A heist at the San Francisco Mint that occurred right around the new year at the turn of the last century and one that may have been an inside job is likely the explanation for the buried cache of 1,427 antique gold coins found by that Northern California couple last month. Referred to since as the Saddle Ridge Treasure, and worth $10 million today, the coins' face value is $27,000 and therefore looks like a match for a little-known heist at the Mint that was reported on January 1, 1900 in The Bulletin of the American Iron & Steel Association, as SFGate blogger Tom Stienstra reports.
Historian and rare coin enthusiast Jack Trout unearthed the news item, and several things about the crime theory match up. First of all, a third of the coins found by "John and Mary" in those cans near their home in the Sierra foothills were uncirculated coins, many in chronological order, suggesting they came straight from a source like the Mint. Secondly, there's a single valuable rare coin in the bunch that is missing the words "In God We Trust," and this, Trout suspects, was the private possession of someone who worked in the mint or had access to the coin presses, and had never left the mint until it was stolen. (The coin is dated 1866 and he thinks it could be related to the aftermath of the assassination of Lincoln the year before.)
The Chron also mentions this heist (they mis-date it in 1901), for which the Mint's chief clerk Walter Dimmick was eventually convicted. The loot was never found, and the numbers are way too similar to dismiss, since 1,500 double-eagle coins just like these went missing.
The Mint has issued a statement saying that they "do not have any information linking the Saddle Ridge Hoard coins to any thefts at any United States Mint facility." But that's not to say that such information won't come along. Another theory is that the coins belonged to a prospector or successful merchant who brought raw gold nuggets to San Francisco and exchanged them for uncirculated coins, saving them over the years and ultimately burying them. But the size of the stash and the circumstances suggests they were taken illegally. (And the stash is far too large, most historians say, to be that from any regular thief or stagecoach robber.)
In any event, I don't get what the statute of limitations on coins in federal possession would be, but it's possible John and Mary won't have that tax bill to worry about after all if the government tries to claim the coins still belong to them.
