John Feigenbaum flew out of San Jose this week in first class, with flip-flops on his feet, a T-shirt on his back and a dime worth $1.9 million in his pocket reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

It was the most expensive dime ever to pass through San Jose. That’s because it is the most expensive dime in the history of dimes.

“All the way across the country I didn’t sleep,'’ Feigenbaum said. “I didn’t eat and I didn’t sleep. You wouldn’t, either.'’

Feigenbaum is a rare coin dealer, and the dime he was carrying across the country, from San Jose to New York, is an 1894-S dime, one of only nine known to exist, and one of only 24 known to be coined that year in San Francisco.

It was his job to pick up the dime from the seller’s vault, in Oakland, and deliver the dime to the buyer’s vault, in midtown Manhattan.

The person who bought the dime does not want the world to know who he is. The person who sold the dime is Oakland businessman Daniel Rosenthal, who was unavailable for comment, perhaps because a person newly in possession of $1.9 million has got better things to do than answer a lot of questions.

But the dime’s cross-country trip was the stuff of intrigue, of that there is no mistake. The logistics of moving a $1.9 million dime across the country turn out to be at least as staggering as the notion of paying $1.9 million for a dime.

It was on Monday afternoon that Feigenbaum, a 38-year-old coin dealer from Virginia Beach, donned his best grubby clothes to meet the seller’s representative at an Oakland bank vault. Feigenbaum was slumming it so as not to attract attention, he said.

“There’s no reason to dress up in a suit and make a big production,'’ he said. “You don’t want to stand out.'’

Feigenbaum put the dime, encased in a 3-inch-square block of plastic, in his pocket and, accompanied by a security guard, drove in an ordinary sedan directly to San Jose airport to catch the red-eye to Newark.

Read it here: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/27/DIME.TMP