ALLENTOWN, Pa. (AP) - Police say they have arrested two men accused of stealing $69,000 in antique coins from an Allentown dealer.

According to police, 27-year-old Shawn Robinson stole a tabletop display case from Hottel's Coins at the Merchant Square Mall. It happened shortly before noon Sunday while the owner was helping other customers during an indoor flea market. The case was filled with rare and antique coins.

Authorities say Robinson ran from the building and hopped into a waiting car, driven by 26-year-old Allentown resident Troy Anderson.

ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. (AP) - A collection of 400 antique bicycles owned by a suburban Buffalo museum is being sold to an overseas buyer for $4 million.

Carl Burgwardt, the owner of the Pedaling History Bicycle Museum in Orchard Park, says he's selling the collection after it wasn't included plans to redevelop Buffalo's Erie Canal Harbor area.

The plans call for museums at the downtown site, but the development agency hasn't decided which ones to include.
Burgwardt says a confidentiality agreement with the buyer prevents him from discussing where the collection is going.

The collection ranges from a wooden two-wheeler made in 1817 to iconic Schwinn bicycles. Many of the older bikes were made by Buffalo factories that later shifted to automobile manufacturing in the early 20th century.
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Information from: The Buffalo News, http://www.buffalonews.com

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-ES-11-12-08 1109EST  

LONDON (AP) _ A gold chain of office King Henry VIII is thought to have given to a Lord Chief Justice was sold at auction Thursday for more than 310,000 pounds ($490,000).

The intricate work, known as the Coleridge Collar, is the only known complete example of its type from Henry's reign, according to Christie's auctioneers.

The chain, dated to 1546 or 1547, is thought to have been given to Sir Edward Montagu, who was Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, one of 16 executors of Henry's will and governor to his heir, Edward VI.

NEW YORK (AP) - Christie's is auctioning a handwritten copy of the 1864 speech Abraham Lincoln delivered at the White House after being re-elected in the midst of an unpopular Civil War that both he and his opponents believed might cost him his job.

The four-page manuscript, which remained in the family's hands until 1916, will be sold on the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth on Feb. 12, 2009, the auction house announced Thursday. It is expected to fetch more than $3 million.

Lincoln delivered the speech to a large crowd on Nov. 10, 1864, after winning a second term with 55 percent of the popular vote. He said the results "demonstrated that a people's government can sustain a national election in the midst of a great civil war."

BASEL, Switzerland (AP) - Officials say Switzerland has agreed to return 4,400 antiquities stolen from archaeological sites in Italy.

Prosecutor Thomas Homberger says the artifacts include ceramics and bronze figures dating back to the Roman and Etruscan periods.

Homberger says the items were seized at an art dealership in northeastern city of Basel in the 1990s. The married couple running the shop failed in their legal efforts to stop the transfer of the artifacts back to Italy.

JERUSALEM (AP) - It took time, but Israeli police detectives have cracked one of the country's greatest crimes - the legendary heist of a priceless clock collection from a Jerusalem museum a quarter century ago.

The 1983 theft, the costliest in Israel's history, saw 106 timepieces worth millions of dollars disappear from the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art. Among them was a pocket watch made for French queen Marie Antoinette that museum officials value at more than $30 million.

Although the stolen clocks had no connection to Islamic culture, they were displayed in the museum because they had originally belonged to the father of the museum's founder.

The heist baffled police for more than two decades. But detectives now blame Naaman Diller - a notorious Israeli thief who fled to Europe and died in the United States in 2004.

Investigators got their first break two years ago, when the museum informed them it paid some $40,000 to an anonymous American woman to buy back 40 of the items, including the Marie Antoinette timepiece made by famed watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet.

Rachel Hasson, the museum's artistic director, calls the gold and rock crystal watch "the Mona Lisa of the clock world." Also recovered were a Breguet creation from 1819 known as the ``Sympathiques'' and a clock shaped like a pistol from the same period.

Police forensics experts were allowed to examine the clocks, and detectives questioned the lawyer who negotiated the sale. The trail led to an Israeli woman in Los Angeles named Nili Shamrat, who police identified as the widow of Diller - a notorious criminal in Israel after a string of bold thefts in the 1960s and '70s.

From there the mystery began to unravel, police say. Diller apparently confessed the crime to his wife on his deathbed. When Israeli police and American law enforcement officials arrived at her home last May to question her, they found more of the stolen clocks.

Police placed a gag order on the case, but lifted it last week after Israeli media violated the order.
Diller's widow refused to answer questions from The Associated Press when contacted Saturday, and did not answer her phone Sunday and Monday. Her Israeli lawyer, Hila Efron-Gabai, also refused to discuss the case.

Oded Yaniv, one of the investigators who broke the case, said about 40 clocks are missing, but police are pursuing tips on where Diller scattered the goods around the world.

Yaniv called the investigation a "once in a lifetime" experience, filled with international intrigue in the murky world of art dealing and antiquity trading.

Diller was renowned in Israel for daring break-ins and an ability to keep one step ahead of the law. He meticulously researched sites for hours and used innovative techniques that earned him the admiration of the same people who were trying to stop him.

"He was a legendary robber. He was very different, very intelligent, and had a unique style," Yaniv said. "We are all disappointed that we don't have the chance to sit and talk to him and investigate him. We feel like we missed out on that."

According to police, Diller used a crowbar to bend the bars on a back window of the museum the night of April 15, 1983, and behind the cover of a parked truck climbed inside with a ladder. Having staked out the museum, he knew the alarm was broken and the guard was stationed in front.

Police spokesman Shmulik Ben-Ruby said Diller was very thin and able to slither in and out of the opening unnoticed throughout the night. He said the clocks were generally small enough to easily pass through and Diller had the expertise to take others apart if needed.

The spokesman said police had thought of Diller as a possible suspect in 1983 but found nothing to link him to the robbery. In addition, police thought the heist was the work of a gang of at least three robbers. Yaniv said he and his colleagues were shocked to discover Diller acted alone.

Diller later moved to Europe, where he operated under several identities and was briefly jailed before moving to Los Angeles, where he died of cancer.

Hasson said she was ecstatic to get at least part of the collection back and plans to have the clock display open again within the two months. She said the museum purchased the watches back for a ``symbolic'' fee after Diller's widow tried to sell the stolen goods elsewhere and failed.

"The clocks are so well-known that nobody would buy them," she said.
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Associated Press researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report.
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On the Net:
L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art:http://www.islamicart.co.il/default-eng.asp
AP-CS-11-04-08 0600EST

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

NEW YORK (AP) - A rare 1868 U.S. postage stamp has sold for more than $1 million at a New York City auction.

The 3-cent, rose-colored "B Grill" stamp was among the highlights of a three-day Siegel Auction Galleries sale that ended Thursday, Oct. 30. The auction house says only three other known examples of the stamp remain.

"B Grill" refers to an embossed pattern in the stamp paper.

An anonymous buyer put in the winning bid of $1,035,000.

The auction also included one of stamp collecting's most famous prizes, the so-called "Inverted Jenny" from 1918. The 24-cent American airmail stamp features a biplane accidentally printed upside-down. Only 100 of the red, white and blue stamps were printed.

Siegel says New Rochelle, N.Y., stamp dealer Harry Hagendorf bought the one auctioned on Thursday for $388,125.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

LONDON (AP) - A painting by Pablo Picasso that was expected to fetch more than $30 million at auction next week has been withdrawn from the sale, Sotheby's auction house said Tuesday Arlequin was to have been one of the star lots at Sotheby's Nov. 3 sale of Impressionist and modern art in New York. A Sotheby's spokeswoman said the painting had been withdrawn by the seller "for private reasons."

FAIRFIELD, Maine - With the world economy under siege, a Colt Walker pistol came out blazing to set a record at James D. Julia Inc.’s firearms auction Oct. 7. The rare and historic Colt Whitneyville-Walker pistol, made for use in the Mexican War, sold for $920,000, inclusive of the 15 percent buyer’s premium.

Considered the finest example of a martial Colt Walker extant, the pistol had been estimated to sell for $500,000 to $1 million. The sale price represents the most expensive single firearm ever sold in North America and is believed to be the most expensive ever sold in the world.

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - EBay is banning the sale of ivory products to help protect African and Asian elephants.
The policy will go into effect in December and will be enforced starting in January, eBay Inc. said Monday.

"We simply can't ensure that ivory listed for sale on eBay is in compliance with the complex regulations that govern its sale," Richard Brewer-Hay wrote on the online auctioneer's blog eBay Ink.

Exceptions for some items with small amounts of ivory, such as pianos, will be made, though the items must have been made before 1900.

Items that have a large amount of ivory, regardless of their age, will not be permitted for sale. These would include chess sets and jewelry.

EBay banned cross-border sales of ivory products last year, but sales "continued to be a concern within the company and among stakeholders," Brewer-Hay said.

The company said it works with international and domestic law enforcement authorities like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and will help them in investigations they initiate.

The Humane Society of the United States and Humane Society International applauded the decision and said they first brought the issue to eBay after an investigation in 2002 discovered thousands of ivory items.

"EBay's decision to wash its hands of the uncontrollable, bloody ivory trade is commendable and should set an example for others," said Teresa Telecky, policy director for Humane Society International.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

DULUTH, Minn. (AP) - The Duluth City Council has voted 8-1 to take a Tiffany Studios "Minnehaha" stained-glass window off the market.

Councilor Todd Fedora proposed rescinding support for selling the Tiffany window after experts expressed skepticism at its $2.9 million appraisal. He said it would have been terrible if the city had put it up for auction and the sale brought in only a tenth of what they expected.

Selling the artwork was one of the most disputed proposals Mayor Don Ness brought forward in trying to balance the city budget after it became clear that revenues were going to fall $6.5 million short of expenses this year.

The window depicting a fictional American Indian princess was designed by Tiffany artist Anne Weston in 1892-93 when she lived in Duluth. It's been on display in the Depot in downtown Duluth.

Information from: Duluth News Tribune,
http://www.duluthsuperior.com

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-WS-10-14-08 0845EDT

KNIGHTSTOWN, Ind. (ACNI) - As previously reported on Auction Central News, dmg world media is moving away from antiques publishing with its sale of London-based Antiques Trade Gazette and the expected sale of four publications produced in Knightstown, Ind., three of them antiques related.

Richard Lewis, publisher of the U.S.-based titles - AntiqueWeek, AntiqueWest, Auction Exchange, and Farm World - confirmed to Auction Central News on Oct. 9, 2008 that the publications are currently under offer.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Talk about an investment in gold. This one is insured for $2.5 million, although it contains only a half-ounce of the precious metal.

It's an extremely rare 1844 proof $10 gold coin struck at the U.S. Mint in New Orleans as a presentation piece for President James Polk. Collectors believe it is one-of-a-kind.

Now the property of an anonymous Florida collector, the coin, known as an Eagle, has been brought back to New Orleans to be put on display at the Old U.S. Mint when the museum reopens on Nov. 1 after a brief closure to install exhibits.

New Orleans coin dealer Paul Hollis made arrangements to have the coin displayed in the city of its origin.

"You will never get another one," Hollis said.

Like many rare coins, the exact history of how this Eagle was passed around is cloudy. Struck on specially prepared, highly polished dies, presentation proofs were given during the 1800s to various VIPs such as dignitaries and heads of state. Well-connected collectors also managed to get a few.
Most were prepared at the Philadelphia mint, while few came out of branch mints such as New Orleans, which operated from 1838 to 1909. The distinctive ``O'' mint mark on the reverse under a heraldic eagle motif identifies the coin as of New Orleans origin.

During its operation, the New Orleans mint produced a wide range of silver and gold coins, including the king of circulating U.S. gold coins, the $20 Double Eagle.

The New Orleans mint was one of three in the South. The others were in Charlotte, N.C., and Dahlonega, Ga. Of the three, only the New Orleans mint reopened after the Civil War.

Hollis said the New Orleans-produced 1844 Eagle surfaced at a sale in the early 1900s and records indicate it may have traded for as little as $11. It was later owned by U.S. Treasury Secretary William Woodin, who served under President Franklin Roosevelt and played a key role in the United States seizing gold and gold coins in 1933 as the country abandoned the international gold standard.

It also was Woodin who cut an exception to the seizure for rare gold coins.
Hollis puts a ballpark value on the Eagle at $2 million to $2.7 million. The owner has insured it for $2.5 million.

"It certainly is a seven-figure item," said Scott Schechter of Sarasota, Fla.-based Numismatic Guaranty Corp., who certified the coin's authenticity.

Hollis said he carried the coin in his hands on a flight from Florida to New Orleans, where security officers accompanied both to the Eagle's new home at the mint.

The mint was closed for about two years after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005 and reopened in October 2007 after a $5 million renovation. In addition to exhibits dedicated to the building's time as a mint, the museum also includes archived maps and documents dating back to Louisiana's days as a French and Spanish possession.

The museum's jazz collection, including sheet music, photographs, records, manuscripts and instruments from some of the city's earliest jazz musicians, is being overhauled and is expected to return to the mint in 2010.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-WS-10-12-08 1118EDT