LF: Minted! Family win battle to KEEP gold coins worth $80m that their father was accused of stealing from US Mint in the 1930s

Title: Minted! Family win battle to KEEP gold coins worth $80m that their father was accused of stealing from US Mint in the 1930s
Source: Daily Mail Online and Associated Press
URL Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art ... ized-gold-coins-worth-80M.html
Published: Apr 18, 2015
Author: Associated Press and Daily Mail Reporter
Post Date: 2015-04-18 22:08:36 by cranky
Keywords: None
Views: 1501
Comments: 2

A family was awarded the rights to 10 rare gold coins possibly worth $80 million or more on Friday after a US appeals court overturned a jury verdict.

US Department of the Treasury officials insist the $20 Double Eagles were stolen from the US Mint in Philadelphia before the 1933 series was melted down when the country went off the gold standard.

They argued that Joan Langbord and her sons cannot lawfully own the coins, which she said she found in a family bank deposit box in 2003.

Ten 1933 Double Eagle coins, which were almost all destroyed when the US went off the gold standard, have been given back to the Langbord family after a length legal dispute with the government

The family found the valuables in a bank deposit box for Joan Langbord's father Israel Switt, a Philadelphia jeweler (left, in 1944). The government believed that Switt stole the coins from a mint in 1933

Langbord's father, jeweler Israel Switt, had dealings with the Mint in the 1930s and was twice investigated over his coin holdings. A jury in 2012 sided with the government.

However, the appeals court returned the coins to the Langbords because US officials had not responded within a 90-day limit to the family's seized-property claim, filed in about 2004.

Family lawyer Barry Berke said: 'Congress clearly intended for there to be limits on the government's ability to seek forfeiture of citizens' property, and today's ruling reaffirms that those limits are real and won't be excused when the government violates them.'

Langbord, who's in her mid-80s, worked in her father's store on Jeweler's Row for most of her life.

Her sons, entertainment lawyer Roy Langbord, of New York City, and David Langbord, of Virginia Beach, Virginia, joined her in the legal fight.

Nearly half a million of the coins were minted in 1933, though almost all were melted and a surviving coin sold for $7.6million in 2002

The coins were never released to the public after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt switched the US off the gold standard

They do not plan to comment on the ruling and have not decided whether the coins will be sold, Berke said.

Sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens designed the Double Eagle with a flying eagle on one side and a figure representing liberty on the other.

One Double Eagle, once owned by King Farouk of Egypt, sold in 2002 for $7.6 million, then a record for a coin.

Its later owner, a London coin dealer once jailed by the US over it, split the proceeds with the US in a deal brokered by Berke.

The family had taken the coins to the Secret Service in Philadelphia to have them examined, Berke said.

A coin that was that was once owned by King Farouk of Egypt (left) fetched millions thirteen years ago. The Langbords brought their coins into the government for authentication, but the valuables were seized

'They authenticated the coins and said, 'Thank you very much. We will now be keeping them,'' he said.

The Mint struck nearly a half-million of the Double Eagles in Philadelphia in 1933 but never released them after President Franklin D. Roosevelt abandoned the gold standard and prohibited using the gold coins as currency.

The money makers in Philadelphia sent all of their gold coins to be melted in 1937, according to Bloomberg.

THE COIN THAT GOT AWAY

The 1933 'Double Eagle' was dreamed up by President Roosevelt’s distant cousin,Theodore, who had commissioned the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to re-design the $20 gold coin in the early 1900s.

Teddy Roosevelt wanted an American coin that matched the beauty of the ancient Greek ones.

The last run of nearly 500,000 coins were never released, and it was thought they were all melted down for scrap.

In industry speak, an 'eagle' is $10, hence the term 'double eagle' for the $20 1933 examples.

While prosecutors argued to jurors in 2011 that Switt must have stolen the coins with help from a Mint insider, Berke said he could have traded his scrap gold for them.

Alison Frankel, a journalist who wrote a history of the 1933 Double Eagles, told the New York Times that Berke had an 'amazing accomplishment' by making the government prove that no coins could have possible gotten out of the mint legally.

She said that the government attorneys decided not to prosecute Switt when they learned about his possible involvement in the 1940s because the statute of limitations had passed.

Robert W Hoge, curator of North American coins and currency at the American Numismatic Society, said that federal authorities had been 'fanatical' about finding the existing coins.

The US Department of Justice said it was reviewing its options after Friday's ruling. A Treasury spokeswoman had no comment.

Switt, who died in 1990, admitted to the Secret Service in 1944 that he had possessed and sold a set of nine other Double Eagles, which were recovered and destroyed.

The surviving Farouk coin is believed to have been a 10th coin from that batch.

The Mint sent a pair of 1933 Double Eagles to the Smithsonian Institution for its US coin collection.

Thanks for posting this. I remember this story from many months ago. I collected coins in my younger days and these I suppose would be called the Holy Grail.

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