Giant gold ‘Butte Nugget’ sells to secret Bay Area buyer
The 6.07-pound gold Butte Nugget sold Friday for an undisclosed amount of money to a secret buyer. Photo taken by David McCarthy. Just one day after it was unveiled to awed crowds in San Francisco, the whopping ‘Butte Nugget’ of gold sold Friday to a “prominent Bay Area collector” for an undisclosed amount of money, according to the company brokering the deal. “The new owner wants to be secret ive, so we can’t name him,” said Don Kagin of Tiburon, the coin dealer who acted as middle-man between the buyer and the prospector who found the 6.07-pound gold lump — the biggest nugget of its kind found in modern times in Gold Rush country. “Let’s just say it’s a win-win for everybody,” Kagin said. The seller also asked that the price be kept secret , he said. But he added: “We were asking for $400,000 and it obviously wasn’t far from that.” David McCarthy, Kagin’s chief numismatist, said he could only reveal that the buyer is “a prominent bay area collector” w...