Shoe designer Stuart Weitzman’s choice to auction his 1933 Saint-Gaudens gold 20 double eagle, once possessed by King Farouk I of Egypt, openly shows that he is the anonymous collector who bought it in 2002.
The coin, estimated to sell for about $10 million and $15 million, would be to be supplied June 8 by Sotheby’s in New York at a three-lot auction which also contains two exceptionally rare stamps.
Net profits from the auction of those 3 lots should be dispersed to a range of charitable outlets.
Weitzman’s coin is the sole case from the creation of 445,500 1933 double eagles struck in the Philadelphia Mint which is legal to get. That decision was made through protracted civil lawsuit which ended in January 2001 with a court settlement allowing the coin to be offered in public auction.
The Weitzman coin, also believed”gem brilliant Uncirculated” and placed by Weitzman within an oil plastic holder, has been bought for $7.59 million through an one-lot, nine-minute auction ran July 30, 2002, at Sotheby’s New York auction gallery, even in combination with Stack’s.
Those net profits were split between the U.S. Mint and British trader Stephen Fenton, who’d returned the coin into the USA in 1996.
Weitzman needed to pay an extra $20 to the authorities to inject the coin. Until this monetization, U.S. Mint officials believed the gold bit to be chattel, or land, rather than a coin.
In 2013, the 1933 double eagle was transferred, together with both philatelic rarities, for display in the New-York Historical Society Museum and Library. The coin has been eliminated from people exhibition recently.
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Storied history
The Farouk 1933 double eagle was one of fewer than a dozen illustrations procured by California trader Abe Kosoff sometime after their creation and dispersed into the numismatic market.
All the 1933 double eagle manufacturing was left illegal to possess and some extant cases must be rounded up from the Secret Service and returned to the Treasury Department for melting. The 1933 double eagles were believed by national authorities to not have been published through official channels.
The Farouk specimen famously escaped melting, as he managed to secure an export permit in the U.S. Treasury Department from 1944, to lawfully eliminate the gold piece from American land and return to his home nation. From the time officials exploring the coins accomplished the export permit was wrongly allowed, the coin has been gone.
The 1933 gold bit surfaced on American land 42 decades after. Secret Service agents stormed a guest room in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York at which Fenton was brokering the sale of this gold bit to U.S. merchant Jay Parrino.
Criminal charges were filed against both traders, but afterwards fell as national government chased civil forfeiture to keep the gold bit.
Throughout the five decades of civil litigation culminating decided to publicly auction the golden bit, it had been kept in a vault in Secret Service New York offices on the ninth floor of Tower 2 of the World Trade Center.
Following the court settlement was reached, the golden piece was finally moved to storage in the Fort Knox Gold Bullion Depository at Kentucky. Had the gold never been moved once it had been, it could have wound up at the rubble of the collapse of Tower 2 throughout the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist strikes.
