"Bootleg" Liberty Nickel coin up for auction

[Dread_Pirate_Mel]

Heritage is auctioning what we poster collectors would consider a "bootleg" Liberty Nickel:

CBSNews.com: Rare 1913 Liberty Head nickel expected to fetch millions at auction



A humble 5-cent coin with a storied past is headed to auction and bidding is expected to top $2 million a century after it was mysteriously minted.

The 1913 Liberty Head nickel is one of only five known to exist, but it's the coin's back story that adds to its cachet: It was surreptitiously and illegally cast, discovered in a car wreck that killed its owner, declared a fake, forgotten in a closet for decades and then found to be the real deal.....

It all adds up to an expected sale of $2.5 million or more when it goes on the auction block this spring in suburban Chicago.

"Basically, a coin with a story and a rarity will trump everything else," said Douglas Mudd, curator of the American Numismatic Association Money Museum in Colorado Springs, Colo., which has held the coin for most of the past 10 years. He expects it could fetch more than Heritage Auction's estimate, perhaps $4 million and even up to $5 million.

"A lot of this is ego," he said of collectors who could bid for it. "'I have one of these and nobody else does."'

The sellers who will split the money equally are four Virginia siblings who never let the coin slip from their hands, even when it was deemed a fake.

The nickel made its debut in a most unusual way. It was struck at the Philadelphia mint in late 1912, the final year of its issue, but with the year 1913 cast on its face — the same year the beloved Buffalo Head nickel was introduced.

Mudd said a mint worker named Samuel W. Brown is suspected of producing the coin and altering the die to add the bogus date.

The coins' existence weren't known until Brown offered them for sale at the American Numismatic Association Convention in Chicago in 1920, beyond the statute of limitations. The five remained together under various owners until the set was broken up in 1942.

[enki]

My money (no pun intended) is on the Secret Service suspending the auction on the grounds of them selling counterfeit US currency. They'll spend millions of tax dollars on manpower and legal fees taking the case to court. In the end, they'll win (as they usually do, no matter the cost) and will return the nickel to the US Mint to be destroyed.