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Treasure hunter released after refusing to disclose gold coins' location
Tommy Thompson, 73, has been released from prison after serving a decade for contempt of court, with 500 gold coins from the SS Central America shipwreck still unaccounted for. Thompson discovered the famed 1857 wreck off South Carolina in 1988 but refused to reveal the coins' whereabouts, leading to his imprisonment.
The discovery and dispute
In 1988, Thompson, an oceanic engineer at Ohio's Battelle Memorial Institute, located the SS Central America, known as the Ship of Gold, which sank in 1857 while carrying 30,000 pounds of gold from San Francisco to the U.S. East Coast. The ship's loss, along with 425 lives, contributed to the financial panic of 1857.
Thompson's team recovered thousands of gold bars and coins, later sold to a gold marketing group in 2000 for approximately $50 million. However, 161 investors who had funded the expedition with $12.7 million alleged they never received their share of the proceeds.
Legal battles and disappearance
Investors sued Thompson in 2005, claiming they were denied promised returns. Thompson argued the coins were held in a Belize trust and that legal fees and loans consumed most profits. A criminal complaint later estimated the recovered treasure's value at up to $400 million.
Facing court demands in 2012, Thompson vanished. He and an associate were arrested in 2015 at a Florida hotel, where they had lived for two years under false names, paying in cash and avoiding detection.
Contempt and imprisonment
Thompson was jailed in December 2015 for refusing to disclose the location of 500 missing gold coins, a violation of a court order. Civil contempt sentences typically last until compliance, but a judge terminated his sentence last year, concluding he was unlikely to ever reveal the coins' whereabouts.
Unresolved questions
The 500 coins remain missing, and investors have yet to recover their full investment. Thompson's release closes a chapter in the decades-long saga, but the fate of the treasure-and the investors' claims-remains unresolved.
"The profits from the first batch of gold mostly went toward legal fees and bank loans," Thompson previously stated, according to CBS News.
