David Redden Quotations

People in the U.S. were hoarding gold. It was undermining the nation's financial system. And FDR, almost as soon as he became president, within a couple of days, took us, by executive order, off the gold standard.

The more one looks at this and studies these extraordinary objects, the more one begins to hear the sounds of battle. This is about as close as one can get to that extraordinary moment in world history when the American Revolution was taking place. It was accomplished with heroism and a tremendous amount of bloodshed. And these flags flew above these armies. I've called them the last great relics of the American Revolution in private hands, and no one has disputed that.

The U.S. government recognized that the 1933 Double Eagle was in that collection, and they officially asked the Egyptian government to pull it from the sale and return it as stolen property of the United States.

Like a traveler encountering a succession of mountain ranges we found the scope of our project seeming to expand with every step we took.

We hear about the ones that are selling but in fact there are many others that are also collecting and they generally do it very quietly.

The presence of at least one gun in the shop made that adventure slightly nerve wracking!

The Secret Service -- ever passionate, ever diligent, not letting their man go -- created a sting operation, seized the coin, and actually put poor Mr. Fenton in jail.

The irony of ironies is, in order to make this coin totally legal and totally monetized, the buyer will have to give, in addition to millions of dollars it costs to buy it, $20 -- a $20 bill -- to go back to the Treasury.

Coins are not money until it's monetized -- until the Treasury says they're money. They weren't legal to spend. It was simply a bright gold round disc. They were by order of the Treasury in 1937, melted down.

It wasn't until a few weeks after that license was signed that suddenly everyone realized that an awful mistake had been made. This coin was illegal to own, and in fact clearly had been stolen from the U.S. Mint.