The Coin the Government Spent Sixty Years Treating As Contraband Is Coming Out of Hiding

The federal government spent sixty years seizing a $20 gold coin every time it surfaced, treating owners like criminals holding stolen property.

Now the Mint that hunted those coins for decades is about to do something it swore it would never do.

That coin the government spent six decades treating like contraband is finally coming out of hiding in a way nobody saw coming.

The Coin FDR Tried to Erase From Existence

In 1933, the Philadelphia Mint struck 445,500 gold Double Eagles carrying Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Lady Liberty design.

Not one was ever legally allowed to reach a citizen's pocket.

Franklin Roosevelt yanked the country off the gold standard that same year and signed Executive Order 6102, ordering Americans to hand over their gold coins to the government.

The Mint melted almost the entire 1933 run into bars before a single coin left the building.

A handful vanished anyway, smuggled out through a side door that led straight into one of the strangest crime stories in American history.

A Jeweler, a King and a Six Decade Manhunt

Philadelphia jeweler Israel Switt got his hands on several of the escaped coins and quietly sold them off.

For decades the Secret Service treated every 1933 Double Eagle it found as stolen government property, seizing coins right out of collectors' safes.

One coin slipped past every checkpoint anyway and landed in the hands of King Farouk of Egypt in 1944, backed by an export license the Treasury itself signed off on.

That license later disappeared from Treasury files, and the U.S. government spent the next fifty years pretending it never existed.

British coin dealer Stephen Fenton resurfaced with the Farouk coin in 1996 and got arrested by Secret Service agents in a New York hotel room sting.

The resulting legal fight produced one of the oddest deals in Treasury history: the government agreed to "monetize" that single coin, making it the only 1933 Double Eagle any private citizen can legally own.

Switt's daughter, Joan Langbord, found ten more of the coins sitting in a family safe deposit box in 2003, and a year later made the mistake of telling the government about it.

A federal jury and, later, a federal appeals court ruled every one of those ten coins belonged to Uncle Sam, not the Langbord family.

One Coin Escaped the Vaults and Sold for $18.9 Million

The lone legal specimen, the Fenton coin, sold at Sotheby's in 2002 for $7.59 million.

Shoe designer Stuart Weitzman bought that same coin and turned around to sell it again through Sotheby's in 2021.

It brought $18.9 million, making a coin the government once tried to melt into scrap the most expensive coin ever sold at auction.

Now the Mint is putting all eleven government-held specimens on public display together for the first time ever, on August 28 at the ANA World's Fair of Money in Pittsburgh.

Two panel sessions on August 27 and 28 will feature Mint Acting Chief Counsel Greg Weinman, numismatic author David Tripp and dealer Stephen Fenton himself walking collectors through the case.

Mint Medallic Artist John McGraw will hold a separate Q&A on the Saint-Gaudens design tradition that started this whole saga in 1907.

Mint Director Paul Hollis called the coins "treasured emblems" born out of a nation in hardship, which is Washington-speak for a coin that once got a British dealer arrested in a hotel room.

The Same Coin the Government Once Melted Now Anchors America250

A $20 coin that the government hunted like a fugitive for six decades and then sold for nineteen million dollars is not just a numismatic footnote.

It is a snapshot of Depression-era America deciding your gold was safer in a federal vault than in your own hand, and every seizure, lawsuit and gavel drop at Sotheby's since traces straight back to that 1933 decision.

That same coin now anchors the Mint's America250 push, turning a story about government seizure into a headline exhibit for the nation's 250th birthday.

Either way, Pittsburgh in late August is about to host the closest thing numismatics has to a crime reunion, complete with the jeweler's heirs' old rival, the dealer who got arrested, and eleven coins the government insisted for generations did not legally exist.

Sources:

• United States Mint, "United States Mint to Host 1933 Double Eagle Panel Discussion and Artist Q&A Sessions at ANA World's Fair of Money," USMint.gov, August 4, 2026.
• CoinWeek, "Eleven Legendary 1933 Double Eagles Will Appear Together For The First Time," CoinWeek, 2026.
• NGC, "1933 Double Eagle Realizes Record $18.87 Million in Sotheby's Sale," NGC News, 2021.
• CNN, "'Double Eagle' 1933 Gold Coin Sells For A Record $18.9M In New York," CNN Style, June 2021.
• Stack's Bowers, "Did You Know That The Export License For The Farouk Specimen 1933 Double Eagle Was Issued 80 Years Ago This Week," Stack's Bowers, 2022.
• Sotheby's, "The 1933 Double Eagle, Three Treasures – Collected By Stuart Weitzman," Sotheby's, 2021.