Jim Puplava’s Financial Sense News Hour features an interview with author David Tripp, whose book Illegal Tender tells the tale of a US gold coin that was lost, found, banned, recoverd, stolen, and finally resurfaced and sold at auction for $7M.
The origin of the story lies in FDR’s 1933 bill making the “hoarding” of gold illegal. Although citizens were told to turn in their gold, no one told the mint to stop minting $20 legal tender gold coins. Some time later this was corrected and most of the minted coins were destroyed but a few survived. The story of one of the surviving coins is the story of this book.
The most incredible thing about this story is the dogged determination of the Treasury over a period of seven decades in insisting that these coins belong to them and attempting to recover thme so that every last one could be destroyed.
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a good article about the history of this coin can be found here: http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1046288235244
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