A Capitol Police Officer Pocketed a Secret Mint Penny and the Government Wants It Back

In the 1970s the US Mint secretly struck more than a million pennies made of aluminum.

Congress killed the plan and ordered every test coin destroyed.

One man grabbed a penny before it disappeared and the government has been chasing it ever since.

The Copper Shortage That Pushed the Mint to Try Something Radical

Copper prices spiked so hard in the early 1970s that the metal inside a penny was creeping toward being worth more than the coin itself, and the Philadelphia Mint needed an answer fast.

The Mint's answer was aluminum: cheaper, resistant to tarnish, and easy on the dies, so in 1973 it struck more than 1.5 million Lincoln cents dated 1974 and sent samples to Capitol Hill for lawmakers to look at before asking Congress to approve the switch.

The pitch fell apart almost immediately once two industries with real muscle in Washington got a look at the new coin.

Vending machine operators warned that a lighter aluminum cent would jam equipment built for a heavier coin, and pediatricians and radiologists told Congress that a swallowed aluminum penny would not show up clearly on an X-ray the way a copper one would.

Congress rejected the aluminum cent in March 1974, copper prices eased later that year after the government released part of its stockpile, and the Mint was ordered to recall and melt every test coin it had made.

One Officer Walked Out With a Souvenir Nobody Approved

Recalling test coins handed out to members of Congress and their staff turned out to be a lot harder than striking them in the first place, and the Mint never fully accounted for where every sample went.

U.S. Capitol Police officer Albert Toven reportedly picked one up during the congressional hearings and simply kept it, and that single coin eventually surfaced in the hands of a private collector, graded MS62 by professional coin graders.

A second specimen out of the Denver Mint took an even stranger path: Harry Lawrence, a Denver Mint assistant superintendent, received one as a retirement gift in 1980, and his son Randall tried to sell it through Heritage Auctions in 2014 with a price estimate as high as $2 million.

The Mint stopped the sale cold, arguing the coin was never authorized to exist and remained federal property no matter whose basement it had been sitting in.

The two sides fought it out in court until March 2016, when Lawrence and his business partner agreed to surrender the coin and give up any claim to it for good.

Today one specimen sits in the Smithsonian's National Numismatic Collection, the surrendered Denver coin is back in federal custody, and at least one more example is still floating in private hands in a legal gray zone the Mint has never fully resolved.

A Fifty Year Old Penny the Government Still Will Not Let You Own

Mint Chief Counsel Daniel Shaver put the government's position in writing: these coins were never officially issued, which means in the eyes of federal law nobody may legally circulate, sell, buy, or even hold one.

Read that again: a one-cent coin the Mint struck on purpose and Congress rejected fifty years ago is something the federal government treats as more dangerous to own than plenty of things that are actually legal to own.

The same government that proudly displays one specimen to the public is the one that sues ordinary citizens who happen to end up holding one too.

That double standard did not stop the Mint from hauling the coin out for public display at events like the American Numismatic Association's World's Fair of Money, where collectors can look at it behind glass but never take one home.

A coin Congress rejected in a single afternoon in 1974 has bounced for fifty years between a Capitol Police officer's pocket, a Denver retirement party, a federal courtroom, and a display case, and the government still treats it the same way it would treat a stolen classified document.

Most abandoned government experiments just disappear into a filing cabinet somewhere, but this one kept resurfacing every time an ordinary citizen tried to claim a piece of it as their own, and Washington has made sure every single time that the government, not the citizen, ends up holding the coin.

Sources:

• CoinWeek Staff, "1974 Aluminum Cent: The U.S. Mint's Bold Penny Experiment, the Auction That Collapsed, and the Legal Fight That Still Haunts Collectors," CoinWeek, 2026.
• Wikipedia contributors, "1974 aluminum cent," Wikipedia, 2026.
• Coin World Staff, "U.S. Mint's ANA booth to display aluminum cent," Coin World, 2017.
• PCGS Staff, "1974-D 1C Aluminum (Regular Strike) Lincoln Cent," PCGS CoinFacts, 2026.