(Sept. 15) — Roy Langbord's family made a stunning find in an old safe-deposit box a few years ago: 10 $20 gold coins, minted in 1933, with Lady Liberty on one side and a bald eagle on the other. The pieces were never officially released by the government and could be worth millions of dollars each, The New York Times reported.
The Langbord family found the coins in 2003 and took them to the United States Mint for authentication the following year. The Mint said the coins were real all right — and it refused to give them back to the family, asserting that one of Roy Langbord's grandfathers, a Philadelphia jewelry dealer named Israel Switt, had stolen them.
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This $20 gold coin is one of the few surviving "double eagle" coins minted in 1933. They were never officially circulated, and most were destroyed after the United States abandoned the gold standard.
The coins, The Times says, were among half a million so-called double eagles minted in 1933. Almost all of them were destroyed when the nation dropped the gold standard. But a few of the coins survived. Two are in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution, and another sold at auction in 2002 for $7.6 million.
Switt died in 1990. His family argues that he got the coins legitimately, and they have taken the Mint to court in an effort to recover them. A federal judge recently ordered the government to prove Switt stole the double eagles or return them, The Times said.
A coin dealer told the newspaper that the pieces could fetch from $4 million to $6 million in a good market. For more on the fight over the coins — and to find out why the government might have a tough time proving its theft allegation — go to The New York Times' Web site.
