OCTOBER 5
1967•Armed Robbers Steal a Great American Coin Collection
2005•Forward-Facing Jefferson Nickel Announced
Armed Robbers Steal One of America’s Greatest Coin Collections
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Late on October 5, 1967, five armed masked men entered the Florida home of collector Willis H. du Pont and carried away roughly 7,000 coins. The haul included two legendary 1804 silver dollars, a 1787 Brasher Doubloon, rare pioneer and territorial gold, and a remarkable group of 1866 No Motto Seated Liberty silver coins.
The robbery became one of the most extraordinary crimes in American numismatic history. What began as a home invasion by men apparently searching for cash and jewelry turned into the theft of a world-class collection containing coins that could not be quietly replaced—or easily sold without attracting attention.
The crime itself lasted only a short time. Recovering its numismatic treasures would take decades.
A Mansion in Coconut Grove
Willis H. du Pont lived with his family in a large home in Coconut Grove, Florida, near Miami.
Du Pont belonged to the prominent industrial family associated with E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company and had the resources to assemble a coin collection of exceptional depth and rarity.
His residence had sophisticated security equipment for the period, including alarms and closed-circuit cameras.
But on the night of the robbery, the alarm system was not activated.
According to later accounts, the intruders entered through an unlocked patio door.
The five robbers apparently did not begin the night as expert rare-coin thieves.
They were searching for a wealthy target and expected to find cash and jewelry.
Instead, they had stumbled into the home of one of America’s most important private coin collectors.
Shortly after midnight, the family was confronted at gunpoint.
Du Pont, his wife, their young son, and household employees were gathered and restrained while the intruders searched the residence.
The Walk-In Safe
The turning point came when the robbers discovered du Pont’s coin collection.
A walk-in safe near his study contained boxes, books, and trays filled with rare coins.
The thieves obtained suitcases from the house and began loading them.
By the time they fled, approximately 7,000 coins had disappeared.
The quantity alone was enormous. The quality of the collection made the theft historic.
Among the stolen coins were two examples of the legendary 1804 Draped Bust silver dollar.
Few American coins possess a stronger mythology.
Although dated 1804, the famous dollars were not regular silver dollars struck for circulation in that year. The earliest known examples were produced decades later for diplomatic presentation sets, and additional restrikes followed.
Only a tiny number exist.
Du Pont owned two.
One was the Class III specimen associated with former Mint Director Henry R. Linderman.
The Smithsonian describes the coin as part of the later group of 1804 dollars and notes its complicated history before it entered the du Pont collection.
When it vanished in 1967, one of America’s most famous coins effectively disappeared into the criminal underground.
It would remain missing for more than a decade.
The other stolen 1804 dollar was the Cohen specimen.
Like the Linderman piece, it was distinctive enough that selling it openly posed an obvious problem.
A famous rarity can be enormously valuable precisely because specialists know what it is.
That same fame makes a stolen example extraordinarily difficult to convert into legitimate money.
The thieves had acquired treasures that could betray anyone attempting to sell them.
The Brasher Doubloon
The robbery also removed a 1787 Brasher Doubloon from the collection.
Ephraim Brasher was a New York goldsmith and silversmith who produced a small number of gold pieces before the establishment of the federal Mint.
The famous doubloons bearing his EB counterstamp rank among the most celebrated objects in early American numismatics.
They belong to the monetary world of the Confederation era, when the new United States had not yet established the federal coinage system created by the Coinage Act of 1792.
The du Pont Brasher Doubloon did not remain missing for long compared with some of the other rarities.
PCGS records the du Pont specimen as stolen in October 1967 and recovered in 1968.
The story of its recovery became almost as colorful as the robbery itself.
According to the account later published by PCGS, one participant in the robbery secretly kept the doubloon for himself and concealed it by taping it to his ankle.
Events in his personal life ultimately exposed the hidden coin, allowing it to be identified and returned.
Another major component of the collection consisted of rare private and territorial gold pieces.
Before federal branch-mint coinage fully met the needs of western commerce, private firms issued gold coins in regions where conventional federal money was scarce.
These pieces are now among the most fascinating relics of the California Gold Rush and other frontier economies.
Du Pont owned a remarkable group of 13 such coins.
They were among the first major pieces recovered after the robbery.
The 1968 Recovery Operation
Within months, efforts were underway to ransom stolen coins back to the family.
In February 1968, according to the detailed PCGS history, the 13 pioneer and territorial gold pieces were recovered through an operation involving a $50,000 payment.
The FBI became involved, and arrests followed when the exchange occurred.
The recovery demonstrated an unusual reality of major numismatic theft: the victim may be willing to pay substantial money simply to recover irreplaceable objects.
Perhaps the strangest group stolen that night consisted of 1866-dated Seated Liberty silver coins lacking the motto IN GOD WE TRUST.
In 1866, the motto was introduced on several U.S. coin denominations.
Yet a tiny number of extraordinary 1866 pieces exist without it.
Du Pont owned the famous No Motto quarter, half dollar, and dollar.
These were not ordinary circulation issues accidentally overlooked in a bag of coins. They were great numismatic mysteries.
The No Motto pieces are connected to a murky nineteenth-century pattern and restrike culture within or around the Philadelphia Mint.
Special coins were sometimes produced outside normal regular-issue channels for collectors or insiders.
The circumstances behind some of these pieces remain controversial.
For decades, the du Pont examples occupied a strange place in numismatic scholarship: famous, apparently unique or nearly unique, and then suddenly absent because of the robbery.
The theft created a problem that would persist for generations.
A stolen rarity may remain hidden for years and then surface in an ordinary-looking transaction.
That is exactly what happened with some of the du Pont coins.
People encountering them decades later did not always realize immediately that they were handling property stolen in 1967.
Identification depended on photographs, pedigrees, diagnostics, and specialists who knew the history.
The Linderman Dollar Reappears
The Linderman 1804 dollar eventually surfaced through an attempted transaction in the early 1980s.
Authentication specialists recognized the coin as the missing du Pont specimen.
The FBI took custody of it, and it was ultimately returned.
PCGS references record its recovery in 1982, while the Smithsonian states that it was retrieved early that year.
Its years in hiding had ended because an 1804 dollar is almost impossible to pass through the legitimate rare-coin market anonymously.
Willis du Pont later donated the recovered Linderman 1804 dollar to the Smithsonian Institution.
It entered the National Numismatic Collection in 1994.
Today the Smithsonian identifies its provenance openly: the coin belonged to du Pont, was stolen in the 1967 armed robbery, and was recovered in 1982.
The robbery is therefore permanently embedded in the documented history of the coin.
The second 1804 dollar remained missing much longer.
In 1993, investigators learned that coins believed to be from the du Pont collection were being offered in Switzerland.
The pieces included the Cohen 1804 dollar and a rare territorial gold coin.
With Swiss authorities and international law-enforcement involvement, the coins were recovered and returned to du Pont.
More than a quarter century had passed since the robbery.
Other stolen rarities surfaced in the commercial coin market decades after the crime.
PCGS reported that the 1866 No Motto Seated Liberty quarter and half dollar reappeared around 1999 in California-area coin transactions.
The circumstances were almost unbelievable considering their rarity.
Coins capable of commanding enormous specialist attention had circulated through channels where their significance was initially not fully understood.
Once properly identified, their connection to the du Pont robbery became clear.
The Dollar Returns in 2004
The 1866 No Motto Seated Liberty dollar took still longer.
In the early 2000s, numismatists were contacted by a person who possessed an example and hoped it might be a previously unknown specimen rather than the stolen du Pont coin.
Photographs and diagnostic comparison established otherwise.
The coin matched the missing piece.
In 2004—nearly 37 years after the robbery—it was returned.
The recovery allowed the famous 1866 No Motto quarter, half dollar, and dollar to be reunited publicly.
For decades, the set had existed partly as photographs, records, and memories of a collection violently broken apart in 1967.
The reunion was more than a collector’s triumph.
It demonstrated the importance of pedigree research and photographic documentation in identifying unique or nearly unique coins long after a theft.
Despite the remarkable number of recoveries, the du Pont collection was never completely restored.
Some pieces remained missing decades later.
PCGS has specifically noted an 1879 $4 Stella among the unrecovered coins.
That lingering absence is a reminder that even famous coins can disappear for extraordinary lengths of time.
They may still exist, but existence and recoverability are very different things.
The du Pont robbery is a powerful lesson in why provenance matters in numismatics.
For a common coin, ownership history may add interest but is rarely essential to identification.
For a great rarity, pedigree can function almost like a fingerprint.
Old auction catalogs, photographs, weights, marks, die characteristics, and documented chains of ownership allow experts to distinguish one specimen from another.
Those records helped stolen du Pont coins find their way home.
Famous Coins Are Difficult Criminal Property
The robbery also illustrates a paradox.
The more famous and valuable a coin is, the harder it can be to sell after theft.
A common gold coin can be melted. Jewelry can be altered. Cash can be spent.
But there are only a handful of 1804 dollars and Brasher Doubloons.
Major collectors, dealers, auction houses, museums, grading services, and researchers know them individually.
The very qualities that make them valuable also make them recognizable.
The story had an unexpected long-term result.
Recovered du Pont rarities eventually entered major institutional collections.
The Smithsonian’s National Numismatic Collection received the Linderman 1804 dollar and today preserves it for public study.
Other recovered material was associated with the American Numismatic Association’s museum holdings.
Coins once hidden in a private mansion—and then hidden again after a robbery—became objects available to scholars and the public.
October 5, 1967 marks one of the darkest and most extraordinary days in American coin collecting.
Five armed men invaded the du Pont home and stole approximately 7,000 coins, including objects that rank among the greatest rarities in U.S. numismatics.
The thieves scattered a collection that had taken years and enormous resources to assemble.
Yet the story did not end with the getaway.
The Brasher Doubloon returned. The pioneer gold returned. Both 1804 dollars eventually returned. The extraordinary 1866 No Motto silver coins reappeared one by one, some after more than three decades.
The Great du Pont Coin Robbery became not only a story of theft, but a decades-long story of identification, provenance, investigation, recovery, and preservation.
Few events demonstrate more dramatically that the history of a rare coin does not end when it leaves the Mint. Sometimes its most astonishing chapters begin generations later.
ALSO ON THIS DAY
2005 — Forward-Facing Jefferson Nickel Announced — The Mint announced the 2006 Jefferson nickel portrait, the first forward-facing U.S. presidential portrait on a circulating coin.