In a shocker of shocks, just days after stealing a rare coin collection worth around $80,000, the thief returned them to their owner. He didn’t have a sudden sense to turn his life around and do the right thing. Nor was he overcome with guilt.
Instead, the thief was only motivated to protect his stolen interests. To do that, he went to a German bank to deposit the coins for safe keeping.
And that’s where justice caught him.
A coin collector can hardly experience anything worse with a collection than having it stolen. After the theft, there is always the hope that some or all of the coins will eventually be recovered. But imagine if your coins were stolen and then spent or traded like every day circulating change, as if they had absolutely no collectible value.
That is exactly what happened to one man’s collection in Enfield, Connecticut. He found out that he had been taken to the cleaners by a woman he hired to clean.
The woman apparently discovered the collection, called another man into the home, and together they took the collectible coins and paper-money. Even worse, the coin collection was then swapped for cash using a coin cash machine at a local store.
Dec. 16, 2007 wasn’t a good day for Chester (Chet) Endress, a 73-year old coin collector and owner of Chet’s Coin Shop. That day thieves burglarized Mr. Endress’s business by cutting through an adjacent store wall.
The robbers then proceeded to torch the shop’s safe to steal approximately $750,000 worth of rare and common coins.
Copper used to be the problem step-child of metals. It was either not thought about or considered in a negative context, like the mental picture of paying for the repair of copper piping underneath the sink.
For some, copper has turned to gold. And better, it wasn’t purchased first - it just found its way onto some junk pile in the garage or back yard and it magically turned into money.
Today, if you have a pile of it sitting around, you can gather it up and make some decent bucks at $2.92 per pound. Even better, a scrap metal entrepreneur is likely to ask and do the work for you just to get a percentage of the return.
A 7-month low hit copper yesterday in New York futures trading. The fall was driven by concerns of softer import data from China.
As interesting as the up trend has been, a continue decline could well be appreciated. It would at least subdue some of the negativity its rise has made.
The ban on melting pennies and its copper and the new legislation to remove it is one thing. That should sort itself out.
But the daily and nightly copper news stories are something else. Recycling discarded or unused copper is a good story. However, the stream of scavengers who steal copper are absolutely mind-boggling.
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