The 1933 Double Eagle twenty-dollar gold piece became a rarity and subsequently the most expensive U. S. coin collectible in history because the United States abandoned the gold standard in 1933. The Great Depression caused President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 6102 in order to bolster the fragile banking system.
Despite having minted nearly a half million of the 1933 Gold Double Eagle coins, nearly all of these gold coins were melted down as a result of the president's order and the subsequent Gold Reserve Act of 1934, which forbade the use and circulation of gold coins. The only two such coins that were supposed to survive were the two held back by the U. S. Mint for donation to the U.S. National Numismatic Collection.
However, at least twenty of the 1933 Double Eagles were stolen, perhaps by George McCann, a cashier at the Mint. Via intermediary Israel Switt, a jeweler from Philadelphia, these coins have been disseminated to collectors. Apart from their imposed rarity, these coins are also a beautiful example of the work of famed engraver, Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
These coins' existence were largely unknown until the federal government began an investigation in 1944 to recover them. Just ahead of this investigation, Egyptian King Farouk applied for and was granted an export license from the U. S. Treasury to export one of the 1933 twenty-dollar gold pieces to Egypt after having arranged for its purchase. This was an example of bureaucratic breakdown of communication within the United States government, as the government tried many times after that point to recover the coin.
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In 2005, the Secret Service was able to recover ten of the $20 Double Eagles from Israel Switt's family. Ironically, neither Switt, McCann, nor any other suspected accomplices to the theft were able to be prosecuted, since the government failed to act prior to the expiration of the Statute of Limitations.
A legal battle has continued to rage concerning the legal title to those remaining outstanding 1933 Double Eagles and the ability of the publice to possess them at all. A possible enabling circumstance is the fact that there was a narrow window of time after the first minting of the Double Eagle coin and the issuance of Roosevelt's Executive Order. While mint records do show show the distribution of any of these coins during that period, some who posses them mske that claim.
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