1933 Double Eagle Special

Basebal21; I am all for hypothesising! I'm all for saying "what if". I'm all for a good detective story where the facts are laid out, like Bryan has done for us. I'm all for saying "it could have happened" this way or that way.

I mean; hey, I was a Detective! I love this stuff. I'm all for investigative writings and theories.

Lol, I'm just the guy that does the voice over at the beginning of the show..."all suspects are innocent until proven guilty...."

No way do I want people to think I am against free speech or investigative work/writings!

Joe

I doubt it - either they would come forward with all of them or just one. What would you do if you had them - why risk even half of these coins when you know that you cant prove how you got them? Why even risk a few? If you're going to test the waters you might as well risk the minimum with just one, and then deal with the others later.

First of all though, they shouldn't have even thought that the Farouk coin set any kind of precedent for them and their coins. That coin was seized even though it was originally GIVEN away by the government as a gift! They still wanted it destroyed very badly. Only after a lot of resistance did they eventually legalize it... and the only reason was that they knew the coin was obtained fairly. It's clearly a very different case, for very relevant reasons.

I'm not saying who I think should get the coins, I'm just saying that this family should have realized they were going to have to prove how they got them. You have something that was created by the government, locked in a secure facility the whole time, and then later ordered by the government to be completely destroyed. In this specific situation it's just really hard to argue that it's actually legitimately yours when you can't prove it. You can't just say "BUT THEY'RE MINE!"... lol

Edit: typo

It was NOT given away, it was purchased by Farouk from a dealer and an export license was applied for just as they would have done, and HAD done for every other US gold coin he had purchased here. Since it was a US gold coin dated 1933 or earlier the license was basically just a rubber stamp job.

OK, I stand corrected, I think I read that in the MSNBC article. Now I can see why the government wanted it back.

NY Times article today.

"World's most valuable coin".
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2...-in-a-vault/

For 10 months, the world's most valuable coin sat wrapped in plastic on a folding chair in a little cagelike compartment behind a bright blue door at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It was only a step or two away from billions of dollars' worth of neatly stacked bars of gold bullion.

On Monday, a man in a dark suit stashed the coin in his briefcase and coolly walked out of the Fed's heavily guarded limestone-and-sandstone building, a couple of blocks from the New York Stock Exchange in Lower Manhattan. He nodded politely to the guards on the front steps of the Fed. They did not stop him.

The man with the briefcase, David N. Redden, an auction-house executive, was not pulling off a heist. He was taking the coin on a 6.7-mile ride to the New-York Historical Society on Central Park West.

**

Rest of the piece is at the link.