Auction

A nonprofit corporation headed by an East Baltimore bishop filed a bankruptcy petition yesterday, halting the scheduled foreclosure sale of a low-income apartment building it owns moments before the auction was to begin. The auction of the 102-unit Berea Apostolic Apartments in Berea, sought by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development because of the owner's failure to maintain adequate funds to make needed repairs on the federally subsidized property, had drawn 18 bidders to the steps of the Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse downtown, 11 of them from out of state.

Jay Brousseau can still feel the indignation - the horror - of his first encounter with an online auction sniper. "In the last 17 seconds, this guy came out of nowhere and took the auction," says Brousseau. "I had the bid with eight minutes to go. Then he just jumped in and grabbed it away." Losing that $22 Kensington track ball was a bitter lesson, the Dallas photographer says. "It made me realize that that's the way the game is played, but it makes the whole thing a pain in the butt.

The latest buyer of a Southwest Baltimore property planned for a retirement community for deaf seniors has failed to come through with the money he bid at an auction, further delaying a project that has been trouble-ridden almost since its inception. James R. Macfadden, owner of a Silver Spring computer business, bid $4.67 million in November for Wyndholme Village, a 24-acre property on which developers have been trying to build a specialized-living community since 1995. Macfadden submitted a $125,000 deposit and was to have paid the rest of the money earlier this month.

The leftovers from crime-fighting in the state capital are for sale - a hodgepodge of the seized, the stolen, the run-down and the lost and found. This includes a 1994 Crown Victoria with a citrus air-freshener on the rearview mirror, an abandoned baby stroller with a diaper bag still attached, and a beer cooler, without the beer. It is auction time at the Annapolis City Police Department. Registration and the preview of the hundreds of items for sale begin at 9 a.m. tomorrow. Serious bidding begins at 10 a.m. with Robert H. Campbell II presiding - a natural-born auctioneer who sounds as if he has an amplifier built into his vocal cords and can say "Do I hear $200?

For nearly 70 years, Southern Maryland tobacco growers have packed up their barn-dried leaf in early spring and taken it to auction. They stacked the leaf on shallow baskets in piles that would reach a farmer's waist, sometimes higher. Growers were careful to place the baskets with their best tobacco - with the thin, cherry-red leaves- at the head of the line. The sale started with the rhythmic chant of the auctioneer in a tongue that few outsiders could understand. As the seller made his way down the long rows of tobacco, a half-dozen buyers would follow.

Instead of "bravo," the final sendoff for the Baltimore Opera Company will be an auctioneer shouting "sold." The giant Sphinx-head that once stared down on the glittery Triumphal March in Aida, the carefully detailed cathedral where Tosca sang a love duet with her painter boyfriend, the scaffold that awaited Mary, Queen of Scots - all sit wrapped up in a warehouse. They, along with hundreds of vivid costumes, props and other remnants of the company, will soon go to the highest bidder. It's a far-from-grand finale for one of the city's oldest cultural treasures.

The Carroll commissioners finalized plans yesterday to auction the former Hampstead Elementary School in November despite continued objections from town leaders who wanted the building redeveloped on their terms. Dismissing a letter from the town requesting another negotiating session, Commissioners Donald I. Dell and Robin Bartlett Frazier told county staffers they want the auction carried off as quickly as possible. "This has been going on too long," said Dell, who added that he and Frazier had repeatedly told town leaders that a decision on the building's fate was overdue.

Monica Coleman's dream was sold in dozens of pieces yesterday and carted out of a Pulaski Highway warehouse.Gone after an auction of Coleman Craten LLC's belongings were a 40-foot U-shaped mahogany bar, about 100 telephones, seven leather chairs, three leather sofas, 16 computers and an assortment of chairs, desks, tables and other computer equipment.When it was over, the auction had raised about $90,000 for the bankrupt company's creditors, a group including former employees, investors and unpaid contractors who are owed almost $6 million.

FACING A budget deficit of $153 million, the city learned recently that its auctioneer kept $744,636 in proceeds from the sale of abandoned and surplus automobiles. Some of this money has been owed the city since 1994. The total loss was closer to $1 million before the company paid $210,000 of what it owed.Auction Alliances Services Inc. of Towson has said it cannot pay more, so the city is exploring the possibility of legal action and attempting to recoup its loss by calling in the proceeds of bonds posted by the company.

After gawking at Marc Hartzman's new book, it's hard to get excited about the latest rash of "amazing" discoveries being trumpeted in the news. So what if researchers just uncovered a 7-million-year-old human skull, a 500-year-old drawing by Michelangelo and the shipwreck of JFK's fabled PT-109 boat? Such treasures pale in comparison to the artifacts unearthed by Hartzman in Found on eBay (Universe Publishing, $16.95), an encyclopedia of weird knickknacks sold on the Internet auction site.