S.S. CENTRAL AMERICA COMMEMORATIVE RESTRIKE CLUES

One of the points of contention is the lawsuits is that there are 500 gold “coins” that either are or were in Thompson’s possession. The press coverage sometimes states that these were “commemoratives.” Sometimes it does not. The general public and other reporters don’t understand the subject, and so confusion ensues. A popular misconception has emerged that there is an “unknown amount” of treasure missing. This is not true.

These 500 coins are commemorative re-strikes of the historical 1855 Kellogg & Co. $50 gold pieces. On each day, from August 20 to September 12, 2001, a total of 5,000 of these commemoratives were produced for California Gold Marketing Group by personnel from The Gallery Mint: Ron Landis, Joe Rust and their staff. The coins were minted at The Presidio in San Francisco, commemorating the anniversary of the departure of the S.S. Central America gold from San Francisco, its voyage to Panama, the crossing of the isthmus, and its northbound voyage until lost in the shipwreck.

Landis and Rust used a transfer technique to produce the dies for the re-strikes, expertly copying the original dies from Kellogg, which had survived. The gold for these coins was derived from Kellogg & Humbert ingots recovered from the S.S. Central America, thus using Kellogg gold to re-produce Kellogg’s design. The faces of the ingots, known in numismatic circles now as “faceplates,” were saved, and can be found here and there on bourse floors and in auctions. Attached are photos of the obverse and reverse of a re-strike, in this case produced on August 20, 2001, as counterstamped on the reverse. All of the commemoratives are similarly counterstamped with their production dates.

The coins were minted from gold bars that Thompson’s Columbus-based companies brought up from the SS Central America shipwreck in the late 1980s.

The court document says that Alison Antekeier, Thompson’s longtime assistant and girlfriend, testified that she took delivery of the coins between 2003 and 2005 from Thompson’s company, Recovery Limited. She put them in a safe-deposit box at a Jacksonville, Fla., bank at Thompson’s direction.

She said Thompson directed her to move the coins in 2010 to a secure place in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Several months later, she packed them into four suitcases and “gave them to a person who Thompson had arranged to transport the coins to Belize and deposit them,” the document says.

To read the complete article, see:
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/05/01/tommy-thompson-gold-coins.html /www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/05/01/tommy-thompson-gold-coins.html)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
BOB EVANS ON THE DISPOSITION OF THE S.S. CENTRAL AMERICA TREASURE (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v16n16a32.html)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web