Posted on 07/07/2011 5:00:53 PM PDT by Orange1998
A jeweler's heirs are fighting the United States government for the right to keep a batch of rare and valuable "Double Eagle" $20 coins that date back to the Franklin Roosevelt administration. It's just the latest coin controversy to make headlines.
Philadelphian Joan Langbord and her sons say they found the 10 coins in 2003 in a bank deposit box kept by Langbord's father, Israel Switt, a jeweler who died in 1990. But when they tried to have the haul authenticated by the U.S. Treasury, the feds, um, flipped.
They said the coins were stolen from the U.S. Mint back in 1933, and are the government's property. The Treasury Department seized the coins, and locked them away at Fort Knox. The court battle is set to kick off this week.
The rare coins (pictured), first struck in 1850, show a flying eagle on one side and a figure representing liberty on the other. One such coin recently sold at auction for $7.6 million, meaning the Langbords' trove could be worth as much as $80 million.
The coins are part of a batch that were struck but then melted down after President Roosevelt took the country off the gold standard in 1933, during the Great Depression. Two were given to the Smithsonian Institution*, but a few more mysteriously escaped.
The government has long believed that Switt schemed with a corrupt cashier at the Mint to swipe the coins. They note that the deposit box in which the coins were found was rented six years after Switt's death, and that the family never paid inheritance tax on the coins.
A lawyer for the Langbords counters that the coins could have left the Mint legally since it was permissible to swap gold coins for gold bullion.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Putting gold in front of the US Treasury is like putting raw steak in front of a hungry dog.
Doesn't sound like due process was served... I guess that's what happens when nothing is certain, but death and taxes.
Hopefully the family gets something out of this except a punch in the face.
This is the kind of ‘change’ Obama was talking about....soon he will be rifling around in everyone’s couches and old hand bags....lol.
Watch them end up in Mr. Soros’ safe deposit box.
That’s obvious..
This reminds me of a guy I went to high school with. He embarked on a little illegal import business that was very lucrative. When the Feds caught up with him he had a very nice home, boats, cars, all the goodies. They confiscated everything and sent him to club Fed and when he got out, they handed him a bill from the IRS that exceeded 125k. They "estimated" his earnings and figured how much he should have paid in income tax. Last I heard, he was still paying an attorney to sort through it. Crime doesn't pay (unless you're the IRS).
Look you have no property rights. You never did. The government can take what it wants and you have to take it. Nothing new here. Time to move on.
He's waiting for the neighbor to move so he can buy the house and pretend he just discovered them.
“Give what back?”
If the gubmint winds up with these coins and keeps them, they would be worth no more than, quite literally, their weight in gold.
If the gubmint left them in the hands of Ms Langbord they would be sold, taxes could be collected each time they were sold thereafter.
So the bully could make a few hundred right now, or millions into the future.
A court will have to sort this out.
Was it truly stolen? I am not sure I believe the government.
All we know is that the government alleges the coins are stolen, and the lawyer for the Langfords will argue that they were not. The legal standard will be “by a preponderance of the evidence” (not “beyond a reasonable doubt”).
Ok, so you’re stupid enough to ask the gov’t to do the authentication.....
I.Q. = 80
How dumb do you have to be to give them ALL OF THEM?????
I.Q. = 5
You're right on the first point. We have no property rights. Once upon a time, though, we did. We let them go.
“Look you have no property rights.”
If only they had kept the original wording of the Declaration of Independence: “...life, liberty, and the pursuit of property...”
We need a constitutional amendment limiting the government’s power to confiscate property.
But think for a minute how dumb the US Treasury is.
If the US wins this, they get to keep 10 1-oz coins that have a bullion value to them of $15,000.
If they let the people keep the coins and sell them, they get to collect millions of $ in inheritance taxes on them.
DUMB and DUMBER
Since when is the government in the coin authentication business? There are private coin grading/authentication agencies that perform this function.
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