John Feigenbaum flew out of San Jose this week in first class with flip-flops on his feet, a T-shirt on his back and a dime worth $1.9 million in his pocket.
It was the most expensive dime ever to pass through San Jose. That's because it is the most expensive dime in the history of dimes.
"All the way across the country, I didn't sleep,'' Feigenbaum said. "I didn't eat, and I didn't sleep. You wouldn't, either.''
Feigenbaum is a rare-coin dealer, and the dime he was carrying across the country, from San Jose to New York, is an 1894-S dime, one of only nine known to exist and one of only 24 known to be coined that year in San Francisco.
It was his job to pick up the dime from the seller's vault in Oakland and deliver it to the buyer's vault in midtown Manhattan.
The person who bought the dime does not want the world to know who he is. The person who sold the dime is Oakland businessman Daniel Rosenthal, who was unavailable for comment, perhaps because a person newly in possession of $1.9 million has better things to do than answer a lot of questions.
But the dime's cross-country trip was the stuff of intrigue, of that there is no mistake. The logistics of moving a $1.9 million dime across the country turn out to be at least as staggering as the notion of paying $1.9 million for a dime.
It was on Monday afternoon that Feigenbaum, a 38-year-old coin dealer from Virginia Beach, Va., donned his best grubby clothes to meet the seller's representative at an Oakland bank vault. Feigenbaum was slumming it so as not to attract attention, he said.
"There's no reason to dress up in a suit and make a big production,'' he said. "You don't want to stand out.''
Feigenbaum put the dime, encased in a 3-inch-square block of plastic, in his pocket and, accompanied by a security guard, drove in an ordinary sedan directly to San Jose airport to catch the red-eye to Newark.
The overnight flight, he said, was the only way to make sure the dime would be in New York by the time the buyer's bank opened in the morning. People who pay $1.9 million for dimes do not like to be kept waiting for them.
Feigenbaum had purchased a coach ticket, to avoid suspicion, but found himself upgraded to first class. That was a worry, because people in flip-flops, T-shirts and grubby jeans do not regularly ride in first class. But it would have been more suspicious to decline a free upgrade. So Feigenbaum forced himself to sit in first class, where he found himself to be the only passenger in flip-flops.
He was too nervous to sleep, he said. He did not watch the in-flight movie, which was "Firehouse Dog.'' He turned down a Reuben sandwich and sensibly declined all offers of alcoholic beverages.
Shortly after boarding the plane, he transferred the dime from his pants pocket to his briefcase.
"I was worried that the dime might fall out of my pocket while I was sitting down,'' Feigenbaum said.
All across the country, Feigenbaum kept checking to make sure the dime was safe by reaching into his briefcase to feel for it. Feigenbaum did not actually take the dime out of his briefcase, as staring at dimes can arouse suspicion.
He does recall fishing around -- somewhere over the Rockies, over the Midwest and over the Alleghenies -- for the dime. For the rest of the flight, he kept his flip-flopped foot planted on the briefcase and his eyes wide open.
At Newark airport, he was met by another security guard in another ordinary sedan. The two men drove to Manhattan, arriving an hour before the opening of the buyer's bank vault.
The buyer was waiting at the curb for Feigenbaum, however. With an hour to kill, the two men went into a nearby Starbucks. Neither man dared take out the dime and look at it. They sipped their beverages and stared at their watches.
At 9 a.m., the vault opened. The two men and the guard went inside and, for the first time, the buyer got to hold his dime.
The buyer spent about half an hour looking at it, Feigenbaum said, which worked out to 15 minutes for heads and 15 minutes for tails. He told Feigenbaum he had bought it strictly as an investment and did not intend to spend it, as there is no longer anything to buy in New York for 10 cents.
Perhaps, though, the dime is again fated to be locked away in a bank vault as a penalty for being ugly. The coin is known as a Barber-style dime, bearing a ghastly likeness of Madam Liberty on the front and a boring wreath of corn and wheat and the words "one dime" on the back.
The $1.9 million dime was produced at the stately Old Mint on Fifth Street, next to the doughnut place. It's a long-shuttered stone building whose front steps are primarily used these days by homeless people on their lunch break. (The building is set to become a museum soon, although that plan has been kicking around, unfulfilled, for decades. The alley north of the mint is being turned into a plaza with fast-food joints, to open by Labor Day.)
Except for the date, the top-notch condition and the fact that it's one of just 24 known to be coined that year in San Francisco, it's much like other Barber-style dimes of the era that typically sell on eBay for a couple of bucks. The coin's rarity has something to do with the fact that 1894-S dimes were produced not for general circulation but as a special gift by the mint director for some visiting big shots. The director was also said to have given one of the dimes to his young daughter, who spent it on ice cream.
Feigenbaum said he and the seller's agent stood to split a 6 percent commission on the deal. He also said that he has since changed out of his flip-flops and that he does not really know what the dime looks like -- how many ears of corn or stalks of wheat are depicted on it, for example, or why Liberty's nose is so big.
"It's the Holy Grail of coins,'' he said. "But Liberty, how can I say it, she's not the prettiest. Actually, it's considered an ugly coin. Sometimes, ugliness can be attractive.''
E-mail Steve Rubenstein at srubenstein@sfchronicle.com.
Link to article:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/07/27/MNG9GR85OG1.DTL
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