The gang at the Mint 1966-7?

Thanks Conder. I believe there is some kind of freedom of information law in Canada. The newspapers keep using it to find stuff the government doesn't want to talk about. So in persuing court documents with legal friends, I'll try to find out more but I suspect you must have a specific request. Asking for the Royal Mint investigation into the error coins of 1966-7 is probably too vague. Maybe some reader here with legal capabilities could chime in.

I didn't know the pennies weren't released. Thanks. Dad said the dots just plugged up with debris in the die. The quarter had a bigger dot and so more coins were produced before the die plugged up, allowing Dad to find at least one 1936 dot quarter in circulation.

 

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I won't say there wasn't any malicious intent at all but I will say it's not proven to have been.
180 degree rotation happens by accident in the u.s. or canada and it happen more frequently 50+ years ago.

The 66 small beads could have just been a left over, overlooked die and also nothing malicious.
Where there has been nafarious behavior it has been caught and put to a stop but in general mistakes happen as they always do.

I don't know about all that but absolutely you can write this story as fiction and play it out however you want to until the end.

 

Thanks John. This all started following up a rumour that 4 varieties (1966 small beads, diving goose, inverted goose, and double struck 1967) were maliciously produced by a criminal gang at the mint. We found the criminal gang, led by Rudolf Hoffman with Frederick Priebe and Darlene Ruddick on the inside. So far I've found no credible evidence linking these varieties to this gang. Without that it makes a great conpiracy theory based on circumstanial facts and speculation.

John was also right to question the 1965 issues as in Hoffman's trial in 1971 the article above reports:
"Police testified that there were complaints dating back to 1965 that some coin dealers or dealer was obtaining the coin oddities, or "varieties" as they are known in the trade. The RCMP soon became aware that the oddities were not mint errors but the result of deliberate actions on the part of a mint employee."
Sadly which varieties are not mentioned but one finds
http://www.coinscan.com/err/doll.html
where errors on blunt and pointed 5's and a small beads obverse are shown. If there aren't any other 1965 errors then these coins are the ones the police are testifying about and is a direct link of silver dollar errors to the gang. So this adds another 3 varities to the four I initially tagged, giving 7 suspcious varieties from 1965 to 1967.

Until credible evidence for a connexion between the gang and the 7 varieties is found all we can do is speculate. In the Mid sixties there was a coin collecting craze with the Newspapers full of articles for inflation wary investors that good coins were a good investment and the change in your pocket was worth more than you think. Dealers were doing well with prices rising. The mint was flooded with proof orders and couldn't keep up with circulation production. So times at the mint were clearly hectic, if not chaotic. That's a recipe for honest errors, but all 7? I'm a newbie at Silver dollar errors, but was there any other three year period that produced as many egregious errors that somehow passed quality control? I suspect there was no other time when the mint was so busy, but these varieties are not hard to find "dots" or misplaced jewels. They are are obvious, well maybe not the 66 small beads.

I don't know the quanties of the 65 errors. If low, one might speculate that it was a dry run for later efforts. Priebe might have kept the small bead die for the 1966 small beads or as John suggests it was an old die that just happened to get used with 1966 reverse. Interesting that the 1966 small beads was a circulation coin and not a proof coin, so it really was a one off. J.E. Charleton first reports the '66 large bead coins in his column Coin Corner on March 18, 1966 in the Calgary Herald. In March he is not aware of the '66 small beads, but has noticed the proof and circulation '66s all have large beads and asks the mint if the small beads will return?
"Delivery on the Canadian 1966 proof-like sets from the mint is four to six weeks from receipt of orders, which is a big improvement over a year ago It is also gratifying to note the absence of wild speculation as occurred with these sets early in 1965. It is interesting to note that the dollar in these early sets has the large beads, and the regular issue silver dollar also has the large beads on the obverse. This naturally raises the question as to whether or not later issues will have the small beads. I checked with an official of the Mint and was informed that, according to present plans, no change will be made in the dies for this year's dollar apart from those now being used. It was explained that an unusual amount of trouble encountered with the dies last year resulted in the various varieties. There are now five known varieties of the 1965 silver dollar. Latest discovery is one similar to Type 4 except there is a different relationship in the lettering and beads on the obverse. A characteristic of the letter "A" in Regina on the large bead variety is that a line extended along its right side will pass directly through the bead In the new variety, this line passes between the beads: in the small bead variety it barely touches the left side of the bead."
So the medium beads '65 is discovered by March 1966 and the mint has no intention of using the small beads in 1966 or ever. Howver by Oct 15 1966 on pg 79 of the Calgary Herald Charleton says in Coin Corner that some months earlier (Summer 1966?) 200 '66 small bead coins were bought from the mint by a dealer who wanted to sit on them until they were worth a lot more. Charleton says:
"Another discovery of interest to collectors is the 1966 silver dollar With small obverse beads. The existence of this variety has been known for some months but it has not been publicized. The reason was the owner of the 200 pieces was not anxious to sell, hoping for a higher price."
Was this an innocent dealer set up to discover a new variety or was he in on it or did he just get lucky? Anyway if Hoffman was involved, Hoffman must have had some himself to make a profit.

Lastly J.E. Charlton in Coin Corner (Ottawa Journal, May 4, 1968) first reprts the Diving Goose as a "slight" die rotation. According to a listing on EBay:
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/1967-1-DOLL...672583?hash=item3b4f5ea2c7:g:Hh0AAOSwIU1fdPlk



Charleton says you could get a diving goose for $50. By November another article reported that they were now $65. and a pair, normal and diving, could be had for $97.50. I don't know the construction of the press they used but geese diving at all sorts of angles sounds like the die just rattled around in the press? My lack of knowlege of mint produced die rotations in Canadian coins leads me to believe that the die axes must be set and are mechanical fixed in postion so they can't rotate. Perhaps a sleepy pressman thought he was tightening the die when he was loosening or rotaing it? Was the same sleepy pressman setting the die so the goose was horizontal and accidently created the inverted goose? I don't know. I'll keep looking.

• CLIPPED FROM

Calgary Herald
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
18 Mar 1966, Fri • Page 63

 

A bit belated, but thanks for the newspaper information on the 1969 Canadian "errors". I own several of them, and always wondered the back story. Very much appreciated.

There were also a number of "mint sport" errors made in 1971 (post-dating the 1970 arrest and sentencing of this mint worker and coin dealer), and I thought they were part of the same network - but obviously not. Those also included a 1971 'nickel' dollar struck on silver and gold planchets, and a number of 1971 dollar errors struck on 1c, 10c and 25c planchets, some uniface and some with mirror brockages.

 

Thanks SPP Ottawa. I wondered if those 1971 errrors were the last Hurrah before prison? I've only looked for Silver Dollar errors but there were a lot in other denominations. It was a hectic time at the mint and there was a lot of turnover. With all the new folk it was inevitable that errors would occur. I wonder if the switch to a crown corporation at that time had any influence?

I was surprised to notice that there are no SP examples listed for the '66 small bead Mule or misaligned dies yielding Rotated Geese (tilted, diving, opposite orientation), or the double struck Butchered Goose. Apart from the Mule, PL listings of the other coins are sparse with most being graded MS. Having the pressman Frederick Priebe and the manager Darlene Ruddick on the inside, they could have navigated the security for Numismatic coins and produced SP and PL coins. There are no SP!

The problem is the cofusion between MS and PL. PL coins are the first business strikes with polished dies and have a mirror finish. As the dies wear mint flash or chatoyancy developes and it is no longer a PL coin. Double Striking for PL coins didn't start until 1971, so before that PL coins were just single business strikes with freshly polishied dies that weren't yet broken in. As Haxby relates on pg 216 in Striking Impressions the avalanch of orders in 1965 prcipitated the creation of the Hull Office with 4 new presses to deal with proof like sets. Preibe and Ruddick were in Ottawa, not Hull, so I doubt that any of these coins were ever in cellophane envelopes as PL coins were supposed to be.

I started this thread looking to confirm rumours of corruption at the mint and finally looked at Stephan E. Dushnick's Silver and Nickel Dollars of Canada 1911 to date (1978). On page 85 he says the '66 Small Beads is a Mule and "was PROBABLY only for Numismatic sets" (my emphasis). He goes on to say, "The "Small Beads" dollars were therefore officially produced and we have heard of at least one being found in a proof like set (which we assume was officially issued) All of these pieces were slated for melting. The circumstances of the appearance of the loose coins on the numismatic market suggests that their issue was "unofficial", placing them in a similar category to the Double Struck '67 dollar..." In '78 Dushnick thought there were maybe 500 Small Beads and they listed at $1250. That agrees with another who posted there were 480 of these graded Mules. Apparently the Inverted Goose was unknown to Dushnick. Does anyone know the circumstances of its discovery?

On page 129 Dushnick lists the only two "Spurious or Illegally Produced" dollars of the series- "1967 Double Strike (Spurious)" and "1967 Diving Goose (Spurious)".

There he says , "The fact that that these double struck coins are available in quantity and ALL ARE EXACTLY THE SAME leaves no question that the rumours we have heard that they are back door coins (produced in the mint but not issued with legal authority) must be correct. This raises the legal question of their sale or ownership. The exact mintage is unknown.These pieces all come in Proof Like condition" They certainly are not "all the same", with the amout of rotation before the second srike being variable from a few degrees to 30 or more. On my specimen I can match the images on both sides with the same rotation so the coin rotated and not the dies between strikes. Does anyone know how these coins were made?

About the rotating geese Dushnick says, "Probably intentionally made by rotating one of the dies approximately 45 degrees and exact mintage is unknown". Rotations of less than 10 or 15 degrees are deemed worth no more than an ordinary MS 1967. But it becomes a Tilted Goose, not officailly listed, with rotations of 20 to 40 degrees and a Diving Goose at around 45 degrees. The Inverted Goose at exactly 180 degrees is the only other Rotated Goose. Tilted geese seem to go for something more than a usual MS 1967 and approach the Diving Goose value as the angle does. The Diving Goose is priced a little lower than the Small Beads, so I would guess they had about the same mintage, around 500. There are claims of 8 to 12 Inverted Geese known. The Inverted Goose is set exactly at 180 degrees, but how variable are the other angles?

The mint has had 50 years to repossess their stolen coins and have done nothing. There must be internal mint documents describing investigations into these coins, but they are not public and the mint ignores any requests about them. I believe they swept this under the carpet to avoid any more unpleasantness. These coins were shepherded through official release and so are just as authentic as any other business strike. Apparently the Market thinks so too.

In late April 2021 the Canadian Numismatic Company auctioned these coins. The MS 62 mule listed at $3690 in Coins and Canada went for $3718.45 plus tax. A PL 66 tilted goose went for $249.50 more than about five times the list price for a '67 PL 66 of $42.90. A PL 64 Diving Goose that PCGS had failed to note was a Diving Goose went for $2380. The Diving Goose is not listed as a PL coin in Coins and Canada but an MS 64 lists at $1060, half what this coin went for. Then there was the MS 66 Inverted Goose that went for $18,445 and listed for $15,200. So the Market treats them as real coins of increasing value. SSP Ottawa, you have done well to acquire them!
+

 

I did not acquire the 1967 silver dollar oddities, my collecting focus is on the small cent and nickel dollar series. Here is what I have, likely from this "mint sport":

https://www.pcgs.com/cert/29952933
https://www.pcgs.com/cert/29952932
https://www.pcgs.com/cert/29952934
https://www.pcgs.com/cert/32839537

And the 1969 dollar (no photo with this one): https://www.pcgs.com/cert/21894034

As for the 1971 strikes, the only oddities lie with the dollar series, and I have these ones (although more exist, including one struck on a gold planchet):

https://www.pcgs.com/cert/32960787
https://www.pcgs.com/cert/32960790
https://www.pcgs.com/cert/32960793

 

I also know a bunch of crazy dollar errors exist for 1973, but I have not managed to acquire any of them. Not that long ago, a 1973 dollar uniface overstruck on a 1973 50c was put in auction, but I don't think it made reserve.

 

There was a 1970 Canadian dollar struck on a gold planchet confiscated by Canadian authorities at the 1980 ANA auction in Cincinnati OH.