Rapper Biggie Smalls' leather jacket to be auctioned April 19-21 in New York The original black leather jacket worn by the late Brooklyn rap artist Biggie Smalls (aka 'The Notorious B.I.G.') will be sold at a three-day sale planned for April 19-21 by Philip Weiss Auctions.
News-Antique.com - Apr 04,2012 - (OCEANSIDE, N.Y.) - The original black leather jacket worn by the late Brooklyn rap artist Biggie Smalls (aka 'The Notorious B.I.G.'), plus a full-year sheet of Chinese Year of the Monkey stamps from 1980 (est. $100,000+), Disney items, Hollywood memorabilia and more will be sold at a three-day, four session sale planned for April 19-21 by Philip Weiss Auctions.
The event will take place at Philip Weiss Auctions' spacious gallery, located at #1 Neil Court in Oceanside. Nearly 2,000 mostly fresh-to-the market lots will cross the block, in many categories: stamps, coins, postcards, toys, trains, toy soldiers, dolls, Disney items, animation and animation art, toys, figurines, Hollywood memorabilia, rock 'n' roll collectibles and much more.
Internet bidding will be provided by Proxibid.com and Auctionzip.com.
The Biggie Smalls jacket is expected to attract intense bidder interest, mainly because the rapper was a larger-than-life figure, both literally and figuratively. Smalls was born Christopher George Latore Wallace on May 21, 1972. He took the name Biggie Smalls after a character in the 1975 movie Let's Do It Again and became a central figure in the East Coast hip-hop scene.
In 1994, Smalls released a debut album with the prescient title Ready to Die. Although he was born in New York and based there, the rapper got caught up in the East Coast-West Coast feud that led to his drive-by killing by an unknown assailant in Los Angeles, on March 9, 1997. His killing may have been retribution for the shooting death of another rapper, Tupac Shakur.
The jacket will be sold in the second session on Saturday, April 21, starting at 2 p.m. It will be offered with other items dedicated mainly to Hollywood and rock 'n' roll. The rock items include a copy of the iconic “butcher” cover of the Beatles' Yesterday and Today album, rare concert posters for many rock legends, a Randy Travis jacket and Tanya Tucker pants and boots.
The auction will kick off on Thursday, April 19, at 4 p.m., with an afternoon-evening session dedicated to stamps, coins and postcards. The star lot of the day will be the full-sheet 1980 Chinese Year of the Monkey stamps, for which bidding is expected to reach or exceed $100,000. A similar full-sheet sold at auction for $70,000, but the value has gone up since then.
Other items will include a group of extremely rare unopened booklets of foreign military currency, gold and silver coins, graded coins, Russian stamps and postcards, stamps from the estate of Charles Russ, Part 2 of the Chicago Collection, more of the Great Lakes Collection, stamps in specialty albums, box lots, attic hoards and postcards (to include estate collections).
Toys, trains, toy soldiers and dolls will take center stage on Friday, April 20, at 2 p.m. Offered will be a selection of pressed steel trucks and vehicles, two rare mint-in-the-box Marx playsets, H-O brass train engines from the Kozsey estate, early German and French toys, a tin lithograph Lehmann Halloh motorcycle, and die-casts, to include Dinky,
