Spent the last few days digging into the 1987 Terrorist Attack set. Almost nothing in the popular version of the story holds up against primary sources, and the actual story is much more interesting.
A few things I learned:
The "Piedmont Candy Co. of Detroit" printed on the wrappers was a fake company. The real creator was Charles Mandel of Sports Design Products in Hazel Park, Michigan. He used the cover name partly to keep his real address off the cards.
In a 1987 interview Mandel called himself a "rabid American right-winger" and said he sent free sets to Reagan, George Shultz, and Oliver North. He reportedly told reporters he didn't really care if the cards made money.
The set was never banned. Kurt Kuersteiner's 2006 piece for The Wrapper magazine specifically calls the supposed backlash "more of a tempest in a teapot." The cards quietly sold through normal hobby channels and were never reprinted because there was just one print run.
The set includes Hitler and Mussolini (state actors with uniformed militaries, not really terrorists by any standard definition) and Charles Manson (cult leader and convicted murderer, also not a terrorist). The working definition was extremely loose.
The most genuinely eerie part: cards in the set imagined nuclear, poison gas, and car bomb attacks on New York City, the Statue of Liberty, and domestic nuclear power plants. This was 14 years before 9/11.
Anyone here actually own a sealed box or pack? Curious what the live market looks like for sealed material since complete loose sets are pretty cheap.