When and where
The wall will be sold in a live webcast auction May 25, at 4:30 p.m. Bids may be made in person at Town Center Park outside Suwanee City Hall, or by registering to bid online at www.auctionEbid.com. Online bidders may place a pre-bid, and will be able to bid in real time through an online interface.
A piece of Cold War history hits the public trading block next week, when an 8,000-pound section of the Berlin Wall goes up for auction May 25 as part of a liquidation to reimburse victims of a Ponzi scheme busted up by federal investigators last year.
The 12-foot-high chunk of historic concrete is currently on display in front of Suwanee City Hall. It was previously owned by Benjamin Daniel DeHaan, who pleaded guilty earlier this year to defrauding clients of his company, Lighthouse Financial Partners.
Prosecutors say DeHaan used at least $7.3 million of his clients’ money to buy things like a house and a stake in a Nashville restaurant.
Greg Hays, the court-appointed receiver of DeHaan’s property, said the wall is the last item to be auctioned off. The sale of DeHaan’s other property raised about $1 million for his victims, Hays said, and he’s not sure how much the wall will fetch.
Hays said the piece was encased in a wooden create and kept in a storage unit when he took possession.
“It was hard to tell what it is,” Hays said. “We needed to get it out and displayed someplace.”
That turned out to be Town Center Park in front of Suwanee City Hall, where it’s been since late April.
Auctioneer Jeb Howell said it will be a bit of a fishing expedition to determine where to start the auction. He said it could be $1,000 or $50,000.
“It doesn’t matter as much where we start as where we end,” Howell said. “Most things we auction are fairly well (known) — there are comparable sales, and we pretty well know when we go into it what the price range is. This one is unique.
“To our knowledge, there hasn’t been an auction with a significant portion of the Berlin Wall.”
Hays said most pieces of the wall were sold privately to foundations or museums.
“This is the first chance, that we’re aware of, where any member of the public can buy this thing without any set price,” he said.
The wall was built in 1961, ostensibly to keep western influences out of East Berlin. In practice, it kept the population under Communist rule from defecting to the west. Most of the wall was torn down in 1989.
On the piece being auctioned, the side that faced East Berlin is mostly clean and devoid of graffiti except for a few squibs of red paint. The western side features a mural depicting three buildings, an American flag and a silhouetted figure with his arms outstretched to the sky.
The piece has a certificate of authenticity after tests on the concrete and rebar came back as consistent with those used in Germany in the early 1960s. The mural is also consistent with the type of graffiti that covered nearly all of the western side.
Howell said the new owner will be responsible for moving the piece. It took a crane to move it out of storage and put it in the park.
“It’s not the sort of thing you can just tip over in your pickup truck,” Hays said.
There would be one easy solution to that problem, said Suwanee spokeswoman Lynne DeWilde.
“We’d love it if somebody in the community would purchase it and donate it back to the city,” DeWilde said. “That’d be great. We’ll be sad to see it go.”
DeWilde said the city can’t afford to participate in the auction.
“Our public arts program is funded through private donations,” she said, “and we don’t have those kinds of funds.”
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