STAN KESSELMAN INTERVIEW, PART TWO

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V27 2024 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 27, Number 26, June 30, 2024, Article 13

Greg Bennick's latest interview for the Newman Numismatic Portal is with New York dealer Stan Kesselman. Here's the second part, where Stan talks about financial times in 1973, and buying gold coins including a 1933 double eagle. -Editor

STANLEY KESSELMAN: So, it's now 1973. And Ted Naftzger calls. 1973 is a very bad year for the financial country.

STANLEY KESSELMAN: The Dow went from maybe 950 down to 480. The stock were paying nine and ten percent dividends because they were riskier than bonds. And we had a gasoline crisis. And Ted Naftzger calls, he needs money. He borrowed money from Wells Fargo. And I never heard of this before. Every three years from Wells Fargo, they made him repay the loan. And as soon as he repaid the loan, he can go out and borrow it all over again. The next day, the next hour, they just wanted to see he could repay it.

And it was 1973. And the cattle business was horrible. It costs more to feed the cattle than he could sell them for. So, he said he had to go sell his coins. So, I call Mike Brownlee up in Dallas. Michael had the customer to buy this. And Julian, since he was so nice to me over the years, I said, let's go to Beverly Hills. We'll meet Ted Naftzger. And we'll try and make a deal to buy his $20 gold coins. And Mike Brownlee brought his customer. His name was Jeff Browning. I don't know if you've ever heard of Jeff Browning.

STANLEY KESSELMAN: Jeff Browning was one of seven children. The parents died and they divided the land up into sevenths. They put in the hat the number of your lot. And he put their hands in the hat. The best lot was the one with the house on it. The other was all prairie and desert. So, Jeffery got the prairie and desert, but they discover oil on his land on the prairie and desert and Jeff Browning in 1973 was taking in around $450,000 a month. Which then was pretty big money.

STANLEY KESSELMAN: Okay, so he was the customer and he flew with Mike Brownlee to Beverly Hills. So, four of us were there, Julian, Mike Brownlee, myself and Jeff Browning. So, I take a room for Michael and myself, Julian has his own room and Jeff Browning has his own room. I'm the first one to arrive. I arrived there the room is freezing; the window had an air conditioner in it and the air conditioner was no longer there. So, you could not shut the window. So, I am totally freezing, the air's coming in, I get into bed and I'm wearing a suit with a tie. I go to sleep with my suit on, I loosen the tie.

So, there I am in the room, Mike Brownlee comes in later. He sees me sleeping there, he doesn't say too much. He takes off all his clothes and he sleeps absolutely nude. I didn't understand this at all, the room is freezing. So now I'm meeting Ted Naftzger downstairs in the coffee shop at nine o'clock, it's 8.30. He says, Kesselman, get out of bed you got to go shower and shave for this meeting. I'm still groggy, I said, Don't bother me.

So now it's five to nine, he's fully dressed he pulls the covers down off of me and I'm wearing my suit and tie. So, I look in the mirror, I tighten my tie and said Michael let's go. He couldn't believe I was fully dressed.

GREG BENNICK: That's amazing, I love that the reveal of you being fully dressed and ready for the meeting within 10 minutes, that's great.

STANLEY KESSELMAN: Right, I guess the smell didn't count, but off we went. So now Julian wanted to come to the meeting. I said, You can't come, because we'd be three against one and that doesn't look good. You stay in the room and we'll see what happens. So, Michael and I go to Ted Naftzger's office, he takes out he's only selling now his liberty $20 gold. He's keeping his St Gaudens.

STANLEY KESSELMAN: So, it's 1850 through 1907 and he has every coin which he's upgraded. So, we had the calculators then, the first calculator made was a Bowmar Brain and that's what we had. So, Michael works it up and Ted Naftzger says he wants $250,000. Michael works it up on the Bowmar. He says, we can pay $175,000.

So, Michael works it up again. He comes up with $175,000. That's the most we can pay. Now, you have to remember, we had the buyer for this already in Beverly Hills in the hotel room. So Ted Naftzger says, I'm not going to sell it less than $250,000. I took years to put it together, and I don't care, $250,000 is the price. So, I said, Michael, let me have the Bowmar Brain. Let me work it out. And I stopped putting in numbers. I put in more numbers. I put in more numbers. And I say now, I just figured out how to buy this set of gold coins. And Michael Brownlee says, Terrific. And Ted Naftzger says, Terrific. So, Michael says, How do we buy them? I said, It's simple. Pay the guy the $250,000.

You know, we weren't going to leave, because we had the buyer there. So now everybody's happy. And we give him three checks, one from me, one from Julian, and one from Michael. And he gives us the coins. Michael takes the coins through Jeff Browning. And I think Jeff Browning gave us, I'm trying to remember the number. I think we made maybe $30,000 each, which was a hell of a lot of money back then. I never made $30,000 in my life in a deal.

And I came back to New York. And a few days later, Ted Naftzger calls. My check bounced. I didn't have enough money in the bank. He didn't care. I said, you know, go put it back. He put it in too soon. Whatever. I said, put it in again. And it cleared. But yeah. Well, Mike Brownlee and Johnny Rowe together had much more capital than I did. And Julian we owed a favor to.

And then the last part of the story is 1973 got so bad, he called, Ted Naftzger calls again and says he wants to sell the St. Gaudens 20s. He has to sell them. So, we go down. I said, Julian, make your reservation. We're going back to Beverly Hills. Michael, make the reservation. We're going back to Beverly Hills. And Jeff Brownlee came back to Beverly Hills. And we bought the St. Gaudens 20s. I think the 1927-D he did not have. We paid maybe $225,000 for them. St. Gaudens 20s.

But then he took out another coin. He says, I can sell you this one. And I open it up and it seems to be a 1933 $20 in maybe 65 grade. And I'm looking at the thing. I'd never seen one before. And he tells me he bought it from Abe Kossoff. He says he's not sure it's legal to own, which we understood. And he wanted $50,000 for it. So, we threw that into the deal.

STANLEY KESSELMAN: And we gave it to Jeff Browning and we told him he couldn't tell anybody about it. But he really wanted to own it. And he could definitely afford it. Because you're talking about two weeks' money for him.

STANLEY KESSELMAN: I took the 1933 in my pocket for a while to have a good time. There was a coin convention out there at the time. And I'm sure you heard of Paul Nugget. And he was a big coin dealer in gold coins. He worked for MTB. And he worked for Stacks later on. And I showed the coin to him and he sort of went bananas. That he had it in his hand, the real 1933, twenty. Eventually the coin ended up with the government.

STANLEY KESSELMAN: But eventually I think they surrendered the coin to the government after having it.

About the Interviewer
Greg Bennick (www.gregbennick.com) is a keynote speaker and long time coin collector with a focus on major mint error coins. Have ideas for other interviewees? Contact him anytime on the web or via instagram @minterrors.