1883 No CENTS

On January 30, 1883, Mint Superintendent A. Loudon Snowden unveiled the new Liberty Head nickel at a ceremony inside the Philadelphia Mint. Dignitaries attended. Souvenirs of the first strikes were distributed. The design replaced the Shield nickel's thirteen stars and Arabic numeral 5 with a coronet portrait of Liberty surrounded by stars, paired with a wreath surrounding a Roman numeral V on the reverse. The motto E PLURIBUS UNUM took the place of the word CENTS that the Shield nickel had carried. Charles E. Barber, who had cut the dies, believed the V was sufficient to identify the denomination. He was wrong.

Within weeks of release, confidence artists noticed that the new nickel was nearly identical in diameter to the $5 gold half eagle. A coat of gold plating turned the five-cent piece into something that in poor light looked very much like a five-dollar coin. The scheme had a built-in defense: the coin itself said only "V," and a swindler caught passing one could honestly claim he had never called it gold. Per NGC, "the Mint had struck nearly 5-1/2 million of the so-called 'No CENTS' nickels, and many had been gold-plated and passed" before officials moved to fix the design. Press accounts gave the gilt pieces a name that stuck: Racketeer Nickels.

The Mint responded quickly. Barber modified the reverse to add CENTS prominently below the wreath, shifting E PLURIBUS UNUM upward to accommodate the new inscription. The corrected dies entered production mid-year. Before the switch, Philadelphia had delivered 5,474,300 No CENTS nickels. PCGS estimates approximately 100,000 survivors across all grades, with around 20,000 in MS60 or better and 5,000 at MS65 or better. Per NGC, "many people set examples aside, mistakenly believing that, having been replaced, these would someday be rare." The result is a survival pattern inverted from expectation: the lower-mintage No CENTS is more abundant in Mint State than the higher-mintage With CENTS of the same year.

The auction record is $12,075 for an MS67 sold by Goldberg Auctioneers in September 2005, with the finest known being PCGS MS67+. Per Ron Guth (PCGS), the No CENTS variety survives at six times the rate of the With CENTS variety despite the latter having three times the higher original mintage, a clean illustration of the first-year-of-issue hoarding effect. The Brooklyn Bridge opened in May 1883, in the same months the Racketeer scheme was first being reported in the New York papers, and the Liberty Head nickels changing hands across the new bridge's tolls included plenty of gold-plated examples that fooled inattentive shopkeepers along the route.