So the Playboy chips were a type of chip called a "coin center." The center was a steel coin with the casino name, "Playboy" and "Atlantic City" and the denomination stamped into it. The coin was enclosed by a plastic ring that had the bunny head impression on it. Neither of those materials -- steel and plastic -- are known for breaking down much if you just bury it in the ground, so they're thankfully still around.
What I mean is that before the massive haul of chips was discovered, a Playboy chip would cost many times its face value. A $100 chip would be selling for $400 or $500, because it was one that was bought for $100 at the casino and saved by its owner since at least April, 1984, when the casino closed.
On April 15, 2009 -- coincidentally the 25th anniversary of the casino's closing -- a construction crew was digging at the former factory charged with destroying the chips. They pulled up a concrete slab and unexpectedly found thousands of the chips -- between 30,000 and 100,000, depending on whose estimate you accept.
People started selling the chips on
eBay for less than face value -- often $2 or $3 a chip. That week, and since then, you could buy a Playboy $100 chip on
eBay for much less than face value -- $2, $3 or $5 each. Prices fluctuate a bit, but that's the price drop to which I refer -- from a collector who would pay $400 or $500 for one chip, to being able to buy the chip for maybe $3.
And chip collectors who had paid multiples of face value for their Playboy chips got badly burned when this happened.
The company was called The Green Duck Co. It had been in that spot in Mississippi since 1975, and closed in 2004. They made bus tokens, which are basically custom steel coins. Some people think the Playboy used The Green Duck Co. to stamp the metal centers that Bud Jones used in the chips, though that has never been confirmed. It would explain why the casino managers returned the coins to the Green Duck Co., when they were ordered under New Jersey law to destroy the existing chips.
But instead of melting or cutting the chips into little pieces, the company apparently dug a hole about the size of a grave, dumped the chips in, covered the hole with a concrete slab, and covered the slab with dirt.
When the company closed in 2004, the building was abandoned. The county stepped in and turned it into a community center. And in 2009, they decided to expand the building. A construction crew tore up a driveway leading to the building, and hit the slab.
Curiosity or fear for what could be underneath took over, and they used a bulldozer to move the slab, uncovering the chips. A photo from that day, just after the slab was moved, shows what looks to be thousands of chips. Many would be instantly recognizable, even from a distance, as Playboy chips to anyone who played there.
Construction workers took some chips as souvenirs. Word spread, and soon a crowd came out to see the hole. People jumped in -- some with 5 gallon buckets, like a Hernando local named Mark Flagg. He loaded up a few buckets of $5s, $25s and $100s. He sold his chips -- 500 of which I bought myself -- in an
eBay store he opened that week. Lots of people made money from what they could grab that day.
The story made the local and national media, and the New Jersey Casino Control Commission said, officially, that they were "investigating." Nothing ever came of their investigation, and anyone who was involved in the murky events of 1984 that moved the chips from the Jersey shore to a hole in rural Mississippi were either dead or not talking.
Some also wonder if the discovery, falling on that specific day, twenty five years to the day after the casino closed, was really a coincidence, or an elaborate ruse to dig up something of value that someone knew about all along.
It's a great story. Even if your chips came from the dig, you can be certain that they were once on the tables at the Playboy, in the hands of the casino's rich, famous and beautiful clients, and spent a quarter century underground as literally "buried treasure."
