A modern-day swashbuckler has been awarded the world salvage rights to a sister ship of the Titanic that he’s convinced sank off the coast of Nantucket with billions in gold in her belly.

U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner issued her decision last night on behalf of Martin Bayerle, 54, of Manhattan, after a New Jersey lawyer and the U.S. Department of Justice both mounted half-hearted attempts to scuttle a search of the RMS Republic.

“This will allow some order to the whole salvage operation,” said Bayerle’s attorney, Timothy D. Barrow. “I just hope we can go forward now.”

The White Star Line’s 570-foot luxury liner sank in 1909 39 hours after she was hit by another ship in dense fog. Six people died.

Bayerle was in Boston yesterday to get his legal affairs shipshape. After a preparatory trip this month, the go-for-the-gold will commence next summer and is expected to take up to four years and cost more than $12 million. The reward could be a treasure valued at between $1.6 and $10 billion, though he admits he has no proof the gold exists.

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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to keep $10,000 he received from an Ohio coin dealer linked to a possible multimillion-dollar fraud case, even though President Bush and other GOP leaders are treating similar donations as if they are radioactive.

Bush is sending back $4,000 he took from Tom Noe, a veteran GOP fund- raiser who is being investigated in connection with $12 million that may be missing from a rare-coins fund he managed for an Ohio state agency.

“There have been some serious allegations that have been raised against (Noe),” Scott McClellan, a spokesman for the president, told reporters Friday. “The president felt it was the right thing to return those contributions.”

Ohio Sen. Mike DeWine, Gov. Bob Taft and other GOP leaders and organizations will send back more than $80,000 they have received from Noe since 1990.

But Schwarzenegger, whose California Recovery Team cashed two $5,000 checks from Noe in March of last year, will be hanging onto that money, said Marty Wilson, who runs that political committee and the governor’s overall fund-raising effort.

“The allegations about Mr. Noe became public a year after we accepted his contribution,” Wilson said in a statement. “As he was an active Ohio Republican Party fund-raiser and donor, we had no reason at the time to question his contribution and have no intention of refunding the money.”

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A 1974 aluminum cent pattern has recently been certified by Independent Coin Grading Company, a third party authentication and grading service. ICG has encapsulated it in a slab with a grade of AU58.

As the price of copper rose during the 1970s to the point where the metal in a penny cost nearly as much as its face value, the U.S. Mint explored alternative metallic compositions. Legislation was introduced in late 1973 that would have given the Secretary of the Treasury the authority to strike one cent coins from an aluminum alloy. The Mint struck more than 1.5 million aluminum and bronze clad one cent patterns dated 1974 and distributed a small number to members of Congress and Treasury Department officials. When it became clear that legislation authorizing a change in composition would not be enacted, the Mint requested that the patterns be returned and destroyed those in its possession. However, it’s believed that some of the distributed pieces were never returned.

Production of bronze Lincoln cents continued until 1982, when the composition was changed to zinc with an outer copper layer.

A U.S. Capitol police officer claimed to have retrieved the recently certified specimen after it was dropped by a Congressman. Thinking the Congressman had dropped a dime, the officer attempted to return the coin but was told to keep it. An unidentified coin dealer submitted the coin to ICG on behalf of the late officer’s family.

The U.S. Mint considers the 1974 aluminum cents to be unreleased and therefore government property. Because the Mint has no enforcement powers, it has referred the matter to the Secret Service, which has handled similar cases in the past. The Secret Service is investigating and could demand forfeiture of the certified piece and any others that surface.

(via Chuck D’Ambra Coins newsletter)

I just learned that the 2006 Guide Book of United States Coins is available at Amazon for $10. I highly recommend the spiral-bound copy because it makes it so much easier to leave the pages open and the binding doesn’t crack after repeated use.

Get’em while they’re hot!

John Ford, a coin dealer and collector known for catalogs that brought clarity to numismatics and whose collections, including the earliest American coins and prized Confederate pennies, have dazzled recent auctiongoers, died July 7 at a nursing home in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 81.

Susan Dobbins, his daughter, confirmed the death.

The scale and completeness of Mr. Ford’s collecting have emerged as 11 of as many as 20 auctions have been conducted to sell off his esoteric collections, which included the notes of Massachusetts issued in 1690, the oldest coins issued by the Continental Congress, and African chiefs’ medals.

Michael Hodder, a numismatic consultant, said bidders already had spent $35 million on the Ford collections, and the final total may rival the three auctions of the collection of Louis Eliasburg, who assembled examples of every known American coin. These exceeded $55 million.

Francis Campbell, the librarian of the American Numismatic Society, said the sales have expanded appreciation of Mr. Ford.

“It’s going to settle in that he was more important than we thought he was,” he said.

Mr. Ford’s impact on the field has been better-known in the small circle of its professionals, particularly his catalogs for New Netherlands Coin Co., which he partly owned. His meticulous descriptions of grades, colors and other qualities were unprecedented, wrote Harvey Stack, owner of Stack’s, which is auctioning Ford’s collections.

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