But the rings were not gifts, for Brady’s son or anyone else. Instead, Spina planned to sell the rings engraved with the name “Brady” at a steep profit, prosecutors said.
On Monday, Spina, 25, was sentenced to three years in federal prison for the scheme and ordered to pay restitution to the former Patriots player who sold him his Super Bowl ring and other items from his college career. In February, Spina pleaded guilty in the US District Court for the Central District of California to one count of mail fraud, one count of aggravated identity theft and three counts of wire fraud. While Spina lived in and ran his sports memorabilia company from New Jersey, one of the buyers he duped lived in Orange County, Calif.
“Mr. Spina’s unsportsmanlike conduct caused a $63,000 loss for the victim and resulted in himself receiving a penalty of three years in federal prison,” Ciaran McEvoy, spokesperson for the US attorney’s office in Los Angeles, told The Washington Post in an email.
Spina’s attorney, Thomas Ambrosio, did not respond to a request for comment. But in a memo in which he argued that his client should get the minimum sentence of two years plus one day, Ambrosio said Spina’s arrest led him to focus on “changing his behavior so that he avoids making the same mistakes that he made as an 18 – and 19-year-old misguided youngster.”
“The chances of him being a recidivist are slim to none,” Ambrosio added.
The groundwork for Spina’s scheme started on Feb. 5, 2017, when less than three minutes remained in the third quarter of Super Bowl LI. The Patriots, who had been clobbered 28-3 by the Atlanta Falcons up to that point, spent the next 16 minutes mounting the largest comeback in Super Bowl history to tie the game with less than a minute left in regulation. In overtime, the Patriots scored a walk-off touchdown to win the game, 34-28.
The Patriots’ prize: an NFL championship and a Super Bowl ring to prove it. The ring bore depictions of five Vince Lombardi trophies made of diamonds, a nod to the five titles the franchise had won at that point. Engraved on the inside of the band: “GREATEST COMEBACK EVER.”
A member of that championship squad, identified as TJ in court documents, received his ring in late July 2017. About two months later, TJ, who had since left the Patriots, contacted Spina, a New Jersey sports memorabilia dealer he had met when he was a college football player, and, looking to raise some cash, agreed to sell his Super Bowl ring and several others from his college playing days for $32,000 outright or a percentage of what they sold for at auction, according to court documents. Spina flew from New Jersey to Georgia with his girlfriend and met TJ at a gas station to complete the deal, prosecutors said.
Spina gave the former player a check, which later bounced.
TJ’s championship ring came in a commemorative box from Jostens, the memorabilia company contracted to make rings for Super Bowl LI, Ambrosio wrote in court documents. Inside, Spina found the website address along with a username and password that Jostens had given to TJ so he could buy up to three “family and friends” Super Bowl rings, which, aside from being 10 percent smaller, were nearly identical to the one he’d been awarded as a player, Ambrosio wrote.
“When Mr. Spina realized that TJ had given him a username and password to purchase three ‘family’ rings when Mr. Spina’s knowledge of sports memorabilia got him into trouble,” Ambrosio said in court documents.
Spina knew memorabilia tied to Brady would sell for more than anything associated with TJ So he called Jostens, pretended to be TJ and bought three family rings for about $32,000, prosecutors said. He got Jostens to engrave “Brady” on the rings by posing as an NFL player and also lying about what he planned to do with them, according to court records. He said he was giving the rings as a gift to Brady’s baby son. (Brady has three children. The youngest, his daughter, was born in December 2012 and would have been a few months from turning 5 when Spina contacted Jostens.)
As he ironed out the details of ordering the “Brady” rings with the memorabilia company, Spina was lining up a buyer — a “well-known” player in the world of championship rings in Orange County, Calif., prosecutors allege. Again, he lied, court records state. Spina told someone identified as SW in court documents that Brady had ordered the rings as gifts for his own nephews, which led SW to strike a deal — he’d pay $81,500 for all three. He locked down the deal with a $6,500 deposit.
When SW became suspicious and backed out, Spina sold the rings to a sports memorabilia dealer in New Jersey for $100,000, Ambrosio wrote. The dealer, Goldin Auctions kept two and auctioned off the third for more than $300,000, even after Brady’s representatives pushed them to drop advertising that claimed the ring was connected to the quarterback, according to the defense attorney. Goldin said that, after learning about the true origin of the ring, he refunded the winning bidder.
When he was charged in December, Spina had just finished serving a nearly three-year sentence for another wire fraud case tied to his sports memorabilia business. According to his lawyer, he was released to a halfway house in November 2020. He was released on supervised probation four months later.
After getting out, he has worked for his girlfriend as the manager of her eyelash salon business in New Jersey. In May, he proposed to her, part of what his lawyer said is Spina’s new life as “a model of rehabilitation” — one he plans to continue when he gets out of prison.
“She will be waiting for him to return from prison so that they can start a family,” Ambrosio wrote in court documents, “and finally put his criminal past behind him, this time for good.”