The World’s Most Expensive Coin
Three years ago one of the rarest and most expensive (think millions of dollars) coins in the world was auctioned off. Now, an investigation has gone on into the provenance of this coin and the validity of its history.
Eid Mar Coin
This coin that will be the focal point of today’s post is called Eid Mar (which means Ides of March). It has a really interesting backstory. So after Julius Caesar was assassinated, Brutus made a commemorative coin of the occasion in 43BC. On one side of the coin is a bust of Brutus, one of the assassins, and on the other side is an image of a pileus cap between two daggers. A pileus cap is a little brimless felt hat that some ancient Romans wore, it symbolized freedom and many freed slaves wore this kind of hat. It also featured the words Eid Mar below the cap and daggers. Eid Mar is short for Eidibus Martiis (meaning “on the Ides of March”) which is the day Caesar was assassinated. This coin was minted in both silver and gold with around 100 of the silver variety still remaining and only three of the gold, that we know of. So needless to say it’s one of the rarest ancient Roman coins.
Richard Beale
I know we’re doing a pretty abrupt jump into the present but now we need to talk about the other important figure in this case; owner and managing director of London-based auction house Roma Numismatics, Richard Beale.
Beale seemed to come out of nowhere in the coin world, he was a former member of the British army and founded his company in 2009. Christopher Martin, the Chairman of the British Numismatic Trade Association, said “he appeared and made his mark in the market that he wasn’t brought up in. Within a year, he was selling coins worth millions of pounds. That doesn’t happen, but that’s what happened with him. Where did he come from? Nobody really knew” (Escalante-de Mattei, 2023). Many other people in the small coin world had come up through family businesses and had created connections over their lifetime but Beale, without connections or family in the business, had made his mark in no time. He was building a reputation as an expert in ancient, valuable coins but no one really knew how he was getting them.
As Beale’s success grew, so did the business and he added Italian coin dealer Italo Vecchi to his team, a known name in the coin world at the time. The British Museum even has ten coins in their collection that Vecchi sourced. Anyways, in 2014 Vecchi brings Beale something huge, the Eid Mar gold coin (still unclear where he got it). In 2015, at the Annual New York Numismatics Convention Beale and Vecchi try to sell this incredibly rare coin to a number of collectors but no one bites. They were telling prospective buyers that the coin came from an ‘old Swiss collection’ which apparently in the antiques world is code for the provenance is dubious. So that’s likely why no one wanted to buy it.
Then, in November 2020, Roma Numismatics held a celebratory event known as Auction XX where they were offering one of the rarest coins in the world for sale (see where this is going?), an Eid Mar coin in gold. Yeah, they were trying to sell it again but this time there was no mention of dubious provenance. There were other lots and other valuable coins on offer at this auction but this coin was the star of the show. At the end of the day, it sold for about $4.2 million.
In 2022, Beale tried to sell a few more coins however it came to light that they were looted from Gaza and this caught the attention of Homeland Security. They became suspicious of Beale and Vecchi and the Eid Mar coin and they launched an investigation into Roma Numismatics, Beale, and the provenance of the Eid Mar coin. In the end, they found that Beale and Vecchi, after not being able to sell the coin in 2015 at the convention, had paid someone to create forged documents saying that the coin had come from the collection of Baron Dominique de Chambrier (who I guess is someone legit in that world). The investigation also found that they had approached other people and offered them hundreds of thousands of dollars to sign false provenance papers, all of these people declined the offer.
Before the auction where the coin was sold in 2020, Beale had sent it to the Numismatic Guaranty Corporation (NGC) in the US to be authenticated, and after an extensive study they determined that it was authentic. Keep in mind, authenticity and provenance aren’t the same thing. The NGC were just determining its authenticity, not its provenance. So clearly there was something in the coin’s past that Vecchi and Beale were trying to conceal. It was also discovered that when shipping the coin from London to the US, Beale listed the coin’s origin country as Turkey which he knew would be less likely to be flagged by authorities than writing Greece or Italy (because of the number of antiquities that get smuggled from those countries). Crafty.
In early February of 2023 the Eid Mar coin was seized by authorities somewhere near New York and Richard Beale was arrested on charges of grand larceny in the first and second degree, criminal possession of stolen property in the first and second degree, conspiracy in the fourth degree, and scheme to defraud in the first degree.
In October, 2023 Beale appeared before the Supreme Criminal Court of New York and pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy and three counts of criminal possession of stolen property; he admitted to falsifying provenance documents for the Eid Mar coin. He was supposed to appear before the court again for sentencing in March 2024 but I couldn’t find any articles about his sentence, he was facing up to 25 years in prison though most people thought he wouldn’t get that much. Vecchi, for his part, has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him (similar to those against Beale but couldn’t find the specifics).
At Beale’s plea arraignment, Judge Althea Drysdale called his actions “woefully wrong and illegal” and “harmful to both the buyers and the nations whose cultural property [was] illegally acquired” (Artnet News, 2023). Well said.
Works Cited
“A London Auctioneer has Pleaded Guilty to Forging Provenance Documents to Sell Ancient Coins Worth Millions”. Artnet News. 2023. https://news.artnet.com/art-world-archives/richard-beale-coin-provenance-court-2360975
Dafoe, Taylor. “The Dealer who Sold the World’s Most Expensive Coin has been Arrested for Falsifying the $4.2 Million Artifact’s Provenance”. Artnet News. 2023. https://news.artnet.com/art-world-archives/roma-numismatics-coin-dealer-richard-beale-arrested-fake-provenance-2269635
Escalante-de Mattei, Shanti. “One of the World’s Most Expensive Coins was Sold Using Fake Provenance and the Seller has Been Arrested”. ArtNews. 2023. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/worlds-most-expensive-coin-fake-provenance-roman-eid-mar-1234659762/