James L. Halperin

James L. Halperin (born October 31, 1952) is an American businessman and author, who is the co-founder and co-chairman of Heritage Auctions, now the largest American auction house with 2022 sales in excess of $1.45 billion. In 1985 Halperin authored a text on grading coins, How to Grade U.S. Coins, upon which the grading standards of the grading services PCGS and NGC were ultimately based. He is the author of two futurist fiction books, The Truth Machine (1996) and The First Immortal (1997), which were in 2001 both chosen by PC Magazine in a survey put out to their online newsletter subscribers, as possible responses for the top 17 science/technology fiction books of the previous 20 years. In the 1980s he and his businesses were investigated by federal agencies (including the Federal Trade Commission), which investigation was settled by signing consent decrees and agreeing to pay a substantial fine. Early life Halperin was born on October 31, 1952, in Boston, Massachusetts, to a lower-middle-class Jewish family. At the age of 13, Halperin created a fraudulent mail-order advertising business, which took out ads in magazines looking for people who would pay to join his nonexistent sales network. This scheme drew the attention of the United States Postal Inspection Service. Halperin would end up avoiding charges in exchange for returning $100,000 of the ill-gotten money. At age 16, as a Summer project in 1969 Halperin opened a stamp & coin shop in Cochituate, Massachusetts. The business was almost immediately somewhat profitable. He graduated from Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts in 1970, then attended Harvard College between 1970 and 1971 where he studied psychology and later philosophy. After three semesters, Halperin dropped out to pursue a full-time career in numismatics, and founded New England Rare Coin Galleries (NERCG) in Framingham, Massachusetts. Career In 1976 he established a rare coin fund for investors, New England Rare Coin Fund (NERCF) which raised $367,500 for Halperin to invest in rare coins. The Fund was successfully liquidated in April 1980 via public auction, realizing $2,158,450. Every $15,000 unit-holder received over $69,000 after fees on a 3.5-year investment with the 360% profit taxable at capital gain rate. In 1982, he sold part of NERCG to a former employee, Dana Willis; Willis's company went bankrupt in 1987, after the FTC charged Willis with fraud for overvaluing coins and selling them at inflated prices.