

Yet Barham’s financial fortunes didn’t seem to improve markedly. Not long after he moved to a place on Berkeley’s Hillcrest Avenue in 1996, his landlord, Halcyon Ferrari, tried to evict him for unpaid rent. He wrote an $83 check to the court. It bounced. In February 1997, a $6,800 judgment was entered against Barham and his roommate.

The following year, he came up with yet another idea: tattoos and body-piercing cards. He called tattoo shops around the country, gathered pictures of some of their weirdest creations — think black-and-white-striped buttocks — and assembled prototypes. “These didn’t hit the market that well,” Barham admits. “I got out of the business.”

No wonder. In 1998, the state placed a lien against his property for $3,500 for unpaid taxes. The next year California added $21,100 to the tab, and then, in May 2001, filed a $53,000 lien against Barham. According to the state Department of Revenue, his company, InLine Cards, hadn’t filed a California tax return since 1992, and can no longer do business here. Barham blames any tax problems on his accountant, who he says is now out of business. “I don’t know what happened since I left California,” he shrugs. “I never took any money from anyone, nor have I done anything dishonest.”

Barham says he moved in 1998 to Key Biscayne, Florida, where he worked for a time as a stockbroker. When his mother became ill, he moved north to Delray Beach to look after her, he says.

That move didn’t pan out very well either. In March 2000, Barham appeared in the Topeka Capital-Journal as one of 30,000 “independent marketing associates” for a company called Renaissance: The Tax People, which was then under federal investigation. This past April, federal prosecutors charged one top employee with being part of a conspiracy that bilked the public of $100 million. Barham was not accused of participating in the misdeeds, which prosecutors have called a pyramid scheme.

A company he formed in March 2001 to match accountants with clients, Professional Referral Services, was also unsuccessful. When the landlord of the house where he now lives tried to evict him in July 2001, Barham penned a pathetic, error-ridden letter to the judge pleading for time. One year later, by signing over a house he owned to his landlord, he managed to keep the current roof over his head. Terrorism finally came along to inspire Barham’s 9/11 cards, which the businessman believes will dig him out of his financial morass. The idea struck him just days after the disaster, he says. Over the objections of friends and family, he raised the $250,000 he thought would be needed, which included some of his own money. There are three other investors. “All I have is a house my mom left me in Maine, and I’ve leveraged it to do this,” he says. “I live life like I’m in college.”

Negative or not, the torrent of media coverage Barham has received is just the kind of publicity opportunists like him dream about. He was called “ghoulish” on CNN Live, and articles questioning his project have appeared around the globe. He found one defender in Ken Paulson, executive director of the First Amendment Center, who took Barham far too seriously in an editorial for Gannett News Service this past December: “Meaningful content can appear in many forms, including small slabs of cardboard,” Paulson wrote. “The First Amendment protects free speech, regardless of the format. In the end, it’s about the message, not the medium.”

Paulson might want to speak with Karyn Ricke, a Florida graphic artist who sued Barham after she provided a design for the cards and he refused to pay. This past October, after Barham failed to show up in court, a judge awarded her $3,000 in damages. “I don’t know if this guy has a pot to piss in,” says Ricke’s lawyer, Scott Chapman. “A lot of people are probably after his assets.”

If Barham’s 9/11 escapade turns out like his past adventures, families of WTC victims are unlikely to see a dime, and friends and business associates may well be left holding the bag. At least one investor, though, isn’t particularly bothered by the prospect of losing his stake. San Francisco’s Bill Healey says he has sunk more than $25,000 into the 9/11 project, and doesn’t believe it is in bad taste. “I probably put in the first $25,000 because Kingsley is a friend,” Healey says. “He has had a pretty tough time of it in the last twenty years. I’d like to see him have some security.”

Barham says his past record has no bearing on the 9/11 project. A chain of grocery stores in Pennsylvania and Northern New Jersey recently agreed to sell the cards, he says, and “Heroes” is doing well on the Internet. “There is no question that I have gotten some bad advice, but I have never set out to harm or hurt or financially wound someone,” he concludes. “Most of the people who have been hurt by me have been worth a lot of money.”

Helene Blatter contributed to this report.