This article from the Huffington Post made me curious. In that case, the coins in question are gold double eagles. They were never released as currency and all but a few were destroyed before ever leaving the mint. The few that did make it out did so by “extra-legal” channels. The US government has been resolute over the years in tracking down and, until recently, destroying these coins.
Reading about the double eagles led me to the 1974 Aluminum Cent. Here, the mint basically passed out “free sample” aluminum pennies to politicians trying to build support for switching over to that material. The change wasn’t made, the government decided they wanted the samples back, and hilarity ensued. The Effa-Bee-Eye themselves even got involved in tracking down stray aluminum pennies.
My question is: Why do they bother? In the case of the double eagles, I can see the point that the coins were stolen and there is a some value of gold involved. I’d bet, though, they spent more recovering coins over the years than the gold was worth. The pennies? What was the point ever?
With the double eagles, one reason for all the hoo-rah was national security. The treasury had never released the coins, and at the time when a few turned up in private hands, there was a war on. If coins could get out of the treasury without having been released, there were leaks that needed to be plugged. It was never really about the value of the gold, it was about making sure Johnny Foreigner wasn’t mucking about with our currency.
The plugging leaks makes sense, but why go to all the trouble to recover them and then destroy them? After the leaks were plugged, what did a few gold coins circulating among wealthy collectors matter?
They went to great lengths to print HAWAII on bills to be circulated in Hawaii during the war just in case those bills fell into enemy hands. The plan was to declare that currency worthless if that happened. So your explanation makes sense. I understand they did a similar thing with a different seal color for money to be circulated in Africa.
The same sort of thing happened in 1962 with the invert printing of the Dag Hammarskjöld commemorative stamp. When it was discovered, the Postmaster General at the time said that the US Postal Service wasn’t in the business of creating rarities and ordered millions of the inverted version to be printed (rather than a recall), thus flooding the market.
In contrast to Royal Mail, which regularly prints limited editions of pretty, commemorative stamps to sell to collectors at face value. The fact that many of these are never actually used means they make 90% profit.
So, to get back to my original question about coins, why the emphasis on recovery and destruction? We aren’t talking about amounts of coins that could, somehow, devalue the national currency. We are, literally, talking about a couple handfuls of coins. Yet the .gov behaves as if they are escaped replicants that must be tracked down and retired.
Well quite simply the government is treating them as stolen property. Much like art works that are stolen years ago, the ownership should not transfer to anyone other than the original owner. The only reason they are being asked to return the coins is that they didn’t follow proper protocol when seizing them. I believe that the court ruling is wrong in this case and will most likely be overturned. Because at the end of the day the coins were stolen.
Once they get the coins back and the court case is finished they can do whatever they want with them. To let the descendants of a thief benefit from the heist would set a bad precedence.
One thing the OP needs to understand about a large reason for laws to be enforced in general is to discourage future attempts.
In the case of the US Mint and very rare coins:
You do not want people to think they can steal some rare coins from the Mint, wait a few decades and clean up. So every time it happens you have to drop the hammer on the crooks big time.
The more you destroy, rather than just stash away, rare coins, the fewer such coins are lying around to be stolen.
(Note that in the case of the Double Eagles, the Smithsonian has one- legally.)
Destroying a disputed coin puts a serious damper on further court appeals to get the coin back. (And suing the government for damages isn’t always possible.)
So don’t think in terms of “This happened a long time ago, blah, blah…” Think in terms of “How do we really, really discourage this from happening again.”
It would appear the best way to “really, really discourage this from happening again” would be to hire more honest and conscientious mint employees. The recurring theme in these coin stories is that they escape into the wild through mint employees. The mint officials actually deliberately handed out several dozen of the aluminum pennies and decided only later “Wait! we want those back.” Any “cleaning up” seems to be done later on by one collector selling to another. The destruction policy actually drives up the value of the remaining coins.
If you were running the US mint, which of these two scenarios would be the one you want people thinking of:
If you steal some of the prototype coins, as long as you sit on them for long enough nobody will be interested in prosecuting you. You can just sell them off to collectors, maybe some super rich dudes, and use the money to retire in a nice country with no extradition. Heck, by the time the government finds out about them, they’ll have passed through a bunch of owners; they probably won’t even be able to trace them back to somebody who knows about you. Awesome!
If you steal some of the prototype coins, whenever they are found, the government will seize them and then destroy them. Even if you wait until after the statute of limitations has expired before you sell them, nobody will pay you huge sums for them because they all know that if the government ever finds out they have them, the government will seize them and destroy them. Anybody who ever gets one of these will have to keep it secret if he wants to keep it, and where’s the fun in owning something you can never let anyone know you own?
Also, the only reason not to destroy them is in case maybe you want to sell them some day, and selling them makes it harder to spot the stolen ones. If you have never sold any, then any that are held by someone else must be stolen.
I mean, when the first of those Double Eagles turned up (was that the 1970s?), the first thing the government did was check the one in the Smithsonian, which was supposed to be the only one not destroyed. Still there? Check. Not a fake? Check.
My favorite for the “rare coin, not supposed to be out there” is the nickels with the wrong date. 1913 was the first year for the buffalo nickle, but there are a small number (5, or maybe 6) of nickles with the 1912 art but the 1913 date. These were made by a worker at the mint who crudely changed the date on the die after they were done being used but before they were destroyed. He then smuggled the coins home and sat on them for over a decade waiting for the statute of limitations on his crime to expire, then approached a coin dealer.
These weren’t coins the mint made that were then smuggled out, they were intentionally made “mistakes”, made for the purpose of making them valuable for their rarity.
They sell for millions.
The date was far from ‘crudely’ changed. They look just like the business strikes from previous years. And the mint employee minting them and smuggling them out is just one theory albeit the most popular. I’ve seen the one at the ANA Money Museum and it’s pretty neat.
It would seem that the best action would be to sell these coins to a foreign collector (or move to another country and become that foreign collector yourself), assuming you know of a country that you believe won’t particularly care.
Oddly enough, something just like that is how the (until this recent ruling, which I’ll wager will be overturned) lone legal Double Eagle “in the wild” came to exist. I’m probably making errors with the story, since I’m going by the memory of something I read a while back, but it goes something like this:
Israel Switt was the jeweler/rare coin dealer who “fenced” a few of the Double Eagles shortly after they were stolen from the Mint. One of the coins he sold fell into the hands of King Farouk of Egypt, who was really into rare coins. Farouk wanted his transactions to be above-board, so when he took the coin back to Egypt, he cleared it through U.S. customs. Some clerk, not knowing that the coin was stolen property, approved the removal, and the coin went to Egypt.
After Farouk died and all of his stuff was sold off, the coin eventually wound up back in America. An individual tried to sell it to another dealer, who knew that there were no legal Double Eagles out there, so the dealer notified the Secret Service. They set up a sting, and the coin was seized. The individual hired an attorney, the same one who is arguing the current case I believe, to try to get the coin back. The attorney argued, somewhat successfully, that in clearing the coin for export, the U.S. government had forfeited any claim to the coin, making it legal to possess. The judge eventually decided that both sides had a legitimate claim to the coin, ordered it sold at auction, and both parties were to split the proceeds fifty-fifty.
The auction was fast and furious, and the coin eventually sold for about $7.5 million. I’m not sure who has it now, but so far, I believe that’s the only Double Eagle that’s legal for an individual to own.