Posted 24 February 2005 - 07:57 PM
John Jr.,
Your conclusion quoted below was made pretty quickly. You may call me a spade if you like. I'm not going to counter with any like comment, but will detail some follow up that I have made with the seller.
"Most people don't have the balls to come out and challenge Sturmgewehr on this issue, but I will. Sturmgewehr is full of so called board Nazis and you are one of them. You cost this old 85 year man and his estate tens of thousands of dollars. Greed or no greed.
Just calling a Spade a Spade."
In hindsight, I would not have deleted the post. 20/20 hindsight is just that. At the time, I had just finished reading the Galati issue that caused so many problems for good people on this board and others. I then saw Arthur Fliegenheimer's original post in this thread, and I thought for sure the post on Sturmgewehr was a troll post. I had actually not seen the post on Sturm prior to the post on this site. After reading it, and agreeing it was suspect, I decided to delete it before someone was potentially scammed. I can count on 2 fingers the number of posts that I have personally deleted on Sturmgewehr. Like I said before, I would not have deleted it in hindsight, which we all have now, and none of us had then.
Once I began to think that it might have been a legitimate post based on comments made on this site, I contacted the poster via the e-mail address that was posted here. Once a post is deleted on Sturm, it is gone. Here's what I said regarding the deleted post:
"First of all, I want to apologize in advance, as I am the one who deleted
your post on Sturmgewehr.com last night. It's my brother's website, and I
thought your post was not real based on the low prices you had listed.
That, along with some other things that have happened recently, led me to
believe it was a bogus post, and I deleted it."
I received the following response from the seller's grandson regarding the background of the Thompson sale:
"A week ago, my grandfather asked to call some gunshops in our area to find out if they wanted his Thompsons and one told us about your site. I know little about what he has and was going by his list and prices that he had given me. He told me that he never paid more than 1500.00 for a single Thompson, and from the emails we received were surprised with the offers."
I then sent another e-mail offering advice regarding the transaction, as did "a number of people," according to the owner's grandson. He replied as follows:
"Thank you for the advice and we are thinking all of this over. We did get email's from a number of people that said 90000.00 was cheap after we made a deal with our buyer. "
I believe there is a very good chance of the seller backing out of the deal, although I did not recommend this action in any way. I relayed that the buyer was getting a very good deal, as did others in other e-mails to him. Higher offers have since been made. Some information he received from the potential buyer that was inconsistent with the standard handling process for such items may also weigh in to the decision of whether to conclude the deal or not. He has another offer that he is very seriously considering. (I am not involved in any way with the offer.)
John Jr, I'm sorry that you didn't have a chance to see the post before it got deleted on Sturm. From what you've said about the site, it sounds like you wouldn't want to visit it anyway. Many people saw the post before it was deleted. If they happened to be dealers, they had the same access to the site that everyone else did, and also continue to have.
Again, I will say that I would not have deleted the post in hindsight.
On the subject of overpriced items, posts that have high prices are not going to be deleted for just having a high price. Everyone who visits, including dealers, may excerise their discretion not to pay a high price.
Respectfully,
David Albert
dalbert@sturmgewehr.com
