1933 Double Eagle: The World's Most Valuable Coin (Part 2)

 

[The second installment of “1933 Double Eagle” moves the story ahead to the Sotheby’s auction of the sole gold coin of that run that was legal tender—and we’ll see how much it sold for in 2002.  (Its latest valuation will be revealed in Part 3.  Wait for it!) 

[The story of the Double Eagle up to its resurfacing in 1996 and its sale at auction in 2002 is told in Part 1 of this series.  I recommend going back to 5 June for the beginning of this saga before delving into the continuation below.  (People and facts identified only sketchily here are given in more detail in Part 1.)

[Also below are snippets of the DE story in the ‘00 decade and into the 2010s, along with some of the repercussions of the coin’s resurfacing in 1996.  Read along—and remember, if you can, that this isn’t a Dashiell Hammett mystery!] 

“PAGING SAM SPADE:
A GOLD COIN FETCHES $7.6 MILLION AT AUCTION”
by Glenn Collins 

[Glenn Collins’s “Paging Sam Spade” ran in the New York Times of 31 July 2002 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”]).  As you’ll note, Collins’s byline appears on the majority of the Times coverage of the return of the 1933 DE; there are two more of his reports below.]

The 1933 double eagle, a $20 gold piece with a mysterious history that involves a president, a king and a Secret Service sting operation, was auctioned last night [30 July 2002] for a record price for a coin, $7.59 million [$7.9 million in 2025], nearly double the previous record.

The anonymous buyer [identity revealed in Part 3], believed to be an individual collector who lives in the United States, made the winning bid in a fiercely contested nine-minute auction at Sotheby’s in Manhattan. Eight bidders were joined by 500 coin collectors and dealers in an auction-house audience seemingly devoid of celebrity bidders, while an additional 534 observers followed the bidding on eBay.

As auction houses prepare for their fall seasons in an uncertain economy, the sale price “suggests that the marketplace for important items is enormously strong,” said David Redden [1949-2024], a vice chairman at Sotheby’s, who was the auctioneer.

“This is an astonishing new record for a coin,” he said.

In an unprecedented move, the auction proceeds were split by the United States Mint and a London coin dealer, Stephen Fenton [b. ca. 1952], who had won that right in court after having been arrested by Secret Service agents for trying to sell the coin in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan in 1996.

Henrietta Holsman Fore [b. 1948], the director of the United States Mint, who witnessed the sale, said that “the moneys we receive will go toward helping to pay down the debt and to fight the war on terrorism.”

Mr. Fenton commented that the double eagle had been on “a long historic journey, with a very satisfying ending.” [The history of the 1933 double eagle didn’t actually end in 2002, as readers will see below and in Part 3.]

He added, “I am thrilled with the price.” The previous numismatic record holder was an 1804 United States silver dollar, which sold for $4.14 million in 1999 [$7.9 million in 2025].

Sotheby’s partner in the one-lot auction was Stack’s Rare Coins, with which it shared the customary 15 percent commission. “I have never seen as much interest in the sale of any coin in my 30 years in the business,” said Lawrence R. Stack [b. ca. 1952], the company’s managing director.

“This is the Mona Lisa of coins,” said Beth Deisher [b. 1946], editor of Coin World, the largest weekly coin publication, with a circulation of 85,000. “It is unique. Forbidden fruit.”

Collectors’ Web sites have seethed with speculation about the sale price, and enthusiasts even organized betting pools.

Last night, Mr. Redden took the podium for nine minutes before the gavel came down, recognizing bidders in the audience and on the telephone. The tension in the crowd was broken with a burst of applause after the $5 million mark, and a louder explosion at $6 million [$8.9 and10.7 million today].

The rumor in the crowd had been that “anything under $6 million would be a bargain,” said Ute Wartenberg [b. 1963], executive director of the American Numismatic Society in Manhattan. Most bidders dropped out after that price. The gavel sounded at $6.6 million [$11.7 million in 2025] after a Sotheby’s senior vice president, Selby Kiffer, made the final bid for the anonymous buyer on the telephone. The sale price of $6.6 million, when added to the commission, totaled $7.59 million [$13.5 million today].

The auction attendance was swelled by coin collectors who had gathered on the eve of the American Numismatic Association Convention [31 July-4 August 2002], the largest coin show of the year, expected to draw more than 10,000 people to the Marriott Marquis Hotel today. “So the auction was almost like the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the convention,” Mr. Stack said.

Ms. Fore of the mint said the high price for the coin was reached “because it is one of a kind, it is beautiful and it has a great story.”

The coin was the only 1933 double eagle that has ever been legally offered for sale, and its Maltese Falconesque history [see note in Part 1] only recently came to light, thanks to documents unearthed during the five-year legal battle over its ownership.

In 1792, it was deemed that all gold and silver United States coins would bear the depiction of an eagle [Coinage Act of April 2, 1792], but gold pieces were issued only after the [California] Gold Rush [1848-55] boom, in 1850. They were called double eagles because their face value was twice that of the original $10 gold piece [see note below].

Following the suggestion of President Theodore Roosevelt [1858-1919], the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens [1848-1907] redesigned the coin in 1907 in high-relief, forever after giving the coins the designation “saints.”

But in 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt [1882-1945] took the United States off the gold standard, and ordered all the 1933 saints already manufactured destroyed, save for two reserved for the Smithsonian Institution. They were never declared legal currency.

But presumably after being stolen by a mint employee, nine double eagles surfaced during the mid-1940’s and 1950’s. They were seized by the Secret Service and melted down. But before these coins came to light, the royal legation of Egypt turned up with one at the Department of the Treasury, and somehow got an official to issue an export license for the coin to enhance the collection of King Farouk [1920-65; reigned: 1936-52]. By the time that blunder was discovered, the coin had left the United States.

In 1954, after the king was deposed [1952], his coins were sold at auction and the double eagle vanished. It went underground until it came to Mr. Fenton in 1995. His arrest in Manhattan, after attempting to sell the coin for $1.5 million [$3.1 million in 2025], led to a court battle over whether — thanks to the Treasury’s mistaken export permission in 1944 — the coin could be legally owned.

The double eagle came close to being melted down many times. The coin once again escaped destruction when it was moved from the Treasury Department vault in 7 World Trade Center eight months before the building collapsed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Ms. Deisher said the only comparable episode of coin frenzy in recent memory was the 1999 auction, for $4.14 million, of an 1804 silver dollar, the finest of only 15 known to exist. “But the double eagle is fascinating because of all the history and the intrigue,” Ms. Deisher said. “And it is unprecedented that the United States government is vouching for its authenticity.”

The mint studied the coin microscopically and matched it with one of the original dies used to strike it, and certified its genuineness.

The record price was seen as a gift by coin collectors. “Many people believe that our great coin rarities are vastly undervalued in comparison to old master paintings,” Ms. Deisher said.

In a ceremony after the sale, Ms. Fore of the mint declared the coin the only 1933 double eagle ever to be legally issued by the United States Government. This “monetized” the coin, making it legal tender. The buyer will receive a certificate of transfer stating just that, but only after paying the auction price and a fee of $20 for the face value of the coin.

That made the sale price actually $7,590,020.

*  *  *  *
“ON VIEW FOR PUBLIC COVETING”
by Glenn Collins 

[This Collins report from the middle of the decade appeared in the New York Times of 10 January 2005 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”]).  “On View” is an account of the period the coin was displayed after the sale in 2002—though the identity of the owner, the person who bought it 30 months earlier, was still unknown.  (That identification is coming up in Part 3.)]

Out of the Vault, the World’s Most Expensive Coin Is Back on Display at the Federal Reserve

Until last week, the world’s most expensive coin was hidden in the world’s most valuable gold vault.

That is to say, in the brilliantly lighted blue-and-white stronghold of E Level, the deepest sanctuary of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the city’s bank of banks.

The coin was locked in a compartment at bedrock, 80 feet below Liberty Street in Lower Manhattan, surrounded by $90 billion worth of gold bars — some 550,000 of them — from 60 foreign institutions. That is more gold than at Fort Knox, and indeed, more than in any other repository.

This exceedingly rare United States $20 gold piece, the $7.59 million 1933 double eagle, will be placed on public display today in the ground-floor exhibition space of the Fed’s massive iron-barred neo-Florentine fortress of a building at 33 Liberty Street.

For more than a year the double eagle had been on view there in a free exhibition [16 January 2002-28 September 2012], “Drachmas, Doubloons and Dollars: The History of Money.” But in August the coin was spirited to the subbasement after a sudden Orange Alert from the Department of Homeland Security, which warned of “casing and surveillance activities” against major United States financial institutions.

For the double eagle’s return from the underworld, The New York Times was granted rare permission to enter the vault on a recent morning as the coin was transferred, after agreeing not to describe the bank’s security arrangements or print the names of its subterranean guardians.

Among those present were: three federal officers with automatic weapons. The archivist of the bank. A senior vice president of the bank. The head of the American Numismatic Society. The coin owner’s representative. The coin’s historian. A vault keeper. An auditor. A custodian. And yes, the two carpenters who actually did the work.

This, then, was the retinue monitoring the transport of the double eagle, a 34-millimeter-wide, 0.96-ounce stamped disk that is 90 percent gold and 10 percent copper. The length of the journey was but five floors: from the vault to the street-level exhibition space.

The coin-storage compartment — itself guarded by multiple locks — was adorned with a fragile paper seal, “just as I left it on Aug. 2,” said Rosemary Lazenby, the bank’s archivist. “Afterward, we kept it down here for the Republican convention [RNC, 30 August-2 September 2004, New York City], and then there was the election [2 November 2004].”

The doors swung open. The coin winked smartly in the light, along with 11 other rare specimens from the exhibition that had been mounted on a plexiglass display panel. Immediately there were inspections by Ms. Lazenby, the auditors and David Redden, a vice chairman of Sotheby’s, the auction house where the coin was sold for a record price on July 30, 2002 [see above and Part 1. He represents the coin’s still-anonymous owner whenever it is moved.

Also scrutinizing the treasures was Ute Wartenberg Kagan, executive director of the American Numismatic Society, which is the co-sponsor of the exhibition, along with the Federal Reserve.

Two carpenters, Cosimo Marolla [b. 1940] and Joseph Palus, lifted the coin into a shiny rubber-wheeled steel cart and began trundling it along the dented vault floor. (The dents are from gold bars that were inadvertently dropped by vault wranglers in the decades since the building was completed in 1924. These days, handlers wear steel-toed shoes plus $500 [ca. $820 today] magnesium shoe covers to protect feet from accidentally plummeting 27-pound ingots.)

Soon, then, members of the coin posse began watching the double eagle (and each other) as it was transported in the vault elevator up to the bank’s exhibition level.

There, Mr. Marolla and Mr. Palus buffed the inch-thick mounting panel with Precision Glass Cleaner, and hoisted the coins into the hyper-secure centerpiece vitrine in the exhibition room. The total value of the 12 rare coins within — estimated from $15 million to $25 million [$24.6-40.9 million today] — makes it, said Dr. Wartenberg Kagan, “without doubt the most valuable coin case in the world.”

An hour and a half after the vault seal was broken, the coin was reinstalled, to be displayed indefinitely. “It’s good to see it returned to its home,” Ms. Lazenby said of the double eagle, which is on long-term loan to the Fed. The $7.59 million price of the double eagle, which included a 15 percent commission to the auctioneers, “is the record for a United States coin,” said Beth Deisher, editor of Coin World, the largest weekly coin publication, in a telephone interview from her office in Ohio.

But the double eagle is on display not only because of its record price — twice the previous record for any coin — but also for its Maltese Falconesque history.

The coin’s story only recently came to light thanks to documents unearthed during a five-year legal battle over its ownership. At the suggestion of President Theodore Roosevelt, the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens designed the coin, called a double eagle because its face value was twice that of a $10 gold piece bearing the depiction of an eagle. It was first minted in 1907.

[The Saint-Gaudens double eagle, of which the 1933 coinage was one exemplar, was first issued in 1907. An earlier double eagle design by James B. Longacre (1794-1869; portraitist and engraver), called the Liberty Head, however, was minted in 1849. The eagle, half eagle, and quarter eagle, with face values of $10, $5, and $2.50, were circulated from, respectively, 1795-1933, 1795-1929, and 1796-1929.

[For the sake of comparison, in 1933, though it was never released onto the market, the DE would have had the buying power of $492 today; the first double eagle would buy $831 worth of today’s goods. The other coins’ purchasing powers, in the years of their initial issuance, would currently be equivalent to $254, $127, and $61.]

When the United States came off the gold standard in 1933, all the double eagles manufactured that year were ordered destroyed [all other, previously legal tender gold coins had to be surrendered], save for two reserved for the Smithsonian Institution [on display at the National Museum of American History in the National Numismatic Collection]. None were declared legal currency.

But presumably after being stolen by a mint employee, one of the 1933 coins was believed to have been conveyed to the legendary coin collection of King Farouk of Egypt — legally, thanks to a United States Treasury export license that had been mistakenly granted. Ultimately a 1933 double eagle came into the possession of a London dealer, who was arrested by Secret Service agents in a sting operation while trying to sell the coin in Manhattan in 1996 [see above and Part 1].

A bitter court battle — over whether the coin could be legally owned, thanks to the Treasury’s export-license blunder — was at last resolved in a compromise when the mint declared the coin to be the only 1933 double eagle ever to be legally issued by the United States [25 January 2001]. The proceeds from its auction were then split between the dealer [Fenton] and the government.

There may be other 1933 double eagles that have never come to light, said David Tripp [b. 1951], a rare-coin consultant who wrote the original Sotheby’s exhibition catalogue as well as the definitive history of the coin, “Illegal Tender: Gold, Greed and the Mystery of the Lost 1933 Double Eagle” (Free Press, 2004). But the one on display at the Federal Reserve “is the only one that is legal to own,” said Mr. Tripp, who was present at the bank during the unsealing.

Coin-collecting gossips have ceaselessly speculated about the identity of the double eagle owner, nicknamed Mr. Big by auction buffs.

“We know of no one in the coin world that the owner has talked with,” said Ms. Deisher. “We have put out teasers to the owner that we’d love to interview him or her, but we haven’t been contacted.”

By permitting the coin to be publicly displayed, Ms. Deisher said, “clearly the owner is generous and thoughtful, and has a sense of history and wants to share it with the public.” But it is also smart of the owner to entrust the coin’s security to the full might of the federal government, she said. The closest anyone has come to making off with gold from the New York Fed were the fictional villains in the 1995 action film “Die Hard With a Vengeance.” They were, naturally, foiled by Bruce Willis.

“If the double eagle is the Mona Lisa of coins,” Ms. Deisher added, “then the analogy is public display in the Louvre. That keeps the painting before the public eye, and helps give it the value that it has.”

*  *  *  *
“IN THIS CASE, ALL THAT GLITTERS IS GOLD.
JUST DON’T CALL THEM COINS”
by Glenn Collins 

[Collins’s follow-up report on the on-going tale of the 1933 Double Eagle coin ran in the New York Times on 12 August 2005 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”]).  The article was also posted on the Times website as “They’re Gold, but Don’t Call Them Coins.”]

The United States Mint announced yesterday [11 August 2005] that it had recovered 10 more of its fabled 1933 double eagle $20 gold pieces and stored them in Fort Knox. But the family that sought to authenticate them at the Mint claims that the government had no right to take them.

Beth Deisher, the editor of Coin World, said that “it has been rumored for years that more of these coins were being held by private citizens.” The Mint’s announcement on its Web site caused a sensation in coin circles yesterday.

A 1933 double eagle that surfaced in 1996 is on exhibition at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, at 33 Liberty Street in Manhattan. The Treasury declared it a coin as part of a legal settlement, and in 2002 it was sold at Sotheby’s for $7.59 million — the most ever publicly paid for a coin. The anonymous buyer has lent it for display.

“We are pleased that these 10 double eagles have been recovered,” David Lebryk, the Mint’s acting director, said in the statement. “These double eagles were never lawfully issued, but instead, were taken from the United States Mint at Philadelphia in an unlawful manner more than 70 years ago. They are, and always have been, public property belonging to the United States.”

The Mint said that the Treasury would not declare them legal coins, or auction them. They came to light last September when, the Mint said, the government was approached by a lawyer for the family of a Philadelphia jeweler.

The lawyer, Barry H. Berke of Manhattan, said the gold pieces were “voluntarily” revealed to the government by Joan Langbord [b. 1930; salesperson in her father’s jewelry store, I. Switt], the daughter of the jeweler, Israel Switt [1895-1990; Philadelphia jeweler and coin collector], who died in the early 1980’s [sic]. He added: “The Mint has responded to their good-faith efforts to amicably resolve any issues relating to their coins by seeking to keep the coins. The Langbord family fully expects that their coins will be returned to them so they can be freely traded like every other numismatic treasure with a colorful history. I expect that if they are not returned there will be litigation.”

When the United States came off the gold standard in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the destruction of all but two of the pieces — called double eagles because they were twice the value of a $10 eagle gold piece. But some left the Mint under murky circumstances that are still debated; any that have turned up have been claimed by the Secret Service. Mr. Berke said that the government had never established that the pieces were stolen.

In 2002, “the Mint guaranteed that no other double eagles would be monetized, and that none other could be sold,” said Ute Wartenberg Kagan, executive director of the American Numismatic Society, so this discovery would not lower the value of the Sotheby’s coin.

“This notoriety might tend to increase the value of the coin,” said David Tripp, the author of “Illegal Tender: Gold, Greed and the Mystery of the Lost 1933 Double Eagle.”

Of the possibility of a lawsuit, Dr. Wartenberg Kagan said: “The family has to come up with an argument about why United States law doesn’t apply in this case, since the government holds that these coins cannot be legally owned.”

*  *  *  *
“FAMILY BATTLES U.S. OVER 10 COINS WORTH MILLIONS”
by John Schwartz 

[John Schwartz’s continuation of the Langdorne family’s double eagle story was reported in the New York Times of 9 July 2011 (Sec. A [news]), on a page entitled “National”).  It was also posted on the Times website on 8 July.]

PHILADELPHIA — Who owns 10 exceedingly rare American gold coins from 1933?

Is it the family of a local gold dealer who died 21 years ago? Or is it the United States government, which produced a half million of the coins before melting all of them — well, almost all of them — down?

Family members, who say they found the coins in a safe deposit box in 2003, argue they are the rightful owners of the exquisite “double eagle” $20 coins, each now worth millions of dollars. The government argues that the coins, never officially released, belong to the United States, and not the heirs of Israel Switt, the gold dealer.

And so to court.

In a case that began on Thursday [7 July 2011, jurors are getting an unusual lesson in Depression-era history, and will ultimately decide whether Mr. Switt was merely “colorful,” as a lawyer for the family described him, or a thief.

Each side explained in opening arguments that, for all of the history and complexities of 1930s Mint procedures and records to come, the case is quite simple. They disagreed, however, about what the simple point of the case was.

Assistant United States Attorney Jacqueline Romero [b. 1970/71], presenting the government’s case, told jurors, “You are going to hear a remarkable and intriguing story about gold coins that were stolen from the U.S. Mint.”

“Israel Switt was somehow involved” in the theft, she said, probably with the help of a corrupt cashier at the Philadelphia Mint. The government had linked Mr. Switt to every double eagle that had emerged over the decades, she said, including 10 tracked down in the 1940s and one sold with the agreement of the government by a dealer, Stephen Fenton, in 2002 for $7.6 million. That sale was based on a government mistake, she said; these coins would not get the same dispensation.

The government will prove, she pledged, that the heirs knew that the goods were not legitimately theirs, and so the jury should return the coins “to their rightful owner, the people of the United States of America.”

Barry Berke, a lawyer arguing on behalf of Mr. Switt’s heirs, the Langbord family, told the jury that the case was, simply, about power and government overreach. Washington should not be able to seize property from citizens “unless it can prove it is entitled to — and not just powerful enough to take it,” he said.

He called the government’s case an attempt to “rewrite history,” and promised to present alternate explanations for treasured coins coming legitimately into the Langbords’ hands: the mint commonly exchanged coins for gold, he said, and the cashier of the mint kept an “open bag” of 1933 double eagles near his desk.

How did the coins get out? Gloriously designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the 1933 double eagles were never officially distributed. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, trying to stop a bank panic and to stem hoarding, issued an executive order that made owning large amounts of gold bullion and coins illegal. So while nearly a half million were made, all but two, sent to the Smithsonian, were supposed to have been reduced to bullion.

But in 2004, Joan Langbord, Mr. Switt’s daughter, and her sons [Roy (b. ca. 1952), an entertainment lawyer in New York City, and David Langbord (1955-2023), owner of Computer Discounters in Virginia Beach, Virginia] contacted the United States Mint to say they had discovered the 10 coins tucked away in a safe deposit box, within a folded Wanamaker’s department store bag, and asked for help in authenticating them. Instead, the government seized the double eagles — an eagle was a $10 piece, a half eagle a $5 — saying that since they had never been circulated, they must have been stolen. The Langbords sued to get them back.

In 2009, Judge Legrome D. Davis [b. 1952] of Federal District Court, said that the government could not simply assume the coins were government property, and would have the burden of proving the facts in court. While the government has the burden of proof, this is not a criminal case in which guilt must be established beyond a reasonable doubt. It must convince jurors only that a preponderance of the evidence supports its case.

In a tough pair of detailed orders issued just before trial, Judge Davis stated flatly that some of the evidence could allow jurors to infer that the coins were stolen and that the family knew it and concealed them. He noted somewhat acerbically in a footnote that the safe deposit box in which Ms. Langbord “claims to have discovered” the coins had been opened by her in 2002, “the day before the Fenton coin was sold at auction.” [The 2002 auction was held on 30 July; see Part 1.]

Even if the jury decides in favor of the Langbords, Judge Davis could still declare the government the rightful owner. That possibility worries coin collectors, said Armen Vartian, a lawyer who filed briefs in the case on behalf of the Professional Numismatics Guild [association of rare coin dealers]. “The government cannot just go around saying, ‘You have this. We think it’s ours. Give it back,’” he said. Having looked at the evidence against the Langbords, he said, “At best, it’s inconclusive,” and added, “You would think that the government has better things to do.”

In the courtroom, jury selection took much of the first day. The process, as usual, was grindingly slow, but had its moments. Judge Davis, a large man with a sonorous voice who tips back so far in his chair that sometimes only his head is visible over the desk, asked a potential juror whether the fact that her husband collected coins would influence her. Did she share his hobby?

“I don’t collect coins,” she said. “I spend them.”

She was seated.

[John Schwartz is a former science writer for the New York Times, who focused on climate change.  In two decades at the Times, beginning in 2000, Schwartz covered law, technology, the space program, infrastructure, and more.  His work also appeared occasionally in the Times Book Review, “Science Times,” and the “Arts” section.  He also wrote a humor column for the business section’s mutual funds quarterly.

 [With Part 2 of “1933 Double Eagle: The World’s Most Valuable Coin,” we’ve taken the saga into the 21st century’s second decade.  (It started in the fourth decade of the 20th century, though I only picked it up in 2002.)  Part 3, which will be out on Wednesday, 11 June, will pick up a couple of years later and move into the third decade.  Please log onto Rick On Theater then and see where the DE’s journey ends . . . for now.]