Article: SI.com's From Rapper To Baseball Collector, The Wild Tale Of Peter Nash

Wow, I knew that Pete Nice was no longer rapping or involved with the music business and had moved on to things like writing and his enormous baseball hobby, but I had no idea he was having this tough of a time out there...

In this article by Benjamin Wallace for SI.com Hip-Hoppers are updated on the somewhat sad and regrettable path that the Prime minister AKA Peter Nash has embarked upon while delving deep into the seedy and unreliable world of baseball memorabilia dealing and auctioning. Once known as the Ivy league educated member of 3rd Bass, Nash has gone from relatively successful writer and respected baseball historian to a man who's lakeside property in Cooperstown (home of the Baseball Hall Of Fame) Ohio is being foreclosed on and someone the police have issued an arrest warrant for...

Also highlighted is he on-going legal feud Nash has been embroiled in with another memorabilia dealer and auction house owner Rob Lifson.

Damn Pete....

-BIG D O

Peter Nash struts around a Hollywood soundstage, brandishing a silver-knobbed cane and spitting acid rhymes. "Getting paid to peddle sneakers and soda pop," he raps. "The thin ice you skate upon will break and set ya straight." In his boxy suit and slicked-back hair, Nash, 24, has a vaguely thuggish demeanor at odds with his Ivy League bachelor's degree in English. To his fans he is Prime Minister Pete Nice, of the interracial rap trio 3rd Bass. It is 1991, and the group is on The Arsenio Hall Show performing its biggest hit, the No. 1 rap single Pop Goes the Weasel. It's an extended verbal beat down of white rapper Vanilla Ice, whom it reviles as a culture thief, and it has helped pay for Nash's tinted-window Mercedes and his penthouse apartment in New York City. "Ya boosted the record, then ya looped it, ya looped it," Nash raps, "but now you're getting sued kinda stoopid."

Eighteen years later Nash sits in a café in lower Manhattan. At 42 he wears cuffed khaki pants and a short-sleeved button-down cotton shirt. He lives in a rental home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., with his wife and young son, and he has driven a sensible Honda SUV to this meeting. Since his moment of fame as a rapper for Def Jam Records, Nash has achieved a markedly different kind of renown -- among hard-core baseball memorabilia collectors who wouldn't know Def Jam from Def Leppard. Over the past two decades Nash has become known as the most prolific source of the rarest old-school material, especially from the 19th century.

But on this afternoon in late July the tough-guy rapper turned baseball historian is mired in a widening scandal over the holiest relics of America's pastime. Nash recently lost a lawsuit against a leading memorabilia auctioneer in which he admitted to fraud, and, according to sources, the FBI is investigating whether he sold forged memorabilia. (Nash declined to comment on the investigation.)

Even so, he retains some of the old Prime Minister's swagger, seemingly confident that he has turned the tables on his antagonist. He riffles through a fat case stuffed with files of evidence he says he has compiled, and tells stories about innocently buying memorabilia that turned out not to be authentic. "In the baseball field, you have to question pretty much every single thing that's out there," he says. "It's like the Wild West."

Read the rest here:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/the_bonus/12/09/nash/index.html