1933 Double Eagle, World Most Valuable Coin

A 1933 Double Eagle has the record for highest price paid at auction for a single coin. On July 30, 2002, at Sotheby’s in New York, it was sold to an anonymous bidder, in less than nine minutes, for a final price of $7,590,020.00, almost twice the previous record for a coin ($4,14 million for the 1804 Silver Dollar). The mysterious owner loaned it to the American Numismatic Society and currently the most valuable coin is displayed at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Unbelievable, isn’t it? Even more since it's not the only 1933 Double Eagle existing. It's its odd story what has made this small piece of stamped gold the most valuable coin in the world.

Back in 1849, and because of the California Gold Rush, the United States Mint decided to issue $20 gold coins instead of the traditional $10 pieces, known as eagles (that's why $20 coins are called double eagles). In 1933, it last year of production, 445,500 specimens of double eagle were minted, but they never oficially circulated: trying to end the 30s general crisis, US president Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an Executive Order by which gold coins were declared no longer legal, so people had to turn in their gold coins and have them changed for other forms of currency (there was an exemption for collector coins, that could keep their 'small treasures'). All 1933 gold coins were melted down except two of the $20 Double Eagles, that were presented to the American Numismatic Society Collection.

These two coins should have been the only 1933 Double Eagle coins in existence, but a number of them, possibly nine, were stolen before being melted down, possibly by an US Mint cashier, and circulated amongst collectors until the US Secret Service began an official investigation and  recovered for the US Government eight of the coins during the period 1944-1952. So that leaves us with one coin missing, the one that was acquired by King Farouk of Egypt, who had a collection of coins of over 8,500. In 1944 King Farouk bought a 1933 Double Eagle, and after a chain of mistakes of the US Treasure Department, he got an export license for the coin. In 1952 King Farouk was deposed in a coup d'etat, and many of his possessions went for public auction at Sotheby's, but the Double Eagle coin wasn't found among them.

Forty years later the US Secret Service arrested British coin dealer Stephen Fenton in New York when he was trying to sell a Double Eagle coin in New York. At first he said that he had bought the coin at his shop, and later swore that the Double Eagle came from the collection of King Farouk, though this could not be ascertained. In July 2001, the case ended with the agreement that the ownership of the gold coin would return to the US Government, and then it could be legally sold at auction (as you may have guessed, this is the $7,59 million Double Eagle). Believe it or not, until this agreement, the Double Eagle was kept in a place that was believed to be safe: the Treasury vaults of the World Trade Center. Only three months before it was destroyed, the coin was transferred to Fort Knox.

In August 2005, the US Secret Service announced the recovery of ten additional stolen 1933 Double Eagle gold coins. But no worries for the owner of the only Double Eagle auctioned, his is the only in existence that is legal to own. The rest belong to the US Government and are held at Fort Knox.