The Nearly $1 Million ANA Money Museum Theft Is Revealed

January 12 • American Coin History Calendar

For years, one of the most serious thefts in modern numismatic history remained largely out of public view while investigators followed rare coins through auctions in the United States and overseas. On January 12, 2012, former American Numismatic Association collections manager Wyatt Yeager pleaded guilty to stealing historically important coins and numismatic objects from the ANA Money Museum. The loss was valued at $984,740—and included everything from rare two- and three-cent pieces to an Australian Holey Dollar, a Gobrecht dollar and early American gold.

The January 12 Date Is the Revelation, Not the Theft

The chronology of the ANA Money Museum case is important.

The coins were not stolen on January 12, 2012. The thefts occurred years earlier, during 2007, when Wyatt Yeager worked as collections manager at the American Numismatic Association's museum in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

January 12, 2012 was the day the case became public in dramatic fashion.

That day, Yeager entered a guilty plea in Federal District Court in Wilmington, Delaware, to one count of theft of major artwork under federal law. At the same time, the ANA announced that approximately 300 historically significant coins and other numismatic objects valued at $984,740 had been taken from its collection.

It was an extraordinary disclosure: a trusted museum employee had used his access to remove cultural property from one of America's most important numismatic collections and sell it into the collector market.

The Thief Had Been the Collections Manager

The most disturbing feature of the case was not a broken window, disabled alarm or masked intruder.

It was access.

Yeager served as the ANA Money Museum's collections manager from January through March 2007. The position placed him close to exactly the material a numismatic museum is supposed to preserve: rare coins, patterns, historic currency and other objects entrusted to the institution for study and public education.

According to the ANA, he embezzled rare material from the museum and later sold stolen coins through auctions in the United States and abroad.

The case demonstrated a difficult reality of museum security. Protecting a collection requires more than keeping outsiders away. Institutions must also maintain rigorous inventory controls, documentation and accountability for people who legitimately have access.

The total acknowledged value of the stolen property was $984,740.

That number alone was startling in 2012, but market value tells only part of the story. Museum objects can be difficult or impossible to replace because their significance may depend on provenance, rarity, research history and their role within a larger institutional collection.

The ANA's collection is not merely an investment portfolio of expensive coins. It exists to preserve and interpret the history of money.

When a rare object disappears from a museum, visitors lose the chance to see it, researchers lose access to it, and the institution loses part of the historical record it was created to safeguard.

The theft was remarkable for the breadth of the material involved.

The ANA's public information identified an Australian 1813 Holey Dollar, a 1795 U.S. half eagle and an 1836 Gobrecht dollar among the stolen objects. Contemporary lists also included colonial pieces, patterns, classic U.S. coins, gold issues and foreign rarities.

Some pieces were valuable because of low mintage. Others were rare varieties or patterns. Some represented unusual denominations that disappeared from American coinage long ago.

That last group included several fascinating two-cent and three-cent coins.

An 1873 Open 3 Two-Cent Piece

Among the listed stolen U.S. coins was an 1873 two-cent piece with the Open 3 date, graded Proof-64 Brown in the contemporary inventory.

The two-cent denomination had been introduced during the Civil War in 1864. It occupies a special place in American history because the 1864 two-cent piece became the first U.S. coin to carry the motto IN GOD WE TRUST.

But the denomination was short-lived. Production collapsed as other forms of small change became more practical, and Congress abolished the two-cent piece in 1873.

No regular circulation-strike two-cent pieces were produced for 1873. The year's coins were proofs, and the date exists in Closed 3 and Open 3 forms. The Open 3 is the famous rarity.

A museum example of such a coin is more than a high-priced collectible. It documents the final moment of an obsolete American denomination.

The stolen inventory also included an 1864 Small Motto two-cent piece, listed as Mint State-64 Brown.

In the denomination's first year, the motto IN GOD WE TRUST appeared in two major styles known as Small Motto and Large Motto. The Small Motto variety is considerably scarcer and has long been a key issue for two-cent collectors.

The coin's historical importance extends beyond the variety. The Civil War had disrupted American coin circulation, and the two-cent piece was part of the government's attempt to restore usable small change.

Its new motto also reflected the wartime movement to place an explicit reference to God on national coinage.

That combination of Civil War monetary history, a major design variety and the first appearance of a now-familiar national motto made the stolen example especially significant.

Another two-cent piece on the stolen list was an 1872 proof.

By 1872, the denomination was approaching extinction. Circulation-strike production was extremely small compared with the millions of two-cent pieces coined in the mid-1860s.

The following year, Congress ended the denomination entirely.

For a museum attempting to tell the story of American small change, the late two-cent issues help illustrate how quickly a denomination can move from proposed solution to monetary dead end.

The 1878 Three-Cent Nickel Proof

The stolen material also included an 1878 three-cent nickel proof, listed as Proof-65.

The three-cent denomination is one of the strangest chapters in American coinage. It began in 1851 as a tiny silver coin created partly to facilitate the purchase of the newly reduced three-cent postage rate.

During the Civil War, coin shortages again reshaped the nation's small change. In 1865, the Mint introduced a larger three-cent piece made from copper-nickel alloy—the three-cent nickel.

By 1878, however, the denomination was nearing the end of its usefulness. No circulation-strike three-cent nickels were made that year; production was limited to proofs for collectors.

The denomination disappeared after 1889.

The stolen 1878 proof therefore represented another obsolete U.S. denomination in its declining years.

One of the most spectacular stolen pieces was not American at all.

The 1813 Australian Holey Dollar is among the most distinctive coins in world numismatics. Faced with a shortage of currency in New South Wales, colonial authorities acquired Spanish dollars and altered them by punching out their centers.

The resulting outer rings became Holey Dollars, while the removed centers were counterstamped and used as smaller-denomination coins known as dumps.

The ANA collection reportedly lost examples of both an 1813 Holey Dollar and an 1813 dump.

The Holey Dollar later surfaced in an Australian auction, illustrating how stolen numismatic material can move openly through legitimate marketplaces when buyers and auctioneers do not know its true provenance.

The stolen inventory read like a tour through American numismatics.

It included an 1836 Gobrecht dollar pattern, a 1792 half disme pattern, a 1793 Chain cent, an 1856 Flying Eagle cent, an 1877 Indian Head cent, a 1916-D Mercury dime, an 1879-CC Morgan dollar and a 1907 High Relief double eagle among numerous other objects whose recovery status varied.

There were commemorative gold coins, patterns and classic federal gold pieces as well.

The breadth made the crime particularly damaging. This was not the disappearance of a single showcase rarity. It was the removal of material representing many different periods, denominations and branches of numismatic history.

How the Coins Were Sold

According to the ANA's sentencing announcement, Yeager embezzled more than $492,000 worth of rare coins and sold them through auctions in Baltimore in May 2007, St. Louis in June 2007 and Melbourne, Australia, in July 2007.

The ANA said he embezzled an additional group valued at more than $492,000 and sold that material through an auction in Germany.

That international trail complicated recovery enormously.

Once stolen coins enter legitimate commerce, they can be purchased by collectors who have no idea anything is wrong. They may then be resold, traded, placed in collections or sent to another country. Years can pass before an object is recognized.

A coin's small size makes the problem even harder. Nearly a million dollars in numismatic material can be moved without anything resembling the logistical challenge of stealing large paintings or sculptures.

ANA officials discovered the theft in October 2007, months after Yeager had left his position.

The organization then worked with the FBI during an extensive investigation. The matter was kept confidential while investigators followed evidence and attempted to recover material.

That explains the five-year gap between the crime and the public announcement.

To collectors hearing the news in January 2012, the theft seemed sudden. To investigators and museum officials, it was the culmination of years of work.

Yeager pleaded guilty to theft of major artwork under Title 18, United States Code, Section 668.

Despite the word artwork, the federal statute covers certain objects of cultural heritage held by museums. Historically important rare coins can qualify because they are part of a museum's collection rather than merely commodities with metal value.

The charge reflected the cultural dimension of the crime.

Stealing a rare coin from a museum is not legally or historically equivalent to taking an ounce of metal worth the same amount. The object's identity, provenance and role in a public collection matter.

The Sentence

On April 24, 2012, Yeager was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison and two years of supervised release.

He was also ordered to pay $948,505 in restitution.

The sentencing did not end the ANA's problem. A criminal case can conclude while stolen objects remain scattered in private hands.

The organization continued working to identify and recover missing material.

In 2014, the ANA announced the return of an 1863 Indian Head cent pattern, Judd-302, graded Proof-66 Cameo. The coin had been among the pieces stolen in 2007.

A collector who wished to remain anonymous returned it.

The ANA emphasized that some people who acquired missing coins may have bought them in good faith, unaware of the theft. The organization sought to encourage cooperation rather than treat innocent purchasers as criminals.

That remains a central challenge in art and collectible recovery: distinguishing the original crime from later transactions by people who may know nothing about it.

The ANA continues to maintain information about the museum theft and encourages anyone who believes they possess one of the stolen objects to contact the organization.

Its recovery policy reflects the unusual circumstances created when identifiable museum property has circulated through the market for years.

Every recovered coin restores more than financial value. It restores a documented object to the collection from which it was removed.

The case carries an important lesson for anyone buying rare coins.

Provenance—the documented history of ownership—is not merely an interesting pedigree attached to expensive coins. It can help establish that an object entered the market legitimately.

Collectors buying important rarities benefit from keeping invoices, auction records, certification information and prior ownership documentation. Dealers and auction houses also play a critical role by checking stolen-property databases and responding when a suspicious pedigree emerges.

A coin may be genuine in every numismatic sense and still carry a serious legal problem if it was stolen.

The Museum's Loss Was the Hobby's Loss

The American Numismatic Association was founded in 1891 to advance the study and collecting of money. Its museum collection exists to serve that educational mission.

That is why the 2007 theft mattered beyond Colorado Springs.

The stolen 1864 Small Motto two-cent piece could teach the history of IN GOD WE TRUST. The 1873 Open 3 could document the end of a denomination. The 1878 three-cent nickel could illustrate another failed experiment in small change. A Gobrecht dollar could illuminate the rebirth of the silver dollar. A Holey Dollar could explain how another nation solved a currency shortage by physically transforming Spanish-American money.

Removed from the museum, those objects lost much of their public educational function even if they remained perfectly preserved in private collections.

January 12, 2012 was not the date the coins vanished. It was the day the numismatic world learned the scale of what had happened and the former collections manager admitted his crime in federal court.

The nearly $1 million theft exposed the vulnerability of even professionally managed collections, demonstrated how rapidly stolen coins can cross international borders and showed why inventory records and provenance are essential to numismatics.

It also left a continuing mission.

Some pieces have returned. Others have not.

For the ANA, January 12 marks both the resolution of a criminal investigation and the beginning of a much longer effort: bringing pieces of numismatic history home.

• Congress Authorizes the Two-Cent Piece
• The First Federal Cents Are Delivered
• The Final U.S. Cent for Circulation Is Struck in Philadelphia
• Congress Kills the Half Cent and the Old Large Cent