A Coin Is Historic, Priceless and No Longer in a Vault

Richard Perry/The New York Times David N. Redden, vice chairman of Sotheby’s, carried a briefcase holding a 1933 gold coin, known as a double eagle, out of the Federal Reserve Bank in Lower Manhattan on Monday. The coin, which is regarded as the world’s most valuable, was transported by armed guards to the New-York Historical Society where it was to be put  on exhibit.

Richard Perry/The New York Times The double eagle coin escaped being destroyed when President Franklin D. Roosevelt took the  United States off the gold standard.

For 10 months, the world’s most valuable coin sat wrapped in plastic on a folding chair in a little cagelike compartment behind a bright blue door at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It was only a step or two away from billions of dollars’ worth of neatly stacked bars of gold bullion.

On Monday, a man in a dark suit stashed the coin in his briefcase and coolly walked out of the Fed’s heavily guarded limestone-and-sandstone building, a couple of blocks from the New York Stock Exchange in Lower Manhattan. He nodded politely to the guards on the front steps of the Fed. They did not stop him.

The man with the briefcase, David N. Redden, an auction-house executive, was not pulling off a heist. He was taking the coin on a 6.7-mile ride to the New-York Historical Society on Central Park West.

“It’s history,” Louise Mirrer, the president of the historical society, said of the coin after Mr. Redden had turned it over to curators who fitted it into a display case. “We have lots of priceless objects, but it’s always exciting to have the most valuable anything.”

The coin is valuable â€" Mr. Redden auctioned it at Sotheby’s for $7,590,020 in 2002, at the time the highest price any coin has ever sold for â€" because it should not exist. That is why it has inspired four books, a documentary for the Smithsonian Channel and an episode of the cable-television drama “The Closer.”

Known to coin collectors as a double eagle because it was worth twice as much as a $10 eagle gold piece, it was struck in 1933, the year in which President Franklin D. Roosevelt took the United States off the gold standard. He also ordered that year’s run of $20 pieces destroyed, except for two that were earmarked for the Smithsonian Institution.

The double eagle that Mr. Redden put in his briefcase somehow escaped that fate. It apparently made its way to Egypt and back, and was seized by the Secret Service in a sting operation at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in 1996.

Compared to all that, the trip to the historical society was somewhat short on drama. The crowd-pleasing chaos of “Die Hard With a Vengeance,” a Bruce Willis movie with a bad guy who broke into the Fed underground after a subway crash and made off with lots of gold in a dump truck? No. Mr. Redden made off with a tiny amount of gold â€" the double eagle is only 34 millimeters wide and weighs just under an ounce â€" in a black sports-utility vehicle with an armed former police officer at the wheel and another in the front passenger seat.

“For collectors,” he said as the S.U.V. barreled up the West Side Highway, “it’s almost a mystical experience to look at it.” He said this while looking at an almost identical double eagle, one from 1923 that did not have to be destroyed because it had been in circulation. He carries that coin with him everywhere, the way other people carry their cellphones. (He has one of those, too.)

Some coin experts consider the 1933 double eagle the Mona Lisa of coins. Steve Roach, the editor of Coin World magazine, suggested a slightly different description: “The Hope Diamond of American numismatics.” It is the only 1933 double eagle that someone can own legally. On one side of the coin is Liberty, “her hair whipping in the wind,” in the words of David Tripp, who wrote about the double eagle. On the other side is an eagle patterned after the image on pennies issued a couple of years before the Civil War.

“There are few coins that can capture the public’s imagination in the way that this coin can,” Mr. Roach said. “It’s a unique combination of beauty, desirability and mystery. It’s so rare, but it has such an interesting back story.”

One element of the back story, he said, is the current owner, who has never been identified. “It’s one of the wonderful mysteries of coin collecting, who bought that coin,” Mr. Roach said.

Mr. Redden described the owner as “a fabulous collector who was completely captivated by the story of the coin,” but not a coin collector.

“After he bought it, he said, ‘I don’t want to take it home, I don’t want to put it in a bank vault â€" what should I do with it?’” Mr. Redden recalled. “I said the Fed is planning a show. It was the star of that show for years.”

But last fall, the Fed sent the coin off to the vault. “The owner is interested in letting the public see it,” Mr. Redden said. The historical society beckoned, and the two security men followed Mr. Redden from the S.U.V. through the society’s back door. They watched as exhibition designers polished its case and tested the alarm, just in case.

“I don’t know what the threat level on this particular item is, because if they steal it, who’s going to buy it?” one of the security men, Louis Guiliano, said. “If you can’t fence the coin, it’s not valuable. It’s only valuable if you can get someone to pay you.”

Richard Perry/The New York Times Bianne Muscente, left, and Lizzie Wright (right) eased the coin into its display case after its safe arrival at the historical society.