“There’s no paperwork,” the doctor said.

But the doctor served as a test case, which had a decidedly happy ending, returning some looted ancient coins to the birthplace of democracy, relieving a Brown University academic/doctor of the potential pitfalls of his side collecting job, and hopefully, installing a newer era of fair play in a history-making game.

It really is a fascinating story, with some true treasures worth at least $200,000, and if those numbers seem small to you, consider where these real coins have been:

Under his plea agreement, Dr. Weiss forfeited the other 20 coins in his possession to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, including five authentic Greek coins dating back to the sixth century B.C.

Those silver pieces were minted in ancient Thrace, Opuntian Locris, Euboea and Thebes; the coins bear images of Herakles, Demeter, the nymph Euboea and Dionysus, among other things.

On the market, the five coins are worth about $200,000, but the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said they were worth far more to Greece.

“As tokens of the world’s oldest democracy, they are, in our view, priceless,” he said as he signed papers transferring the coins to the Greek ambassador, Christos P. Panagopoulos.

The ambassador said it was “a great day of joy for Greece” and promised the coins would be displayed in the Numismatic Museum in Athens.

Dr. Weiss got caught talking to an informant at auction in January, when he first tried to unload the coins for a mint.

The coins were among 20 rare pieces from the ancient world that the surgeon, Dr. Arnold-Peter Weiss, tried to sell at the Waldorf-Astoria on Jan. 3, 2012. One of the buyers who approached Dr. Weiss was an informant, who caught him on tape saying he knew that one of the coins he was selling had been recently looted from Sicily.

“There’s no paperwork,” the doctor said, according to a criminal complaint filed by the Manhattan district attorney’s office. “I know this is a fresh coin; this was dug up a few years ago.”

The case never went to trial, but Dr. Weiss’s arrest sent chills through the numismatic world, where state charges for possession of stolen property are extremely rare. In years past, American dealers caught with ancient coins dug up in the modern era of strong patrimony laws in countries like Greece and Italy usually faced civil suits in federal court.

At worse, they risked being forced to forfeit the artifacts to the United States government, which in most cases returned them to the source countries without pursuing criminal charges, experts on cultural property law said. As a result, some dealers were willing to market coins with spotty paperwork and murky histories.

“You could almost call it a landmark case — he did something that was suddenly seen as criminal,” said Ute Wartenberg, the executive director of the American Numismatic Society. “This was like something that could have happened to a whole bunch of people; there was nothing particularly unusual about it.”

Dr. Weiss pleaded guilty to lesser charges ... "attempted criminal possession of stolen property" and the Greek people were happy to get the legitimate authentic, stolen coins back. Turns out, the good doc was dealing in forgeries too, but the article doesn't state whether he knew this upfront or was played himself in turn.

Dr. Weiss, 54, a hand surgeon who teaches at Brown University and has served on the board of the American Numismatic Society, pleaded guilty in July 2012 to three counts of attempted criminal possession of stolen property. Those pleas concerned only the three coins he believed to be silver pieces from the fourth century B.C. that he thought had been looted from Sicily, court papers said. Experts using electron microscopes later determined they were clever forgeries. Still, Dr. Weiss had been trying to sell one of them for $350,000 and the other two for $1.2 million, prosecutors said.

The investigation was done jointly by agents from the district attorney’s office and the Department of Homeland Security.