so what have we got don quixote i know just enough about them to
get in trouble rick we might have the holy grail coin
this is like the holy grail it's almost like one in a million it's like the hope diamond
hey how's it going good i'm john i'm a local bail bondsman i had a guy skip out on me on a 50 000
bail and i was trying to see what i can get out of this to pay the bond so he skipped on you huh
yes sir no laughing matter yeah life is a [ __ ] sometimes i decided to come to the pawn shop
today to sell my rare 1861 double eagle 20 gold piece i took this coin for collateral against
the guy skipping court and he did skip court now i got to pay 50 000 bucks so i'm hoping
it'll make a dent in the 50 000 that i owe on this bond so you know much about the coin
not much i thought it was pretty good condition but uh i was hoping you could tell me was this
graded at one time or i know i've never had it graded you mind if i pull this out of the plastic
because it's not great it doesn't it doesn't really matter pulling this one out don't drop it
let's put down my little safety pin appreciate it appreciate it thank you
how's it looking son i mean it's in pretty damn good shape
the u.s men started making these coins in 1849 and they continued to make them for over 80 years but
there were design changes along the way and this appears to be the original liberty head and it was
a big deal to have one of these back then because 20 was a ton of money what i can tell you about
this coin is that it appears to be real this is uncirculated men's state this is a very expensive
coin the reason this one is worth so much money is because this is a really low mintage year there's
11 different grades of men's state from ms-60 the ms-70 difference between a 61 and a 63 is
the difference between 10 000 and 40 000. there's also a variant of this coin that's worth right
around a quarter of a million dollars in the shape really rick we might have the holy grail of coin
there's a possibility i'd like someone to look at it who just knows a little bit more than me
sure so do you mind uh hanging out for a little bit and get somebody down here june okay great
thank you appreciate it be right back being a bondsman is all about making cash money man i'm
hoping this expert comes in tells me this coin's worth a lot of money okay a 20 live when we had
the 1849 gold rush america had a substantial gold supply they started issuing the 20 gold piece up
till till then they only had the 10 gold piece so that's why they call it a double eagle versus a
eagle which was a 10 gold piece they made one pattern in 1849 the year of the gold rush
and that's sitting in the smithsonian today and basically priceless and then in 1850 they started
issuing a 20 gold piece uh the liberty it was the highest denomination gold people had out there 20
what are your questions or concerns about this coin that you would like me to evaluate
i need to know the grade on it and i know there's a variant of this year that's super rare and worth
a quarter of a million dollars in this shape so take a look okay the variant is distinguishable
by the back it was a design which was not accepted but some of them were issued as patterns there's
less of them and that's what makes the coin rare okay so is this it we'll look on the reverse
and that's how you can tell with the tall letters and the shield variation in the
larger wingspan unfortunately you do not have here ugh i am sorry okay
what grade do you think it is let me take a good look at it and tell you it was a long
shot that this was the quarter million dollar coin but it's still rare and it's still valuable
but before i can make an offer i still have to have its condition and grade determined
we could be talking thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars looks very high
grade off the cuff very very minor scratches on the whole coin good body very slight wear
this definitely is a
ms63 or a better coin which would minimally be worth forty thousand dollars
okay thanks a lot andrew i really appreciate it i'm very happy this coin's worth a lot of money
so what do you want to do with it ponder to sell it sell it how much you want for it
you heard the man 40 grand uh 40 grand that's not going to happen
i'm thinking more like 30 grand and that's cash well he said it was worth 40 and i definitely
need the money how about 35. um do you know you're gonna make five grand off it i'm not necessarily
gonna make it five grand i plan on making five grand plans don't always come out as planned um
so how about 33 34 you got a deal
what do you think now go for it what the hell all right 34 000 fantastic all right let's go right
this thing up very good just made 34 thousand dollars i'm very happy i have to pay a 50 000
bond with it but it's pretty good it's better than i expected
i'm in l.a with dan and he's showing me his collection of willy wonka memorabilia which is
absolutely amazing he's got gene wilder's hat he's got walker bars he's got the golden egg
a golden ticket and and what is that what would you want it to be
oh my god
is it the everlasting gobstopper yeah
that's the real deal i'm even getting chills holding it it's like the hope diamond
talk about being speechless yeah that's like the holy grail when i was
seven years old that's the one thing i remember was the everlasting gobstopper it just sounded
like the most amazing thing in the world with all the different flavors and it lasts forever yes
yeah that was the centerpiece of the whole film yeah slugworth
came to charlie and you know i told him to give him a bunch of money if he stole the everlasting
gobstopper yeah and at the end charlie turned around and just gave it back to willy wonka and
that's when the willy walker gave the factory yes it's crazy too because the movie was a flop
and then the 80s came out and video came out it just turned into like the greatest thing ever
yeah cult classic it's still popular to this day so how much do you want for the gobstopper gosh um
that is the centerpiece of the film which if we sell that that's definitely breaking up
the aesthetics of the whole collection so um i'm gonna give you one price and that's that
i gotta stick with a hundred thousand dollars for the gobstopper it was your favorite film
if you throw on a walk-up bar so that means that i'd literally be giving you a wonka bar
oh and that's breaking up the set though it's not really a set of the rej it's just it's yeah just
i mean like but i'll tell you what i would give you one wonka bar and i'd give you the everlasting
gobstopper for a hundred and fifteen thousand but you can do it for a hundred thousand no all right
so 105 000 and i get a wonka bar i'm gonna miss that everlasting gobstopper sweet you got a deal
it's like the fountain of youth i'm seven years old again
i mean these are crazy pricey but putting these things in the shop will bring people in my shop
they're in amazing condition they have all the provenance in the world they're 100 legit they are
wanted and these collectors pay insane money all right rick now that you've opened up your wallet
i've got this client that has a really really cool muhammad ali piece and if you have some time i'll
bring them in and you can check it out hey got plenty of time i don't want to go back to vegas
let's do it earlier a guy brought in a straitjacket that he says belonged to harry
houdini and if he's right that's incredible but he doesn't have any paperwork and i'm a little
skeptical so i invited my buddy murray down to take a closer look good to see you all right rick
hey man how's it going i'm a magician i travel the world doing various magic and magic over 25 years
this is what i called you about this is supposed to be houdini straitjacket wow
so what's the history of it just so we know a little bit on it the story is theo gave this
jacket to my grandfather he was very good friends with the okay this makes sense theo
you know houdini's brother gave a lot of his stuff away houdini did hundreds and hundreds of straight
jacket escapes when he came to a town he'd always do a straight jacket escape over a building
generally the newspapers building of that city that's how we got in the front every newspaper
because he picked the building where the times was or the chronicle everyone would come to see
the spectacle and then all of a sudden his show would be filled up for the whole week that's how
he drew people okay what makes harry houdini so amazing is the fact that when he performed
it was a do or die situation either he would fall to his death or escape from a jacket
now you know he did escape upside down now it looked like it was harder well ironically when
you're upside down your torso stretches when your torso stretches it makes more room in the jacket
okay so something that looks death defying actually helped him get out so what are the
chances of this actually being houdini's jacket what's interesting with all these jackets is
that each jacket was individually made by hand each rivet has a certain space and these rivets
are never going to match another jacket's spacing now a company that he always used a
lot was a swan felt tent and awning company and generally that stamp is on a jacket
oh well swan felt tent and awning company i thought for sure there was no way we could
prove this was houdini's and now we have a positive clue this is a great start but
to prove it i need to find a photograph which is like a 1 million chance but this
is really houdini's jacket this is like the holy grail i mean a houdini
so i'll look at my resources and i have a huge file of resources and that'll let me
know if i can authenticate this or not okay sounds good great thanks guys hey you're back
i am finally yeah i know sorry about that um so i found the only photographs of a jacket that's
as close as we can get to this jacket it's the exact same style made by the same company
this is january 1st 1915 in st louis missouri okay so now i'm gonna do a
little bit of forensic work i'm gonna get the stitching i'm gonna count every single stitch
if there's one stitch less it's not the jacket well this is a moment that i've been waiting on
for a long time let's check this thing out you know see if this is the actual jacket
unbelievable look at this this rivet here is flattened so is this one this rivet is
raised that's raised you can see it in the photo it's that clear as day this actually reflected
off the camera which a flat surface would this is a great sign this right here is this i mean
that's identical granted they could have put the same amount of roads and jackets fair enough
but you have one stitch two three four five check this out right there
double stitch wow it's amazing it's almost like one in a million
you know what this is houdini's jacket from january 1st 1950 absolutely awesome
congratulations thank you even in magic history this is huge now that we've found out that it's
real i wish me and my cousins hadn't played so hard in it when we were five and six years old
all right so tell me what do these things go for this jacket i would estimate would go anywhere
between 34 and 42 000 okay thanks man you're the best there you go you know i've seen a few
houdini jackets but it's always the jacket and then a different picture this is the first time
ever i've seen harry houdini in a jacket and then having the exact same jacket beside me all right
so how much do you want for it uh you know if i could get 40 i think we'd have a deal all right um
i'm thinking 15. it's in really rough shape it's had repairs on it it could be years
before i sell this thing you know i might i might go a little less than 40 maybe 35.
i'll tell you what i'll go 25 grand i mean that is tops
if you could come up to 30 then then we've got a deal um i'll go you know 25 is it
well um it's been an awesome day
uh you know i think i'll keep it okay i'm always here man awesome thank you
guys forget the numbers the most exciting thing is to actually have
the expert come in and find an actual photograph of harry houdini wearing my jacket
absolutely blew me away blew me away i can't believe this guy wouldn't budge on his price
even though we were only five grand off on the price 25 000 is the most i could offer damn i
really wanted this jacket i almost feel like running after him in the parking lot right now
what do we got here i've got four uh volumes of history of don quixote okay they were printed in
1731. so did you ever read don quixote 40 50 years ago do you remember any of it not really okay
i decided to come into the pawn shop today to sell my collection of don quixote books
my dad was a big book collector so these books were a part of his collection i don't know how
much these things are worth but i'm hoping to actually start a college fund for our daughter
this is cool um you know anything about them i don't really know much about them except
they're bound and inside the front cover it said it's a fourth edition printing
from 1731. okay i mean it was written in the 1600s and you read it today there's still
funny passages in it that will make you laugh it's about don quixote who thinks he's a balorus knight
but i think he cruises around on like a donkey all right don quixote is a novel
about an ordinary guy who decides to put on a suit of armor and go out looking for
adventures he's sort of a bumbling fool always getting into trouble like a 16th century chumley
okay well they were obviously bought before 1962 at a bookstore in
salt lake city when you see an address without a zip code that means it's like 1962 or before
that's when they came out with zip codes wow didn't know that and these are definitely old
i mean this is hand laid paper you know it's been a popular book for over 400 years yes so
these are sort of timeless like that and that's why they are collectible these books are hundreds
of years old leather bound and in pretty good condition so i'm betting they're actually worth
quite a bit here's my concerns i just don't know enough about them i can tell you that if these
were the first editions from the 1600s written in spanish you would have like the holy grail and
they'd probably be worth i i have no idea it's got to be over a million dollars probably um
and that's where my knowledge stops okay um so let me get someone down here who will know
everything there is to know about these books okay let me go give her a phone call thank you
i've done really well with rare books in the past and my instincts are telling me there's some big
money here so what have we got don quixote i know just enough about them to get in trouble
the guys usually call me down here when they've got a rare book they don't know a lot about
it and so i come down take a look at it get an idea of what it is so what do you know about him
well don quixote is probably the best-selling
work ever after the bible so 500 million copies of this book have sold at least
the author of this book cervantes he lived about the same time as shakespeare
and critics largely agree that it's the most important novel ever written so this is a big deal
now the first edition in spanish was printed in 1605 in madrid and then a man named thomas shelton
we see him here on the title page uh he translated it for the first time the two parts in 1620. and
this edition here is over a hundred years after that i see uh this is normally not a good thing
but you're lucky because don quixote is the most popular novel in human history so later printings
like this can still have some collectible value i'm looking at the bindings they look to be the
time period which is always a bonus uh though they're a little beat up so for this 1731 edition
in this condition all four volumes would probably retail at
fifteen hundred to eighteen hundred dollars
really oh okay i'm disappointed i i thought they were more valuable harvard's probably going to be
out of the question so what do you want from young lady i'm really not good at negotiating um and i
trust you guys you know she said they're worth 15 to 1800 bucks retail okay mind you they are books
they do sit around a long time they're not quick movers um i'm looking you know a thousand bucks
really i was thinking more like 12 50. it kind of bugs me when a seller says
they trust me to come up with a price and then they try and get more out of me a thousand really
is my best offer i'm hoping to get 1500 bucks for them okay um let's let's do it okay it's a deal
thousand dollars thank you i'll meet you right up front and we'll do some paperwork thank you
in the end i think we both made a deal that works and i will definitely make some money
you