Lawyer: Texas Separatists Considered Buying Mulligan Mint

A Dallas mint in search of a buyer sparked the interest of a Texas separatist group, a lawyer revealed Wednesday in bankruptcy court.

A lawyer who helped market Mulligan Mint Inc.’s Texas plant, which made more than 30,000 coins per month before filing for bankruptcy in September, said he got a verbal offer for the plant from a group called the Republic of Texas.

For years, that group has claimed that Texas has been illegally occupied since it became the 28th U.S. state in 1845. (A U.S. District Court judge who declared Texas to be a “state of the union” in a 1998 decision hasn’t seemed to deter them.)

The group’s offer for the 20,000-square-foot plant never turned into a formal bid, lawyer William Medford told a bankruptcy judge Wednesday during a hearing before the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Dallas. The judge later approved a $1.4 million offer for the plant that came from NTR Metals USA, a precious metals company.

A representative for the Republic of Texas group couldn’t be reached for comment Wednesday.

The group made headlines in 1997 when several Republic members held two Texas residents captive and demanded that another Republic member previously arrested on charges of trespassing be released, according to Tribune News Services.

Before the Republic of Texas was a potential buyer, it was a Mulligan Mint customer. The mint printed the group’s coins, which depict the Alamo and were advertised on Mulligan Mint’s website as “not regulated or manipulated by the U.S. government and retains its true value permanently.”

A page on the Republic’s website said that people can exchange their U.S. dollars for the Republic’s “Texian currency,” from Mulligan Mint, at its meetings.

During a 2012 Congressional hearing, Mulligan Mint founder Rob Gray told lawmakers that he’s helped with more than 150 so-called community currencies and token fund-raising programs, which are alternative money systems adopted by small groups of people. Some of those groups are wary of the U.S. dollar.

Prior to its bankruptcy, Mulligan Mint targeted an antiestablishment clientele who felt estranged by mainstream banking. Mr. Gray once said that the mint had the power to create a “complementary currency system that can fill in the blanks where the U.S. dollar lets us down.”

Sound like something that a bitcoin investor would say? Mulligan Mint once sold a one-ounce silver “bitcoin,” which could be scanned by a smartphone, in honor of the controversial virtual currency.

Opened in 2012, Mulligan Mint filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Sept. 13 after officials discovered that part of a $1.4 million shipment of silver was missing. The owner of that silver had threatened to shut down the 25-worker mint—a move that the bankruptcy filing blocked.

The mint was later put up for sale during the bankruptcy. A Mulligan Mint official said during the hearing some potential buyers gave several excuses for their lack of interest; some found the mint to be “just too weird” for them to purchase.

Write to Katy Stech at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter at @KatyStech.