'Nothing, Mr. Chapman. Not a dime.'
Mike laughed. 'At least I'd get twenty bucks' worth.'
'No, that isn't true. Your hypothetical piece wouldn't even be worth the twenty dollars engraved on its back side. The coin was literally illegal the very day it was made.'
Mike mimicked the position of Stark's fingers, which were still holding the coin. He had a goose egg instead of a gold proof. 'Zilch. Zero. Bupkes.'
'I suppose if you melted it down you'd get the price of the gold weight, but that's about it.'
'How come?'
'Very simple, Detective. After the Mint creates the coins-all coins-they have to be 'monetized.' That's the process the Treasury Department has to go through with every kind of currency, or else-like the Double Eagle-it never becomes legitimate money. It's the process of monetizing the coins that makes them legal tender.' Stark sighed. 'This particular value is all in the history of this piece, the uniqueness of it.'
'You wanna tell me about that?'
'Certainly. If I entertain you enough, perhaps I can charm Ms. Cooper out of some of these other little treasures,' Stark said, referring to Queenie's stash. 'I'd like to see everything you found in the lady's closet.'
He started after the Gold Rush of the 1840s, which placed the young American nation among the wealthiest in the world. 'The United States Mint needed a new denomination for the growing economy, something more than the original one-dollar gold piece. The highest value of currency that had been available until then was the ten- dollar coin. So a bill was introduced in Congress to create a twenty-dollar piece, cast with nearly a full ounce of gold.'
Stark went back to his glass etagere and brought several coins back to us. 'Plenty of these twenty-dollar gold pieces to go around,' he said. 'They were minted almost every year between 1850 and 1933.'
I looked at the older version that he handed to me. 'This one isn't nearly as elegant as yours, is it?'
'You can thank Teddy Roosevelt for the improvement. While he was president, he had a chance encounter with the man most people considered America's greatest sculptor.'
'Who was that?' Mercer asked.
'Saint-Gaudens. Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Roosevelt complained to him that the U.S. coins lacked artistic qualities. Old Teddy wanted something to rival the ancient Greeks, with brilliant design and high relief. He had found the man capable of designing it. This new golden Double Eagle became the symbol of American wealth and power, a very desirable object from the first moment it went into circulation.'
'There's only one bird on this thing,' Mike said. 'Why call it a Double Eagle?'
'Because it was twice the amount of the old ten-dollar piece, which had been nicknamed the Eagle.'
'What ended the Eagle's flight?' I asked.
'Another Roosevelt, Ms. Cooper. Teddy's cousin, Franklin. By the time he was inaugurated in 1933, the country was in the depths of the Great Depression. You could buy a daily paper for two cents and a pack of cigarettes for a quarter. The only thing that held its value during this crisis was gold itself.'
'So there was a run on the banks, and people began to hoard gold coins,' Mercer said.
'And two days after he was sworn in, President Roosevelt closed all the banks, embargoed the export of the very precious metal, and took America off the gold standard. After March of 1933, never again was the United States Mint to issue gold coinage.'
'So Farouk's piece was made before FDR's proclamation?'
'Ah, the heart of the matter, Mr. Chapman. The Treasury Department prohibited the Mint from monetizing, or legitimatizing, any gold coins from that point on. But it neglected to forbid the actual
'Farouk's Double Eagle was struck
Stark nodded his head. 'The Mint was just a factory, after all. The engraving for the coin had already been completed, the bullion was prepared, and within a month after the embargo, one hundred thousand 1933 Double Eagles had been cast. The Treasury realized the gaffe and immediately told the Mint not to license this particular coin.'
'So the Double Eagles existed…'
'Yes, Mr. Chapman,' said Stark. 'But they had only the value of a small gold medallion. They were never legitimized.'
Mike sat back in his chair. 'That's an awful lot of gilded birds in the nest. How could anybody account for them all?'
'There are wonderfully arcane regulations that have been in existence since this country's birth,' he answered. 'Romans had their Trial of the Pyx, so our forefathers set up an assay commission. Samples of the strike were submitted in locked boxes to be weighed and tested-a laborious series of examinations-and while this was being done with just a few hundred coins, all the others were kept in storage at the Mint.'
'What became of the one hundred thousand?'
'In 1937, the order finally came from the Treasury-right from the president-to melt down the entire strike. As far as the government knew, not a single coin was left.'
'So when did the Eagle fly out of the cage?' Mike asked.
'I'm afraid that's the first time our company came into this mix,' Stark said. 'Nineteen forty-four. My father had been in business about ten years, doing quite well, when a great private collection came on the market which he bought for auction. The owner was a Colonel James Flanagan.'
Stark took another sip of coffee. 'Papa put an advertisement in all the papers, announcing the sale. And for the final lot, the biggest prize, the ad read, 'The Excessively Rare 1933 Double Eagle.' He was quite thrilled about his coup.'
'I guess that let the cat out of the bag,' Mike said.
'Needless to say, that wording caught the attention of a few giants in the numismatic field who were interested in bidding, one of whom took it upon himself to call the Mint and quite simply ask what made it so rare. How many coins had the government actually legalized and released was what he wanted to know.'
'The answer was none?'
'Exactly. From there on, the feds moved in pretty quickly. The Mint brought in the Secret Service-'
I interrupted Stark and looked at Mike and Mercer. 'I know the Secret Service is the law enforcement branch of the Treasury, but I can't for the life of me remember why. I just think of them as the presidential protection force.'
Mike helped me with the history. 'The Secret Service was created in 1865 especially to investigate and prevent the counterfeiting of U.S. currency, and enforce all laws related to coins and securities of the government. That's all that they were about at first. They didn't get into the protection business until President McKinley was assassinated.'
Stark continued. 'So there was my father in 1944, sitting at his desk during the second day of the actual auction. In burst a couple of agents who announce to him that the Flanagan coin had been stolen from the Mint, that it had absolutely no value, and that they were going to seize it from him before it went on the block.'
Mike wanted the facts. 'So whom had Flanagan bought the illegal Double Eagle from?'
'Precisely what the Secret Service wanted to know,' he said, seeming a bit chagrined. 'They also questioned my father about where he got the information in the catalog entry that said at least ten of the pieces had gotten into private hands.'
'Did he have the answers?'
'Most certainly. He and my uncle were extremely cooperative,' Stark said, starting to smile again. 'After all, they had paid the enormous sum of sixteen hundred dollars for the coin. They had all the bills of sale, and took the agents directly to the jeweler, who was holding it in his safe.'
'So the feds got that one back for sure,' Mike said.
'I can promise you that, Detective. It was one of the first lessons I learned from my father. And then this lead agent spent the next few months tracking down the other Double Eagles my father told them about. He was like a bloodhound-Philadelphia, Baltimore, Memphis, London.'
'How many were stolen from the Mint and avoided destruction?' I asked.
'Ten. That's what they figured when they went back to examine the assay samples I mentioned to you, which
