People in the U.S. were hoarding gold. It was undermining the nation's financial system. And FDR, almost as soon as he became president, within a couple of days, took us, by executive order, off the gold standard.
The U.S. government recognized that the 1933 Double Eagle was in that collection, and they officially asked the Egyptian government to pull it from the sale and return it as stolen property of the United States.
We hear about the ones that are selling but in fact there are many others that are also collecting and they generally do it very quietly.
Like a traveler encountering a succession of mountain ranges we found the scope of our project seeming to expand with every step we took.
The irony of ironies is, in order to make this coin totally legal and totally monetized, the buyer will have to give, in addition to millions of dollars it costs to buy it, $20 -- a $20 bill -- to go back to the Treasury.
Coins are not money until it's monetized -- until the Treasury says they're money. They weren't legal to spend. It was simply a bright gold round disc. They were by order of the Treasury in 1937, melted down.
The Secret Service -- ever passionate, ever diligent, not letting their man go -- created a sting operation, seized the coin, and actually put poor Mr. Fenton in jail.
In 1944, we were in the middle of a world war, and Egypt stood at the crossroads in the middle of the Mediterranean. It was not, perhaps, precisely the right moment in diplomatic history to go and try to make a claim on a coin.
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