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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Lehigh96, post: 604070, member: 15309&quot;]There is a book written on the subject called ILLEGAL TENDER by David Tripp.&nbsp; A must read for any Numismatist IMO.&nbsp; Anyway, here is a passage from the Author&#039;s Note at the end of the book that should settle this debate.</p><p><i><br /></i></p><p><i>Within the coin collecting circles it was generally assumed that a few of the coins had legitmately slipped into circulation despite the government&#039;s arguments to the contrary.&nbsp; It was also assumed that the government&#039;s sole cause for rounding them up and tarring them illegal was as part of FDR&#039;s general recall of all gold coins and abandonment of the gold standard.&nbsp; As his laws were rewritten and over the next half century and private ownership of gold once again legalized, it was theorized, in numismatic circles, that this would similarly legitimize ownership of any 1933 double eagles that might, somehow, have eluded the keen eyes of the Secret Service.</i></p><p><i><br /></i></p><p><i>I, too, accepted this interpretation of history until the United States Government signed a contract with Sotheby&#039;s to sell the coin at auction and enormous piles of legal documents, depositions, and archival Secret Service reports were made available to Sotheby&#039;s and Stack&#039;s for research. </i></p><p><i><br /></i></p><p><i>What a shock it was.&nbsp; I was Sotheby&#039;s Special Consultant on the auction, and when those of us charged with researching the story for the auction catalogue read those documents, we were in unanimous and virtually instantaneous agreement that the long-accepted assumptions bore little relationship to what had actually happened seventy years previously.&nbsp; <span style="color: Blue">The legality of the 1933 double eagle no longer hinged on legal subtleties and oral tradition.&nbsp; It had been the target of a serious Secret Service investigation that concluded that all of the 1933 double eagles had been stolen from the United States Mint.&nbsp; That was the reason for the sixty years of unrelenting attention.</span></i></p><p><i><br /></i></p><p><i>But the reason for the half-century of numismatic misunderstanding was quite simply the government&#039;s fault:&nbsp; it never explained to the coin collecting fraternity that the 1933 double eagle was deemed illegal because it was stolen property.&nbsp; Had it done so, Steve Fenton would undoubtedly have avoided the coin like the plague--and I would have no book.</i></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>So the real reason and the generally accepted reasons are different.&nbsp; I urge everyone to read that book, you won&#039;t be disappointed.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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