THE VANISHING PROOF SET MYSTERY 上市 Deposited
The E-Sylum: Volume 2, Number 52, December 26, 1999, Article 5
THE VANISHING PROOF SET MYSTERY
Ed Krivoniak brought up another recent "sale that never was."
He writes: "You failed to mention an American sale that was
canceled just a few years ago, involving a consignment of early
U.S. proof sets. The owner of the coins was a lady from
Butler, PA, who had been judged incompetent for a number
of years and had a caretaker. This caretaker talked the old
lady into going with her to the safe deposit of a local bank
where the coins were withdrawn. The caretaker then sold them
to a local Butler coin dealer for $60,000. The dealer in turn
consigned the coins for sale at auction.The lady's son-in-law saw some of the remaining coins in the
house and started checking on the values. When he found out
that they were worth significantly more than what the lady was
paid, he raised a stink and got an injunction to stop the sale.
The coins were eventually sold by Superior for $1.5 million."Ed interviewed Pittsburgh dealer Saul Weitz for some of the
foregoing information, becoming in the process the first free-
lance reporter for E-Sylum. Thanks, Ed! A postscript:"Saul also told me that a large number of early proof sets
started turning up on the East coast at that time and he
suspects that more of the sets were sold under the table, so
to speak. There was never any inventory so nothing could
be proved but the son-in-law remembers seeing 1936 proof
sets years earlier that never turned up anywhere."- 1999-12-26
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