King Farouk of Egipt had one of them. The US Treasury went to the full extent of diplomatic limits trying to get it back. When Farouk lost power in a 1952 coup his coin disappeared.
In 1954, a 1933 Double Eagle appeared at auction in Cairo, Egypt. Sotheby’s, acting on behalf of the new Republic of Egypt, was selling the astonishing collections assembled by the deposed King Farouk. King Farouk was one of the greatest coin collectors of all time, though it was not until this auction that the world learned of his remarkable achievement — the collection comprised more than 8,500 gold coins and the sale itself took nine days. Lot 185 in that auction contained a 1933 Double Eagle. Learning of the offering, the United States Treasury successfully requested that the coin be withdrawn from the sale. After this, the whereabouts of the coin remained a mystery for nearly half a century. It has been suggested, in sworn depositions, that the present coin is the King Farouk coin, and there is significant evidence that it was part of the famed collection, including the fact that no other 1933 Double Eagle is known to exist or has ever been identified.
The location of the present coin, since its minting in 1933, had been a mystery until 1996 when it was seized at the Waldorf–Astoria in New York as respected and leading British coin dealer, Stephen Fenton, attempted to sell it to Secret Service agents who were posing as coin collectors. The legal proceedings lasted five years, ultimately resulting in a ground-breaking settlement that specifically allows this particular Double Eagle, nearly seventy years after its production, to be the only 1933 Double Eagle permitted to be privately owned.
Nine of those estimated 20 missing 1933 Saints surfaced in the years that followed. US treasury officials turned the missing coins into an all-out manhunt. They documented and destroyed the nine coins. This left only 13 after accounting for the two held at the Smithsonian.
The two intentionally spared coins are in the U.S. National Numismatic Collection, ten others are held in the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, and the one remaining recovered coin was sold in 2002 to private collector Stuart Weitzman (who remained anonymous at the time) for US$7.59 million. The coin sold again to an anonymous buyer at auction in June 2021 for US$18.9 million, making it the most expensive coin ever sold.