Santa Rosa Coin Exchange

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Beware! Under new ownership. The current owner switched out two coins from a collection of 200 I brought to sell on 2/18/14. I did not scan the coins prior to the visit to the shop, thinking it was under the same trustworthy ownership as of two years ago. The owner, Bruce Collister, identified three coins of particular value. We both looked at them for 10 or so minutes, even looking up the value in the catalog together. A 1893 S Morgan dollar, and two 1893 O Morgan dollars. The price for the S coin was listed at $2600, and something less for the other two. He wanted to send them away for appraisal, but I told him I did not want to leave them with him, and stacked them next to my car keys and ID immediately to my left. At that point, the transaction became chaotic, coins were stacked and moved and recounted and it felt more like a magic show than anything else. Two older women were briefly in the shop, but they did not approach me and for the bulk of my time in the shop, it was just Bruce, his wife Linda, and myself. At the end of it all, two of the three stacked coins of value were missing...the S and one of the O coins. I thought he may have put them in with the other 197 coins, so we searched for the missing coins at least 8 times, but the coins I had set aside were no longer part of the batch...even though there were still 200 total! Bruce had left the counter a few times during the transaction...going to the back of the shop a couple of times and reaching in his safe at one point. When I raised my suspicions that he has switched out the two valuable coins for two from his safe that were "melt value," he told me we had "looked at the dates and mint marks wrong...that the 1893 S was not really there, nor was the one 1893 O (other than the one still set aside). I started to argue, but by now, the shop was closed and I had no cell phone. I was alone in the store with him and his wife, with the tension rising, and had a gut reaction that told me to leave. I left and filed a police report as soon as possible. My loss: somewhere between $2600 and $3500. My regret is that I didn't inventory the coins prior to taking them to Santa Rosa Coin Exchange, and for not calling the police from his shop and waiting for them to confront him. My hope is to make it harder for him to do this to anyone else...