When Donald J. Trump appeared at Sneaker Con in Philadelphia over the weekend to promote his limited edition line of gold high-tops, there were plenty of boos from the crowd, but not a boo from Roman Schaaf. There was no.
Scharf, a watch dealer known for his tangerine-sized selection of Audemars Piguets and Patek Philippe watches, ended up buying the signed Never Surrender sneakers after bidding for $9,000 in an auction held on the app Whatnot that day. did. .
“It's still new. It smells like glue,” Scharf said Friday morning, holding the shoe up to his face and sniffing it.
Above each ankle was an American flag of sorts, consisting of red and black lines and a blue box filled with twinkling stars and stripes. A T was embossed on the tongue and on the side. The former president's signature appeared in dark black ink on the glossy right toe box.
Flaunting his prize, Mr. Schaaf stood on the second floor of the small building that is the headquarters of his company, Luxury Bazaar, in Southampton, Pennsylvania. The space looked like a safe, except for the shell of a 2019 F1 car, which acts as a kind of sculpture.
Behind him is an office filled with vintage Louis Vuitton trunks, old cassette tapes by Jay-Z, Whitney Houston, 2 Live Crew and more, and an orange Pelican case containing 20 watches. He said they have a total value of about $3 million.
Schaaf wore blue Nike was.
He ended up at the club after proudly posting about the SneakerCon acquisition on his social media channels, where he has hundreds of thousands of followers. Trump then invited them to lunch. So Scharf hopped on a plane and headed to the golf club with his 20-year-old son Marcus Scharf, who lives in Miami and runs luxury sneaker and streetwear boutique HYP Miami.
Mr. Scharf had Caesar salad and chicken noodle soup. Trump munched on his trademark hamburger and fries. After lunch, Schaaf's rabbi sent him a text message asking if they had discussed the situation in Israel, but no such luck.
“It was like talking to a friend,” Schaaf said. “It was a normal conversation and there was no agenda.”
A significant number of Schaaf's hundreds of thousands of followers on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok had a different reaction. They said they were unsubscribing from Schaaf's feed as a result of his support for Trump. Some of the online outrage was sparked by a Daily Mail article about Mr. Scharf's sneaker purchases that described him as a “Russian oligarchy” prone to “MAGA mania.”
Mr. Scharf has publicly stated that he is not concerned about the criticism. “I do social media,” he said. “I'm used to haters.”
He added that his job is to feed people who have money. And many of those people were Republicans, and he was happy to see them profess their loyalty to Trump. But Schaaf had a few things he wanted to clarify, including that he is Ukrainian, not Russian.
He was 13 years old when he came to the United States with his stepmother, sister and father in 1988, three years before Ukraine separated from the Soviet Union and became an independent state.
“He had $4 in his pocket,” Schaaf said of his father.
The family moved to Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, where they lived in a small apartment in one of Fred Trump's buildings. His father got a job at a company welding store canopies and worked as a waiter on weekends. His stepmother was an accountant.
After high school, Mr. Scharf served in the U.S. Army from 1993 to 1996. Records show he was stationed at Camp Pelham, South Korea, and then moved to Fort Knox, Kentucky.
From there, he spent two years at Penn State University before heading to the Philadelphia area, where he attended computer programming school. He then took a job at HealthPartners Inc., an insurance company. When his annual income exceeded $50,000, he had enough money to pretend to be wealthy.
“I leased a BMW 3 Series and got a Rolex Datejust for $1,000,” he said. “He came into the room before me.”
Mr. Scharf held out his arm and appeared to be showing off his Rolex. The watch dangling from his wrist is his vintage yellow gold Patek Philippe Nautilus sports watch, which costs more or less 200 times his price.
By the late 1990s, he was working at Deutsche Bank, working in infrastructure support. On the side, he started selling watches on his eBay. His side business took off and in 2006 he founded Luxury Bazaar. Currently, he has 30 employees and two offices, one in Southampton, Pennsylvania, and one in Hong Kong. He lives in the Philadelphia suburbs with his wife, Anna Scharf, and their two young children.
Schaaf said he firmly opposes Russia's invasion of Ukraine. “I don't even understand his goals,” he said of President Vladimir V. Putin. He added that he believes Trump is the “only president” who can end the war by holding talks between the two countries and reaching an agreement.
“I am a strong supporter of the First Amendment and the right to bear arms,” Schaaf said. “I also believe in same-sex marriage and abortion rights, within limits.”
“Everyone is green to me,” he continued, recalling a saying from his Army days. “That's what we're taught in the military because we all wear the same color uniform. What I don't want to see is division. We're one people under one flag.”
Although he only had two pairs of shoes. One on each of his feet.
