Small Change, Big Haul - What would you do with 29,000 pounds of coins?
1st American Reserve wanted to post this interesting piece that was written by the late great writer, Ed Reiter, of things to do with coins and numismatics.
Reiter had suggested that the article might be called the 21st-century version of buried treasure.
Reiter suggested that it might be called the 21st-century version of buried treasure.
FBI agents investigating a missing Federal Reserve coin shipment struck paydirt – literally – on Feb. 4, 2005, when they dug up 676 bags of nickels, containing more than 2.7 million coins, behind a stable on a farm outside Miami, Florida. The coins weighed more than 29,000 pounds, or nearly 15 tons.
A truck hauling 900 bags of nickels – 3.6 million coins with a total face value of $180,000 – had left a storage facility in East Rutherford, New Jersey on Dec. 17, bound for the Fed’s subdistrict bank in New Orleans. When it failed to arrive as scheduled Dec. 20, authorities went looking for it.
They found it Dec. 22 at a truck stop in Fort Pierce, Florida. But it was empty. And the driver, Ricardo Mendoza, was nowhere to be found. As of mid-February, Mendoza – now suspected of stealing the coins – was still missing, as were the remaining 224 bags of nickels, worth $44,800 face.
What does all this have to do with numismatics? Little or nothing, at first glance.
It’s unclear whether the shipment consisted entirely of brand-new coins, but surely almost all of them were common, late-date Jefferson nickels with little or no value as collectibles. It would be delusional to think there were bags or rolls of earlier nickels mixed in, the way some bags of Seated Liberty dollars turned up in U.S. Treasury vaults, hidden behind the Morgans, during the silver rush of the early 1960s. It’s highly unlikely that even scarcer Jeffersons – say, 1950-D’s – were among them, other than perhaps a few isolated pieces.
Still, it’s fascinating – and instructive from a hobby standpoint – to study the way law-enforcement agencies went about tracking down the missing coins. And it’s more than a little intriguing to contemplate the might-have-beens if earlier, scarcer coins had gone astray in some such scenario decades ago.
Let’s consider first the investigative trail that led to the “buried treasure.”
Suppose you found yourself with 3.6 million “hot” nickels on your hands and wanted to convert them into a more readily spendable form of cash. You could take them to a bank, but government agents would be watching banks closely – and turning in even relatively modest amounts would arouse suspicion.
Where else can lots of coins be converted into folding money fast? You guessed it: Coinstar machines – those green machines in supermarkets around the country that count coin deposits and return vouchers redeemable for cash (after deducting a “processing fee” of 8.9 percent).
The FBI guessed it, too, and alerted Coinstar and supermarkets to watch for large deposits of nickels.
On Jan. 15, police got word of such deposits at a Winn-Dixie store in Miami. When questioned, the depositor claimed he had been saving up nickels for a year.
No immediate arrest was made, but bells went off when that same depositor was arrested in a drug raid at the farm and police found an ice cooler filled with nickels. The FBI was summoned, and agents using metal detectors found the mother lode of nickels under four feet of dirt behind the stable. The coins were in their original shipping bags.
According to FBI Agent Amanda Moran, the group holding the coins “decided to bury the nickels to avoid being caught” after the Winn-Dixie episode.
Four suspects were arrested, but truck driver Mendoza was believed to have fled to his native Mexico. Authorities said the others were supposed to send him a share after cashing in the coins. One of the suspects admitted cashing in $4,000 worth of the nickels, they said. But that left $40,000 worth still unaccounted for.
The coin machine’s role in this case serves as a reminder that Coinstar, little more than a decade old, has become a major player in keeping U.S. coins in circulation – significantly reducing the U.S. Mint’s need to produce new ones and affecting the supply of both new and older coins available to collectors. So far, its machines, located in all 50 states, have processed roughly $10 billion worth of coins.
There may be no direct numismatic implications in the case at hand, but just think: If a similar shipment had gone astray in 1950, the entire population of ’50-D nickels – slightly more than 2.6 million – might have been lost to the hobby. The FBI dug up more than that many coins from this one Florida farm.
Then again, hobbyists who bought ’50-D nickels at the height of the roll-market boom of the early 1960s can identify with the coins found in Florida.
If they chose to keep the coins after the market crashed, they’ve been “buried” now for 40 years.
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