Thefts
On August 19, 1858, two well-dressed thieves on a tour of the mint used a counterfeit key to open a display case. They made off with $265.00 in gold pieces, but due to the rarity of the coins the men were quickly apprehended while trying to spend them in local shops.
In 1893, Henry S. Cochran, a weighing clerk, was found to have embezzled $134,000 in gold bars from the mint vault over a period of 8–10 years. $107,000 was recovered from his home and from a cache in the ventilation system inside the mint itself.
Approximately 500,000 Double Eagle coins were minted in 1933 but none were ever legally released. One coin surfaced in 1996 and, after a legal battle, was sold at auction for $7 million in 2002. The seller and the government split the proceeds of the auction, with the provision that any further 1933 Double Eagles would be seized and not auctioned. In 2003, a Philadelphia woman named Joan Switt Langbord found ten 1933 Double Eagles in a safety deposit box that once belonged to her parents; when she took them to be appraised, they were seized by the United States Treasury as stolen property. Investigators claimed that Langbord's father, Israel Switt, conspired with a clerk inside the mint to steal the coins. He had been investigated previously for the crime, leading to the confiscation of several gold pieces, but the statute of limitations had prevented him from being prosecuted. Langbord sued to have the coins returned to her, but in July 2011 a federal jury ruled that the stolen coins were property of the U.S. government.
In September 2011, former mint officer William Gray pleaded guilty in federal court to stealing error coins valued at $2.4 million and selling them to a distributor.
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