Casino Chip Treasure Trove Discovered
Casino chip collectors may want to guard their private stash of souvenir chips. A horde of casino chips from the now defunct Playboy Casino in Atlantic City was discovered by a work crew in Hernando, Mississippi in a location that once housed the Green Duck Corporation. Green Duck was one of the major manufacturers of slot machine tokens and supposedly the place where old casino chips were sent for destruction. Authorities in New Jersey are looking into why the chips were in Mississippi and many people who collect chips are watching it very closely.
The collection of chips was found on April 14, the exact date of the grand opening of the Playboy Hotel and Casino 27 years ago. The crew discovered the horde of bunny-themed chips beneath a concrete slab that was 4 feet wide, 8 feet long, and 4 feet thick while digging it up so that they could lay a new sidewalk for the community center that is now built on the former Green Duck site. The chips were immediately scooped up by the work crew and passers by in the hopes of having something of value from the old casino. The police chief and the mayor helped themselves to a set as well.
When people started inquiring as to the value of the chips, they discovered that the bunnies were fetching a comfy price on e-Bay: $10 to $20 for a $1 chip; $3,000 for a $100 chip, supposedly the rarest in the find. Unfortunately, the influx of these rare chips hitting e-Bay and other auction sites have caused their value to plummet, making the $100 chip that was once worth $3,000 now worth next to nothing.
While the town’s mayor is joking about affecting currency in the nation over the rare find, the gambling authorities in New Jersey are wondering why the chips were buried instead of being destroyed. They have opened an investigation into this phenomenon, but representatives from Green Duck have no idea what happened. What’s even more interesting is that one former vice president for the company stated that she remembered getting the destruction contract from Playboy while the company’s owner claims that they never destroyed casino chips let alone bury them under a concrete slab. The chips were to have been destroyed in 1985 and the New Jersey authorities are attempting to find records regarding the disposition of them after the casino had been sold.
The chips that were found are in varying conditions. Some of them are cut in half, some of them are embedded in the concrete, and the rest were in good shape. The construction crew, in an effort to remain on schedule, buried what was left of the chips, stating that there were so many of them that they couldn’t see the bottom of the pit. People are still flocking to the Mississippi town and digging them up for their collections. Anyone trying to cash in their chips through a special fund that had been set up in New Jersey when the casino closed will be required to sign an affidavit swearing their chips were not from the Mississippi stash in order to get their money.
