He’s gotta catch ’em all — again.
A California toymaker who lost $4.5 million Pokémon cards in the Palisades Fire last year is rebuilding his collection of priceless collectables again — as he helps his neighbors rebuild their homes.
Jeremy Padader’s million-dollar menagerie took years to curate and made the 52-year-old a mentor to influencer Logan Paul, who has built his own formidable cache.
“You can’t imagine the remarkable treasures that were gone forever,” said Padawer, president of Jazwares, whose products include Squishmallows, Pokémon and “Star Wars” merch.
Padawer is also one of the organizers of They Let Us Burn, a group that’s aiming to hold Mayor Karen Bass and other officials accountable for the mismanagement and neglect they say precipitated the fires, which destroyed around 7,000 homes in Palisades and nearly 10,000 more in other parts of Los Angeles County in January 2025.
Padawer and his allies have spent more than a year fighting for streamlined inspection and permitting processes, sales tax exemptions on building materials, and other critical policies to help residents return to the Palisades, which is still mostly a ghost town.
But no insurance check can bring back the artifacts and heirlooms of generations of artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers who called the iconic neighborhood home.
“I don’t believe the reality of the losses ever entirely hit the zeitgeist,” Padawer said.
Padawer’s Pokémon collection included a pristine first-edition set of the trading card game, one of only 10 in existence.
He also lost signed sports memorabilia, cartoons by “Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz, a sealed iPhone 1, and early prototypes of his best-selling toys — around $7.5 million in total losses, which insurance only covered a third of, Padawer said.
Padawer’s neighbor, a third-generation writer, lost a collection of first-edition books and original manuscripts.
The fire torched around 100,000 original scores and parts from groundbreaking composer Arnold Schoenberg, his son told the New York Times.
Famous former Palisades High School tennis coach Bud Kling, 79, lost his world-famous collection of Olympic memorabilia that he spent 47 years amassing.
“It was such a shock that it was all just gone. It’s final. It’s gone. You’re never going to get it back,” Kling lamented to The Post.
Padawer said the loss of his cherished collectables first made him angry, but hearing dozens of similar stories from his friends and neighbors inspired him to act.
“I noticed how much pain there was, not just in the Palisades community but also in Altadena and other areas in the burn scar. That’s when I went into advocacy mode.”
A card collection might seem trivial compared to great manuscripts and paintings, but Pokémon — which Padawer called a “granddaddy” of kids’ collecting — has helped define whole generations.
The cards have consequently skyrocketed in value.
In 2021, Padawer flew to Dubai to broker Logan Paul’s purchase of the most expensive Pokémon card ever sold — a special edition Pikachu Illustrator card from 1998.
Paul flipped the card this year for $16.49 million — more than three times what he originally paid for it.
Padawer said he will not try to reconstruct his own Pokémon collection.
“Paying multiples of what I had paid before would have been a gut punch. It’s a tough thing for a collector. And also revisiting that moment was just something I didn’t want to do,’’ he said.
But he hasn’t stopped collecting other oldies but goodies.
The latest additions to his post-fire collection are Weekly Shōnen Jump magazines featuring the first chapters of “Dragon Ball” and “One Piece” — both of which later began meg-hit anime shows.
He purchased both last week with Paul.
The Dragon Ball was the most expensive manga comic ever sold, going for $550,000. The One Piece went for “hundreds of thousands,” though Padawer isn’t disclosing the exact price.
Both are currently safe in a vault, “where no fire can reach,’’ he said.
Read the full article here
