1/3/2024 0 Comments Most valuable coinsWith the right timing and a good market, he said, they could bring $4 million to $6 million each, because there are many people who would want to own one. Fenton, the coin dealer who sold the Farouk double eagle, said that if the coins were allowed to be sold, he would advise selling just one or two a year. “Maybe they were stolen in the 1930s,” he said, “but they certainly weren’t stolen by the people who are holding them now.” Vartian said he would be happy if the Langbords were allowed to sell the coins. “Anybody who has to do that, I think, is going to fail.” “Nobody can prove conclusively what happened,” Mr. Berke’s success in persuading the judge to shift the burden of proof onto the government in the case “quite an amazing accomplishment” that forces the government “to prove a negative that the coins could not have gotten out legally.”Īrmen Vartian, the general counsel of the Professional Numismatists Guild, agreed. “There’s really nobody with contemporary knowledge from the Mint who’s still living,” he said, having sought out former Mint employees for the earlier litigation. Proving otherwise will be extremely difficult, he said. Switt was a frequent visitor to the Mint, had plenty of gold to trade for gold coins and probably did so. Berke counters such arguments by quoting the Secret Service report on the coins, which explicitly admitted that its investigation “did not conclusively establish when, how or by whom the coins found in circulation were taken from the Philadelphia Mint.” Switt worked with a corrupt Mint cashier. The book details the government’s contention that Mr. Switt was “a thoroughly nasty piece of work,” and that a dealer who traded with him called him a “gold coin bootlegger” who continued to sell gold coins long after the practice had been prohibited. Frankel wrote in her 2006 book “Double Eagle: The Epic Story of the World’s Most Valuable Coin” that Mr. ![]() Switt in the mid-1940s, saying the statute of limitations had passed. A Mint spokesman declined to comment on the case because of the litigation.Īccording to a history of the coins by Alison Frankel, a journalist with The American Lawyer, a United States attorney decided not to prosecute Mr. Switt, working with a corrupt cashier at the Mint. The Secret Service, which polices currency crimes, has argued that all of the double eagles that escaped government control passed through the hands of Mr. ![]() ![]() Langbord got off the plane, he said, he called his mother, Joan Langbord, and asked, “Do we have any more of these?” About a year later, the search turned up the safe-deposit box in Philadelphia. He was stunned, he said, to see that the dealer who first procured the coin was his grandfather. Langbord, an entertainment industry executive, said he first learned about his family’s involvement with the storied coins in 2002 on a flight to Las Vegas, when he read an account of the Farouk coin’s odyssey in an advertisement for the auction.
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