Langbord-Switt 1933 Double Eagle Case

Inasmuch as this thread has taken an unfortunate political bend, I only hope that the coins will be preserved.

That said, Izzy Switt was obviously even less than shady in his dealings, all the while assisted by a corrupt mint employee who had the fortune of not being found out beyond a reasonable doubt withing his lifetime.

When the family came forward with the coins, I believe it was more for personal gain - greed and the hopes of somehow 80+ years after their less than savory departure from the mint, that they would somehow find that time had erased the crime of their predecessor so that the coins could have mystically been legal to sell at a usurious profit. There are times whence one is perhaps better to keep mum about such matters and quietly stash something away. Now the Langbord family is less the coins, and more importantly less the egregious and untoward legal fees.

There is whispering of an appeal to the SCOTUS - but I cannot imagine a precedent which would permit the court even hearing this case.

Then another thought, what if in some wild thought, the US mint decided to recover the 1913 Liberty nickels - made illegally by an employee in the mint and illegally removed and quietly hidden until the 1920s?

 

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In PA the taxpayers haven't made their payments to public pensions because the legislature diverted the pension payments to favoured projects, like tax cuts for the gas industry. The employees have made all their contributions because we have to. Guess what the other party has as an answer. Cut the pension benefits. Impact the only people who did play by the rules. Never let the taxpayers know the truth.

 

Why such zeal for the '33 and not the '13?

 

Good question. Best answer is a legal concept called laches. You have an obligation to act as soon as practical after you know of a thing. You don't get to wait around until you get good and ready. This answer applies to Greenie as well.

 

I knew a fellow who worked for Pan Am many years ago. Retired, he was (for lack of a better word) screwed out of his pension because of misdeeds by the company........

 

New Mexico has a citizen legislature. They meet for 30 days a year, then the next year 60 days, then back to 30 days and so on. Most of the state legislature people are trying to do a good job, it's just that NM is still in the "Good 'Ole Boy" mindset and it's going to take sometime for the new to replace the old.

All judges are elected except for the state Supreme Court. On the local level, mayors are elected as are the town council, same for county commissioners. What is particularly bothersome is that just about everyday the newspaper lists some public employee/official that has been charged with some kind of misdeed.

 

There are a lot of educators in many states that are going to find that their pensions are underfunded or not funded at all.

 

Yet those educators probably paid every cent of their contributions, while the taxpayers, represented by the people they elected, reneged.

 

Inasmuch as I would love to believe that is just your state, it is a fact that exists everywhere. Where I live we have township managers, village trustees that got caught embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars over some 20+ years and you have to ponder how with all the auditing that allegedly happens that they never got caught prior.

 

My wife did, then opted out went with another plan, was able to cash out her state pension early and divert it into an IRA. She was fortunate.

 

Funny word - divert. That's what the politicians did - divert the pension funds to their own political favorites. I prefer another word for what your wife did. Like 'responsibly manage' maybe.

Look, states and localities are like the ANA. The staff does what they're supposed to for the most part. The problem is with what the elected people do.

 

The Pennsylvania General Assembly is full time. They are sworn in the first Monday of January in odd-numbered years and can be in session theoretically any day for the next two years. They only adjourn sine die once every two years. Just since I started there we have been in session on July 4 three times, on New Year's Day twice, and frequently up till 11PM without prior notice on any day.

 

I would recheck those numbers

 

Or 1913 V Nickels or Class III 1804 dollars, or Class I dollars other than the King of Siam, Muscat of Oman or Stickney specimens

March 6th? Roosevelt's Executive order was signed April 5th. What was this March 6th order. And the cash window clerks were allowed to exchange gold for gold up until sometime around April 28th and the 1933 double eagles WERE in the cash windows before then.

So even though they have never pursued recovering them, and they are still government property, you can't go after them. But the owners of the 1913 V nickels and most of the 1804 dollars don't actually own them. So what normally happens when someone sells something they don't actually own?

Agreed

Can't use that Jury finding in deciding whether the government was obligated to pursue the forfeiture action. That decision wasn't made until well after the government was obligated to act on the forfeiture request. At the time the request was made the coins had not been determined to be government property. The government felt they were, but there had never been any actual decision that they were. The decision on the forfeiture action should have been made on the grounds that at the time ownership of the coins had NOT been established. Instead them made it retroactively on ownership decided at a later date.

I will agree though that it is over now. The SC will not hear the case and there is no other appeal. Right or wrong this is the final decision.

 

This is a misunderstanding of the application of precedent. Judges, on the whole, are supposed to avoid setting precedent in law, as doing so can often be considered as politically motivated. As such, when decisions are made that have no precedent, they're often categorized in a way to avoid setting precedent.

In the case of the 1933 Double Eagle, they've been confiscated continuously by the US Government since Mar 1944 or so. The only reason the Farouk coin was never confiscated was it was already out of the country and in King Farouk's possession. The key element of why the Farouk case doesn't really establish precedent was the 29 Feb 1944 export license issued to a representative of Egypt by the Treasury Secretary. Essentially, the license, an official US Government document, established that the coin could be removed from the country, but didn't *really* release ownership of the coin. This is why the split auction proceeds agreement was made. Fenton could never sell the coin without consent of the US Government, but the Government _also_ had illegally confiscated it. The agreement to a single sale via auction seemed a reasonable compromise.

In that decision, it established that the only legally released copy of the 1933 Double Eagle is the Farouk-Fenton piece. Any other coins sold by or possessed by Israel Switt would be considered stolen property. Just because Switt died doesn't grant his daughter (Joan Langbord) any legal authority to ownership of stolen property.

If the Langbords were offered any compensation, that would be insane. Why should/would the US Government reward Switt for distributing stolen US property?

 

In the Circuit Court opinion the court laid out the 1933 timeline. They gave great weight to the proclamation of March 6, two days after inauguration. Also, the fact that the jury determined that title always belonged to the government IS dispositive here because it justifies the Mint's seizure, and made formal forfeiture proceedings unnecessary. The jury's finding is indispensable here. The craziness was Judge Rendell's who held that the government must initiate forfeiture proceedings even when the government both owns and possesses the property. Insane!

 

The only thing that militates for SOME compensation is the fact that the 1933's were not purely stolen; but rather surreptitiously exchanged for earlier dates. This seems clear from the contemporary investigation by the Secret Service.

 

Let me see if I understand. In order to get the 1933's they exchanged older gold of the same face and bullion value for them? Obviously with malice, although I'm not accusing just an assumption. So they paid for the coins in question even though the coins shouldn't have been available for exchange. If that is the case then they could be entitled to reimbursement of the bullion value of the coins if there was no malicious intent in the beginning which would be hard to prove, and if the mint made these coins available to them for exchange even malice would be hard to prove. Thus the family could say it's just an honest mistake on the Governments part by giving us the coins in the first place and we feel we should be reimbursed the value of the coins exchanged at today's market value along with the expense of the safe deposit box we used to safely store them as well as any time and effort put into to returning them to the FBI or whomever they returned them to. Right or Wrong?

 

It's hard to characterize it as right or wrong (above my pay grade for sure), but you are absolutely correct in that the argument goes that way. Apparently, this sort of date swap was something close to standard operating procedure when new dates became available each year (before 1933).

 

Can we please just stop it with this kind of rhetoric designed to scare and/or alarm the hobby? C'mon Conder, you know better than that. None of those pieces are implicated by this precedent whatsoever. The precedent will obviously apply to any pieces the government has assiduously consistently sought to recover, yes. If you have any Martha Washington test strikes, beware. Ditto 1964-D Peace dollars and 1974 (D or P) aluminum cents. There is now a de facto zero tolerance regime in place for coins not issued from now on. Act accordingly. But the pieces that the government has never sought to recover, like the 1913 V's, and the 1804 dollars? No. Stop it. Laches prevents any action. That said, I WISH the government could snag them, but they just can't.

lach·es
[ˈlaCHəz]

1. law
   unreasonable delay in making an assertion or claim, such as asserting a right, claiming a privilege, or making an application for redress, which may result in refusal.

ORIGIN
late Middle English (in the sense ‘slackness, negligence’): from Old French laschesse, from lasche ‘loose, lax,’ based on Latin laxus. The current sense dates from the late 16th cent.
RELATED FORMS
laches (noun)

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