iPhone Savior: Tony Soprano Is Selling His Rare Apple Logo Art

In 1983, Steve Jobs commissioned artist Myra Burg to hand-craft 25 Apple rainbow logo wall-hangings for the company's gift catalog. In a recent interview with Ms. Burg — I discovered that she actually produced 27 of those limited edition works of art. Twenty five were listed in Apple's catalog for $350 each — Myra then made an additional one as a gift for Steve Jobs and another one for Steve Wozniak.

New York native Donald Metzger, who worked for two years as a Tony Soprano photo-double for James Gandolfini in the epic HBO TV series The Sopranos, just happens to own one of those rare original Apple wall-hangings and he's putting it up for sale.

While it's unclear if Steve Wozniak still owns his piece, the wall-hanging made for Jobs was left behind in his Woodside mansion — as documented in a photo I spotted about a month before the home was demolished last year.

When Metzger recently contacted Myra Burg about his Apple art, he had no clue that his signed wall-hanging was a limited edition. Until Metzger located Burg through her online gallery, he believed the piece was some mass-produced item shipped out to Apple resellers back in 1983.

"I decided to put a feeler out there to see what it might be worth," said Metzger about the wall-hanging. "I saw Myra Burg's name on the piece so I did a Google search and I called her up."

"She flipped out! I had no idea there were only 27 of these — my mind was blown right out of the sockets. I thought Apple had sent these out to all their dealers in 1983."

Mr. Metzger worked at a computer store in Manhattan when the rug first arrived inside a plain cardboard box almost 30 years ago. He has worked in the PC business since 1980, but it was his uncanny resemblance to James Gandolfini that landed him work on The Sopranos for the final two seasons of the show, after winning a Sopranos look-alike contest hosted by HBO.

"My work on the show was primarily doing the driving scenes where you’d see Tony’s Cadillac Escalade going by the screen quickly enough where you wouldn’t have seen him close-up." said Metzger.

"The first episode of the final season I was in all of the driving scenes around Greenwood Lake, New York," Metzger added. "There were other episodes where Tony was a passenger, like in Christopher Moltisanti's SUV just before the roll over accident when he met his demise.”

But before Metzger found his touch of fame as a Tony Soprano look-alike, he worked as a computer consultant specializing in data base applications. It was that same work which placed him at the center of the gruesome aftermath following New York's 9/11 tragedy.

"The day after 9/11, I was hired as part of the World Trade Center Disaster team at the New York City Medical Examiner's Office as co-designer and developer of the computer system used to catalogue over 20,000 bodies and body parts recovered from the World Trade Center site."

"I worked for three years on that system which included the Remains inventory, identification tracking, the Reported Missing list, DNA identification and generation of the daily up to date causality numbers furnished to the media." Don added.

Thanks to Donald Metzger, the fantastical tale surrounding Apple's branded wall-hanging that began for me late last year when I first reached out to Myra Burg, has become an even more bizarre story by several leaps and bounds. Not only does Don still own an iconic piece of original Apple art, it's been kept in beautiful condition — looking like it just dropped out of Apple's 1983 gift catalog two weeks ago

I consider this collectible piece of Apple history to be priceless, but Don Metzger hopes to sell it for a price that even Tony Soprano might consider a bit hefty. Let's just say that any offer south of twenty large ($20k) won't command Don's attention.

"I'd really rather not sell it," says Metzger, "But I'm willing to listen if someone makes me an offer I can’t refuse."