A Filthy Fortunes “Find”

While chatting on the phone today with my mom, she told me about seeing a show on the Discovery Channel recently called Filthy Fortunes. The reality show revolves around a team of people who clean out extremely cluttered rooms and homes, selling the items contained to hopefully pay for the clean up and make some profit. It’s essentially the TV show Hoarders but with an emphasis on looking for some treasure in the rough.

My mom said that in the episode she watched, the crew came across a John Wilkes Booth card of some sort that they were very excited about. She said it was signed by him and apparently went for a lot of money. I decided to look into the show and see what treasure they had found.

Here’s a clip from the show that they put on social media showing the discovery of the Booth card:

As I had suspected, what the clean-up crew found was a carte-de-visite photograph of John Wilkes Booth. These are not all that rare, as Booth was a famous actor who regularly had his picture taken. While there was a temporary halt on the sale of Booth’s photographs after the assassination, when this order was rescinded, many photographers flooded the market with photos of the assassin. There are many pictures of Booth, and the pose found by the cleaners, where he is wearing his fancy jacket, is one of the most common images of him.

The host of the show was very excited because he said the photo was signed by Booth at the bottom. Now, a genuine signed CDV of John Wilkes Booth would be worth quite a lot of money. An oversized clipped signature of Booth’s sold for over $17,000 a decade ago. Unfortunately for the host, this is clearly not signed by John Wilkes Booth. The writing looks nothing like Booth’s handwriting and is in print, not cursive. This isn’t the first person to confuse a labeled image of John Wilkes Booth with a signed one; they regularly pop up on eBay and other places. There is also some random text written on the top of the card, but again, not in Booth’s hand. This writing actually detracts from the value of the otherwise average Booth CDV. On eBay, you could maybe get $100 for it.

I found the rest of the episode online and got to the point where the host was revealing to the homeowner how much money they made selling the things they found in the house. The host documented the other things they had sold from the home, including misprinted stamps, a Mustang, and a coin collection. He then stated to the homeowner:

“The item that really put us over the hump was a signed John Wilkes Booth card. We sent it to auction and they estimated that it’ll be worth $10,000.”

He then stated that with the cash sale of the other items and the auction estimation, they made $28,000 from the items in the house. The cleaning cost was $10,000, leaving $18,000 profit. This was then split between the homeowner and the cleaning crew, 60-40. The host handed over a stack of cash to the homeowner, saying it was her $10,800 share. She was, of course, ecstatic to not only have her house cleaned out but to have made $10k in the process.

But did she?

Well, let’s look and see how much that “signed” John Wilkes Booth CDV actually brought when it was sold at auction in July of 2024.

It sold for $80. Not $8,000. Not $800. $80. And, actually, that is a pretty fair price for an average Booth CDV with random writing on it. Interestingly, the auction house that sold it did not attempt to portray this as a signed CDV. The description documents that John Wilkes Booth’s name on the bottom is “(not in his hand).” We can also see that the starting price for this CDV was set at $40, hardly an amount you would start at for a priceless relic like a genuine signed Booth item. So, where in the world did the host get the estimation of $10,000?

My guess is that when they shot the end of the episode, the production company had not yet reached out to any auction house. Instead, they just looked at some recent auction prices of genuine Booth signatures and letters and made a guess. If they did reach out to a real auction house, the auctioneers must have given them the $10k valuation sight unseen. I have a hard time believing any legitimate auctioneer would have thought this photograph had a genuine signature. Even a quick Google search would show that the printed name has nothing in common with the assassin’s autograph. You have to wonder how that homeowner felt when the production company eventually informed her that she was getting less than half of what they told her on camera since their $10,000 item only sold for $80.

This Booth CDV makes an appearance in the pilot episode of Filthy Fortunes. When I was trying to find a video of the show online, I came across a few interviews the main host had with media people and YouTubers during the promotional period before the show debuted. In some of those interviews he makes mention of this great John Wilkes Booth find. But his recollections of the actual item are wildly incorrect. The biggest issue is that the host clearly does not know the difference between a picture and a playbill. Here’s an assortment of his comments on the item from different interviews:

“…the most interesting thing we found this season was a John Wilkes Booth playbill, like an actual picture of John Wilkes Booth that he signed like not too long before he shot Lincoln…”

“…it’s a play- it’s a picture, basically like a tintype, so like a Polaroid, of John Wilkes Booth. It’s dated. He signed it. Cause he was an actor at the Ford theater there in D.C. And so we found like a playbill, with John Wilkes Booth’s signature, like three months before he shot Lincoln…”

“…a John Wilkes Booth card…it’s a playbill from the Ford’s theater with a picture signed by John Wilkes Booth and it was like six months before he shot Lincoln…Let me tell you that’s worth some real money…”

“…the coolest thing for me this season was a John Wilkes Booth playbill that was signed by John Wilkes Booth at the Ford theater…When I found the John Wilkes Booth card, I was like ‘I got a guy’ [to sell it to]…”

Perplexingly, in a far more casual and expletive-laden interview the host gave to a Twitch streamer, he recounts how he sold the Booth CDV to a private individual for $40,000. I’m going to embed that video below, but I am warning everyone that there is a lot of cursing throughout (because that’s how you get in cool with the youths, apparently). The video should start right at the beginning of their discussion of the Booth item:

I honestly have no idea what to make of this video and the claim that the host sold the CDV for $40,000. Fraudulent and fake things sell all the time in the auction world to people who don’t know any better. I know of one eBay seller who regularly has CDVs of Booth, the other Lincoln conspirators, and other famous people for sale that are terrible forgeries made by putting a modern printed picture in between two halves of genuine portrait or vignette-style CDVs with the original images removed. I highly doubt the Filthy Fortunes host acted in a malicious way like that. It’s far more likely that he truly thought he had a genuine signed Booth CDV when he found it because he doesn’t have the expertise to know the difference. His confusion over what a playbill looks like demonstrates that this area is not his forte.

In the end, all I can do is point to the auction listing showing that this labeled but not signed John Wilkes Booth image sold for $80. If the host actually sold it for $40,000 to a private individual, then he made the deal of a lifetime off of a real fool who didn’t do any due diligence. But I suspect that all of this story is bluster, intended to make the show seem more exciting by having an item appear far more valuable than it is. To borrow a phrase the youths on Twitch will understand, “it’s cap, fam.” (For my fellow non-Gen Zers, “cap” apparently means “a lie.”)

The lesson here is, as always, don’t believe what you see on “reality TV.”

Thanks, Mom, for giving me something to gripe about on the internet.