?Talk about fortuitous timing. Within six minutes of each other on the same day, two items popped up in my Outlook Inbox that shine a hopeful light on a dark corner that afflicts our collecting community — numismatic crime. 

From Doug Davis, founder and operator of the Numismatic Crime Information Center, comes a message reporting on the good work NCIC does (see his letter on the page opposite this Editorial). Davis is both a coin collector and a professional law enforcement officer. He is currently mayor of Pantego, Texas, and also served as the community’s chief of police.

Thirty years ago, in 1987, he “established the Numismatic Crime Information Center within the Pantego Police Department to assist law enforcement officers in the investigation of crimes against collectors and dealers. Later that same year he was instrumental in assisting the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the development of the National Stolen Coin File,” notes the history of NCIC published at its website.

For two decades, Doug has been instrumental in working with the numismatic and law enforcement communities to report and investigate numismatic crimes. He has a network of more than 6,000 contacts, and whenever a crime is reported to the NCIC, he sends out email alerts to his network. His letter published in this week’s issue includes one of the many success stories NCIC can boast of over the years.

Whenever a reader contacts me with a sad tale that they have been burglarized or robbed of their collection, I do not hesitate to direct them to contact Doug for assistance. I do not have to do this often, fortunately, but it is a relief to know that help is available for the victims of numismatic crime.

A few minutes after I received the email from NCIC, Donn Pearlman, on behalf of the Professional Numismatists Guild, sent me an email announcing that a member dealer of the PNG (who shall remain anonymous by choice) had aided in the arrest of two men who have since been charged with a crime.

According to Pearlman, “A long-time member of the Professional Numismatists Guild ... assisted the Federal Bureau of Investigation in solving a case involving an attempt by suspected thieves to purchase $2 million of gold using a bank check with the forged signature of a deceased New York City woman.”

According to court documents, the two men stand accused of preying “on a deceased New Yorker’s estate by stealing millions in stock certificates from her home.  Then, in an attempt to cover their tracks, the defendants allegedly sold the certificates and tried to purchase more than $2 million in gold coins so that the ill-gotten gains couldn’t be traced to them.”

The dealer said the two men who contacted him were unsophisticated about buying gold. “This just smelled bad,” he said. He contacted the FBI who conducted an investigation and eventually made the arrests.

When numismatic crime happens, it is good to know that organizations like NCIC and PNG exist, and are there to help the victims and the authorities who investigate the crimes.

Forty years ago this month, in the summer of 1977, a Coin World reader sent the editorial staff a coin reportedly pulled from a roll of mixed cents acquired for making change at the finder’s swap shop. The coin was stunning in appearance and potentially the biggest discovery in years — an overdate 1977/6 Lincoln cent.

An overdate results when a numeral (or numerals) is punched or hubbed over another numeral. While during the early history of the U.S. Mint, overdates were a fairly frequent occurrence, by the 20th century, such varieties were rarely produced. In fact, the last confirmed overdates known in 1977 were produced during World War II and both were on 10-cent coins: the 1941/1 and 1942/1-D Winged Liberty Head dimes (the 1943/2-P Jefferson 5-cent coin had not been found yet).

Our preliminary examination of the cent gave us hope that it might be real but we held off on publication until we could consult with expert help. It was decided that we would submit the cent to the Bureau of the Mint’s technical experts for their review and possible authentication. Remember, 1977 was in the early days of third-party authentication, with the American Numismatic Association Certification Service in its infancy, and although its main authenticator, the deeply respected Ed Fleischmann, in fact had been a Coin World employee until the previous fall, we decided to consult with the experts who presumably had struck the coin.

On rare occasion, Coin World editor Margo Russell would reach out to Mint officials and ask them to examine a coin for us; that’s what she did this time. On July 1, we received the Mint’s verdict, though it was preliminary. Dr. Alan J. Goldman, the Mint’s assistant director for technology, and Dr. George E. Hunter, chief of the assay division, had reviewed the coin and thought it genuine.

Goldman and Hunter were two of the most knowledgeable individuals regarding coinage production in the country. Based on their expertise, Coin World published a Page One article in its July 13, 1977, issue announcing the find. We did report that the judgment was preliminary; the two experts wanted to consult with one more Mint expert before rendering a final decision. That would not occur until July 5 at the earliest.

After the Independence Day break, the Mint’s Technical Laboratory’s third expert, Tom Jurich, arrived back at the Washington, D.C., headquarters (he had been testifying in a counterfeiting case) and examined the coin. He agreed with his colleagues that the coin was genuine. Coin World received the happy news on July 5 that it was the unanimous opinion of the Mint experts that the coin was a genuine Mint product. The next day, everything fell apart.

On July 6, the Mint technicians journeyed from Mint headquarters to the Philadelphia Mint where they did some additional testing that led them to reverse their decision. They said that they were able to replicate the process outside of the normal die-making process by creating an artificial die. While they would not disclose how they made the artificial die, they did share that the process was similar to how fake dies had been created to produce counterfeit “double dies” and “over struck” coins that became the subject of several trials in the 1960s.

Goldman told Coin World that the 1977/6 fake was good. “It had everyone fooled for a while,” he said. Jurich said the areas around the bottom back of Lincoln’s shoulder on the obverse and around three letters in AMERICA held clues to the coin being fake.

By this time, the news published in the July 13 issue had spread and offers were being made for additional examples at prices as high as $200. Goldman said that as long as additional examples did not enter the numismatic marketplace, the Secret Service would not be interested. However, he was premature in that assessment.

Coin World reported the reversal of the Mint’s assessment of the coin in its July 20 issue.

Not long after, Mint officials informed Coin World that the fake overdate cent would not be returned but instead had been turned over to the Secret Service. Agents from the Cincinnati office of the Secret Service came to Coin World’s offices in Sidney, Ohio, on July 12 to confiscate another coin that had been sent to us along with correspondence. We objected to the Mint’s decision, noting that by not returning the cent to us, they were violating a longtime agreement between the government and the publication. We had no choice, however, but to comply with the Secret Service’s confiscation of the coins.

On July 17, Secret Service agents from the Tampa, Florida, office arrested two men in connection with the production of the fake 1977/6 Lincoln cent. An additional 17 altered coins were confiscated along with the paraphernalia to manufacture them. The men were charged with violating counterfeiting laws by being in possession of a counterfeit die. Ultimately, the man who had sent us the fake overdate was sentenced to probation for violating federal laws.

For a brief time, though, the hobby thought that the best die variety in decades had been identified, and the market was hopeful that more pieces would be found. It was not meant to be.

Over my four decades as a Coin World staff member, I have received thousands of phone calls, from readers and nonreaders alike, asking questions about coins or items in their possession, or seeking advice on how to collect, or providing us tips on stories.

Some calls came in waves. For example, any time that a bronze 1943 Lincoln cent appeared at auction and was covered by the mainstream media, I prepared for a lot of calls from noncollectors with 1943 steel cents who thought they had one of the rare ones (since a steel cent is unlike any other Lincoln cent in appearance, one cannot blame callers for their excitement). I also talked to callers with what they thought were rare early U.S. coins like a 1787 Brasher doubloon or an 1804 Draped Bust dollar. I can say that in all of those calls, not a single one ever resulted in the discovery of a new example of a 1943 bronze cent or Brasher doubloon or 1804 dollar.

One call in mid-1994, however, revealed the existence of a U.S. coin that no one had ever heard about before, and that an official U.S. Mint/Treasury Department report claimed was never struck.

I took the call in June (I believe) of 1994. It began like any other call, with the speaker saying that he had something rare — five 1974 Lincoln cents of an unusual composition. I was, of course, familiar with the Mint’s 1973 experiments in alternative compositions that resulted in the 1974 aluminum cent. But that wasn’t what the reader said he had; it was something unexpected — a 1974 Lincoln cent struck on a bronze-clad steel planchet.

The caller, a retired steel worker, told me a fantastic story of how United States Mint officials, with a contingent of Mint police on hand, arrived at the Alan Wood Steel Co. in Pennsylvania 20 years earlier, in 1974. According to the caller, at least 40 bags of the experimental pieces — 200,000 pieces or more — were destroyed in one of the mill’s furnaces.

But not all of the pieces were destroyed, according to the source.

At least nine and as many as a dozen 1974 Lincoln cent experimental pieces struck on the bronze-clad steel planchets reportedly survived the furnace.

According to the source, the bags of experimental cents were shoved down a chute from the third floor to a basic oxygen furnace on the second floor. The source said the cents were under heavy guard by five Mint guards.

As the bags were being placed onto a lift to be transported to the chute, one bag fell to the floor and burst open, scattering the experimental pieces across the floor. The Mint guards made the employees move away from the spilled cents as they swept them up for melting. 

According to the source, as the cents from the burst bag poured down the chute, a gust of wind blowing through the plant picked up 10 to 12 pieces and blew them onto the floor of the furnace, which had not yet gone into operation. Despite the presence of the Mint guards, some employees managed to snatch up some of the coins, apparently without the guards noticing. The five pieces possessed by the source came from those dozen or so survivors. Another three pieces may exist in burnt condition in the possession of other mill employees.

The caller’s story was rich in detail and I immediately felt that I was onto a possible blockbuster article. I asked him to send Coin World the best example of the five cents in his possession so we could examine it.

When the piece arrived and I had an opportunity to examine it, I was immediately convinced that it was genuine. While I had been waiting on the reader’s coin to arrive in our offices, I had grabbed our copy of the December 1973 Alternative Materials for One-Cent Coinage, the official report of the Mint’s experiments in alternative compositions. At the time, the price of copper was so high that the Mint was losing money on every cent it struck, and that was considered unacceptable.

The 1,579,324 aluminum experimental cents struck in 1973 using standard 1974-dated cent dies were well known. The report also had details about another promising composition that was tested — a bronze-clad steel composition, with two outer layers of 90 percent copper and 10 percent zinc bonded to low-grade steel. There was just one problem. According to the report, no bronze-clad steel pieces were struck using standard Lincoln cent dies. When testing began, what are called “nonsense dies” were used to strike various experimental pieces. As the report stated, “The nonsense dies were designed to simulate the actual penny dies with regard to relief and location of images and lettering. In this way, coining characteristics of the alloys could be compared relative to one another without creating a large number of potentially valuable numismatic oddities. ... Finally, 1974 cent dies were used to strike a carefully controlled number of aluminum alloy coins.”

When the caller’s cent arrived, I compared it to the description in the official report and it matched. It was made of two outer layers of copper with a core of gray metal. The piece stuck to a magnet, what you would expect of a coin with a steel core. The designs looked good and when compared to the designs of a regular 1974 Lincoln cent, they were identical. I was convinced on the evidence — the coin that I had in hand and the caller’s very convincing story — that the piece was something heretofore unexpected — a 1974 cent struck on one of the bronze-clad steel planchets that the Mint had admitted that it had tested, though not with cent dies.

Coin World published the article in the July 4, 1994, issue as the main story on Page 1. Here are the introductory paragraphs to my article:

“An experimental 1974 Lincoln cent struck on a bronze-clad steel planchet — a piece a 1973 Treasury publication says was never produced, has surfaced — and with a source who claims a quarter million or more of them were destroyed by Mint officials 20 years ago.

“Coin World has examined a 1974 Lincoln cent struck on a bronze-clad steel planchet that appears to be a genuine U.S. Mint experimental piece. It matches the description of planchets produced and tested in 1973, and mentioned in various Department of Treasury reports discussing alternative cent compositions.

“This is the first indication that specimens of experimental 1974 Lincoln cents struck on other than aluminum planchets survived. Previously, it was thought that only specimens of the more famous 1974 aluminum experimental pieces had escaped destruction.”

I described the coin for readers:

“At first glance, the coin appears to be a normal 1974 Lincoln cent. In fact, the obverse and reverse are indistinguishable from a standard Lincoln cent in color and texture, even under high magnification.

“However, when one examines the edge, it becomes immediately apparent that the piece is not a normal Lincoln cent. The steel core is visible along the edge as a grayish band between layers of bronze.

“Most spectacularly, the coin is attracted to a magnet because of its steel core. The standard copper-zinc cent is not.”

In an accompanying article that I wrote from additional official sources for the same issue of Coin World, I explained why the Mint rejected the bronze-clad steel composition:

“According to the 1974 Annual Report of the Director of the Mint, ‘Several alternative alloys and clad materials were tested on a laboratory scale and the most promising materials, an aluminum alloy, a 70 percent copper-30 percent zinc alloy, and gilding metal clad steel were subjected to short production runs.’

“The December 1973 Alternative Materials for One-Cent Coinage, a federal government report published by the Department of the Treasury, details how the bronze-clad steel experimental cents proved to be a failure in just one critical area that doomed it as an alternative. The composition failed in the category of ease of coin fabrication.

“However, it received B\+, B and B-grades in all other categories. In fact, in the eight categories in which each composition was tested, bronze-clad steel bested the preferred aluminum composition in two (general public acceptability and coin machine acceptability) and equaled aluminum in three other categories (durability, present availability of metals and long-range in-house production feasibility).

“Bronze-clad steel was rated lower than aluminum in the categories of ease of coin fabrication, present cost and long-range seigniorage protection.

“Mint Director Mary Brooks, testifying before Congress on March 27, 1974, said a bronze-clad steel cent is ‘a very expensive proposition, and the die life, because of its hard composition would be a fourth to an eighth of that we are presently experiencing. We would get about 100,000 to 150,000 strikes: we did get on the bronze-clad steel. We are now experiencing over 600,000 strikes on our present die.’

“Brooks said the need to change dies more frequently to strike bronze-clad steel cents would result in less press time and cent shortages.”

The publication of the two articles, as you expect, generated a great deal of excitement in the collector community.

In my next blog, I will detail how I got Mint officials to confirm that such pieces had been struck, whether any others survived, the steps I took to protect my source and Coin World from becoming involved in a possible confiscation of the caller’s coins, and how I asked the Mint for confirmation of a statement from a Mint official that the bronze-clad steel cents would be legal to collect.

?I think it safe to say that 2016 was a life-changing year, both in the numismatic com­munity and the nation at large. Some of our Top 10 Stories of 2016 represent those changes.

?One hundred years this month, Bureau of the Mint officials in Washington and Philadelphia were busy trying to fulfill what they believed to be a statutory requirement to replace the existing designs of the dime, quarter dollar, and half dollar.

Charles Barber’s designs for those three silver coins were introduced in 1892 and thus celebrated their 25th anniversary in 1916. That anniversary was important, at least in the views of Mint officials, thanks to an 1890 law. That law was intended to prevent the frequent redesign of U.S. coinage; under the law, Mint officials were prohibited from redesigning a coin unless it had been in use for 25 years, though the Mint could seek congressional approval for a waver to the rule.

By 1915, however, Mint officials had inter­preted the act as requiring design changes every 25 years, not permitting the changes. This interpretation was a misreading of the law and Mint officials were under no requirement to change the Barber designs.

In 1916, though, Mint officials were nine years into a massive redesign of the coinage that had begun in 1907, all for coins whose designs were well past the 25-year “mandatory requirement” — the $10 eagle and $20 double eagle in 1907, the $2.50 quarter eagle and $5 half eagle in 1908, the cent in 1909, and the 5-cent coin in 1913. Redesigning the three lowest denominations of four silver coins would have made sense in 1916 even without the misinterpretation of the 1890 act.

As Coin World has reported throughout this centennial year in our news coverage of the gold centennial versions of the three 1916 silver coins, the resultant designs are the most attractive of the three denominations — the Winged Liberty Head dime, the Standing Liberty quarter dollar, and the Walking Liberty half dollar. And yet, as December 1916 began, officials were close to missing their self-imposed goal.

Numismatist Roger Burdette has done a masterful job of reporting on the 1916 redesign  effort in the final volume of his Renaissance of American Coinage trilogy, a series that belongs on every numismatist’s bookshelf, so we will not attempt to retell the entire story here. We’ll just note that the dime had not been released until Oct. 30, and as December 1916 began, officials had yet to finalize the designs for the quarter dollar and half dollar. However, by the end of the month the Mint had succeeded in striking small numbers of the two larger coins, though neither would be released until early 1917. The wait, however, was well worth it — the three 1916 silver coins are beautiful, and the 1916 quarter dollar and 1916-D dime are the key dates for their respective series.

So, do you think the 2016 gold versions will be as popular in the future as the originals?

?Sixty years ago this month, teens were rocking to Bill Haley and His Comets singing “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock” and Pat Boone’s “Ain’t That a Shame.” Dad and Mom were listening to Mitch Miller’s “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” In movie houses and at the drive-ins, moviegoers were watching William Holden woo Jennifer Jones in Love is a Many-Splendored Thing while in The Man From Laramie, Jimmy Stewart faced down a gunrunner selling rifles to the Apaches.

In Nevada, at Yucca Flats, the U.S. military was continuing to study the damage done to “Survival Town” by a series of 14 atomic bomb blasts conducted during the previous spring.

In the Northeast, residents were still cleaning up from Hurricane Diane, whose torrential rains in August had flooded vast swaths of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and New England, killing more than 180 people. 

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In the die shop of the Philadelphia Mint, an employee installing a partially hubbed obverse die failed to check the alignment with the hub. 

The die sailed through the inspection process, somehow, and was installed in a press on the coining floor of the Mint. The facility was operating a 12-hour shift seven days a week to meet the huge demand for cents. A new 1-cent cigarette tax had just been enacted in Pennsylvania to pay for the damage from Diane.

At the Mint, an employee checking the latest batch of cents finally noticed something was amiss with some of the coins, from one press, after about 40,000 had been struck. Approximately 24,000 of the cents from that production run were already mixed in with other cents. After some consideration, the Mint decided to ship the error cents that were mixed with the others, since the need for cents was so acute, but melt the rest. Not long after, collectors began to notice the odd-looking cents, many found tucked in cigarette packs.

Happy birthday to the 1955 Lincoln, Doubled Die Obverse cent! 

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