NY Times article on the 1933 Saint Gaudens
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January 10, 2005
On View for Public Coveting
By GLENN COLLINS
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, "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, and then there was the election."
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. 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 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 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 - 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.
When the United States came off the gold standard in 1933, all the double eagles manufactured that year were ordered destroyed, save for two reserved for the Smithsonian Institution. 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.
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. The proceeds from its auction were then split between the dealer and the government.
There may be other 1933 double eagles that have never come to light, said David Tripp, 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."
On View for Public Coveting
By GLENN COLLINS
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, "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, and then there was the election."
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. 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 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 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 - 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.
When the United States came off the gold standard in 1933, all the double eagles manufactured that year were ordered destroyed, save for two reserved for the Smithsonian Institution. 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.
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. The proceeds from its auction were then split between the dealer and the government.
There may be other 1933 double eagles that have never come to light, said David Tripp, 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."
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