Posted on 07/17/2025 7:33:14 AM PDT by Red Badger
His expedition found a “mountain of gold” at the bottom of the Atlantic. But he might never see a cent of the lost fortune.
It was late in the summer of 1988 when Tommy Thompson finally located a big rusty paddle wheel buried in ocean floor sediment. Now he was banking on an even bigger discovery: a cache of 19th-century gold worth as much as half a billion dollars.
On September 11, Thompson and a crew of explorers hunkered down aboard the Arctic Discoverer, a retrofitted Canadian icebreaking ship about 160 miles east of South Carolina. There they deployed an uncrewed submersible craft into the Atlantic Ocean. Designed by Thompson, the Nemo (named in honor of Jules Verne’s fictional submarine captain) had a boxy angular shape, like a small shipping container, and was fitted with 18 computers and 12 monitors. At 12,000 pounds, it weighed more than a couple of pickup trucks and was kitted out with mechanical arms, broadcast-quality video cameras, spotlights, strobe lights, thrusters, and excavation tools—everything required to trawl 8,000 feet below the surface, searching for sparkles of gold in the nightmarish dark.
As the Nemo hovered near the Atlantic floor, its cameras began relaying images of that paddle wheel up to the Arctic Discoverer. Thompson knew his crew had found the ship they’d spent the past five years searching for: the SS Central America. Coincidentally, on that same September date in 1857, the large sidewheel steamer was being battered by a hurricane on its voyage from Panama to New York. The next day, September 12, it foundered in the storm. Many of the more than 500 passengers were fresh from the California gold fields, carrying their new fortunes. Only about 150 people survived, the others sinking into the Atlantic with the crippled steamer. According to records at the time, this “Ship of Gold” contained more than three tons of the precious metal in the form of coins, bricks, and freshly mined nuggets. That treasure had made the ship an alluring yet elusive target of treasure hunters over the years.
Thompson almost seemed preordained to be the one to finally locate it. He was born April 15, 1952, exactly 40 years to the day after the Titanic sank. “Ever since my youth, I have been fascinated by the black, frigid, sea depths below 600 feet known as the ‘deep ocean,’” Thompson writes in America’s Lost Treasure, a book he published in 1998 that chronicles his expedition to discover the Central America. In college he got a degree in engineering, and from there his interest in deep-sea exploration only expanded.
Nothing, however, could have prepared him for what he saw the morning of October 1. The Nemo maneuvered around the paddle wheel, and when the underwater dust settled, the pictures it relayed were as clear as day. “The bottom was carpeted with gold. Gold everywhere, like a garden,” Thompson said.
Over the next three summers, Thompson’s team used the Nemo to haul up two tons of gold. Yet by the time the first coin was recovered, the treasure had already begun to tear at Thompson’s life. And that was before he, and a lot of that gold, went missing.
The Choice Was clear. Ditch Your Gold and hope to survive, or cling to it and sink into a watery grave.
Hunting shipwrecks is a bare-knuckle business, sometimes as dangerous and ruinous as plundering and pirating, to which treasure hunting is often compared. There’s little financial certainty. Rough seas claim lives. Finding gold is no guarantee. And quick fortunes can tear apart professional and personal relationships.
Twelve years before he struck upon the ruins of the Central America, Thompson had journeyed to South Florida to search for an even older ship. Back then he was a baby-faced kid in his early 20s, looking for an adventure and some practical way to apply his recent degree. In Key West he met Mel Fisher, a former chicken farmer and dive instructor who had spent the better part of a decade searching for the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, a Spanish galleon that had sunk near the Florida Keys in 1622.
Ship logs and historical records showed that the Atocha was carrying 901 silver bars and 161 pieces of gold bullion. But Fisher’s endeavor was not going well. At that point his search had turned up muskets, swords, and 4,000 silver coins. In 1975, his son Dirk had discovered nine 3,000-pound bronze cannons in shallow water off the Marquesas Keys, 20 miles west of Key West. But five days later, the rusty tugboat Fisher’s team used as a dive boat keeled over. Water rushed in, trapping his son. Dirk, along with his wife and another diver, drowned before he could escape.
By the time Thompson arrived, Fisher was back on the hunt. Soon Thompson was working as an engineer aboard the crew’s barge, which they used as a base while diving for clues around the Marquesas Keys. He spent time underwater searching for gold, often in charge of the ship’s hydroflow, a pump system used to blow sand and sediment away. To make operating it easier, he rigged together a throttle the divers themselves could control. Later, when the diesel pump on the hydroflow broke, Thompson spent a day ripping parts out and rebuilding the machine until it worked again. His shipmates recall that he spent his downtime reading technical manuals.
As the summer of 1976 wore on, the crew came up empty-handed time and time again. Thompson spent less time in the ocean and more time on deck, where he began piecing together the problems with Fisher’s operation. He was particularly frustrated by the dive crew’s method for marking “hits” on the ocean floor. The Arbutus towed a magnetometer device, which would register when it picked up a signal. The crew noted those spots with old bleach bottles tied to cinder blocks that they threw overboard. But one of two things would usually happen: By the time they got the buoys in the water, the ship would have drifted away from the target, or rough seas would push the buoys away from the marker.
“He was more interested in why they couldn’t find the Atocha than he was in seeing treasure, and as he watched, he got to thinking,” writes Gary Kinder, author of Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, an account of Thompson’s search for the Central America. The time he spent with Fisher that summer served as a window into the broader woes of shipwreck hunting operations. They were often wildly underfunded. They usually had no long-term planning or system to track artifacts they found, or whether those artifacts even belonged to the ship they were hunting. Thompson came to believe there was a better way.
He also developed a fear that consumes so many shipwreck hunters—that someone else could swoop in and make the discovery.
In the fall of 1976, fresh off a summer searching for the Atocha with Fisher, Thompson may have appeared as a wild-haired, swashbuckling treasure hunter. He was personable, with a seemingly ceaseless well of colorful stories that he told with humor and wonder. To others, his ragged edges reminded them less of Long John Silver and more of Albert Einstein.
“He was hardly Jack Sparrow or Blackbeard,” Bob Evans, his good friend who served as Thompson’s chief scientist and historian during the search for the Central America, wrote in 2013. “Think more along the lines of Dilbert in charge of the operation.”
Thompson seemed to embrace both personalities. From the beginning, he was capricious and calculating. That summer he spent with Fisher, for instance, he once removed his mask and fins during a dive, carried them in his hands as 15-foot-high waves swirled around him, and swam underneath the crew’s barge. When he surfaced on the opposite side, he told everyone he wanted to see if he could make the swim on his own, without his gear.
Jae C. Hong Rust-covered gold coins recovered from the S.S. Central America steamship that went down in a hurricane in 1857, sit in small containers filled with water while being restored in a laboratory Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2018, in Santa Ana, Calif. More than $50 million worth of gold bars, coins and dust described as the greatest lost treasure in U.S. history is about to make its public debut in California. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong) Thompson grew up in Defiance, Ohio. Curious, eccentric, and sometimes enigmatic, he devoured science books and issues of Popular Mechanics. His father, an engineer, and mother, a nutritionist, remembered him playing with Tinkertoys well into the night. He was the youngest of four children, with a “wild-eyed look and curly hair” who was “always building something or fixing something or tearing something down to build over again,” writes Kinder. As a teenager, Thompson fell in with a group of buddies who branded themselves the Vigilantes. They quickly nicknamed him Harvey the Hobo because he liked to travel all around town. The nickname stuck. To his friends, he became just Harvey.
He’d often challenge his friends to competitions to see who could hold their breath the longest. While other kids his age were buying cars, Thompson dropped $400 on a cream-colored amphibious vehicle—the same kind used by James Bond in Thunderball. He harbored a passion for “seeing and doing things under the water,” he once told a newspaper reporter.
In 1970 he enrolled at the Ohio State University. Although he was determined to be an ocean engineer, the closest he could get at his university was to pursue a degree in mechanical engineering. With help from his advisor, however, he attended the school’s lab for marine biology on Lake Erie, becoming the first engineering student to do so. On the first day, Thompson arrived in his amphibious car, driving it right out of the lake and up a boat ramp. Another one of his advisors, as Kinder recounts in Ship of Gold, remarked that Thompson seemed “absolutely fearless,” willing to “go places where no one else had gone and try things no one else had tried.”
In spring 1981, after his stint searching for the Atocha, he returned to Ohio and took a job at the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, a nonprofit that regularly engaged in contract work for the U.S. Department of Defense. Don Frink, who hired Thompson, remembers him as a quintessential SWAN: Smart, Willing to work hard, Ambitious, and Nice to work with. Yet he also wondered if Thompson was too entrepreneurial, too wrapped up in his own ideas. Still, writes Kinder, Frink immediately set Thompson to work on the concept of mining the deep ocean, to find ways to probe previously inaccessible depths. At one point, Thompson helped develop technology that enabled the U.S. government to recover information from a sunken Soviet nuclear sub.
Those early professional successes didn’t fully satisfy Thompson’s entrepreneurial spirit or his itch for adventure. He wistfully remembered that summer in the Keys diving for the Atocha, and his pragmatic mind wondered if there weren’t a better way to search for shipwrecks—if he could develop the capability and the technology.
Around the time he had started at Battelle, he connected with Bob Evans, who had graduated from Ohio State with a degree in geology. The pair became fast friends and spent long hours on Evans’s front porch, Thompson drinking tequila and Evans drinking Wild Turkey. Thompson regaled Evans with anecdotes about working with Fisher in the Keys. Eventually he revealed to Evans the idea that had been gnawing at him: He wanted to go after historic shipwrecks. Which wreck, however, was the question.
“GOLD MINE FOUND.” The Californian newspaper carried that headline on March 15, 1848. Soon the California Gold Rush was in full swing, and the sleepy settlement of San Francisco watched as its population boomed from 459 people to almost 25,000 by the end of 1849. As thousands flocked to seek their fortune, shipping routes opened, ferrying passengers and supplies into California and bringing prospectors and gold back to eastern U.S. cities.
The SS Central America was a key cog on this journey, transporting people and products from the Panamanian port of Aspinwall (now Colón) to New York City, a nine-day trip through the Caribbean and up the East Coast.
The Central America was one of a new class of steamships commissioned in 1853. It was 278 feet long, with a wooden hull and three masts. The real power lay amidships: Two sidewheels roughly three stories high were powered by massive coal-fired steam engines—750 tons of machinery and boilers. The engines sat atop thick oak timbers that held them 16 feet above the bilge, the lowest portion of a ship’s hull.
On September 3, 1857, the Central America departed Aspinwall with almost 500 passengers and roughly 100 crew members, carrying gold totaling about $1.6 million (worth $21 million in 1988). Many passengers also brought their own shipments of “gold coins struck at the new San Francisco Mint, and gold bars, some the size of building bricks” lined their “trunks and pockets, the carpetbags and money belts.” The steamer made a stop in Havana before continuing on to New York on Tuesday, September 8. The skies were clear and the seas calm. All had expected an unremarkable journey on the ship’s final leg.
Conditions changed swiftly on Wednesday. Dark clouds thickened on the horizon. By Thursday, the Central America was in a hurricane about 175 miles east of Savannah, Georgia, according to a report made by one of its officers. One merchant captain on board remarked that the “sea ran mountains high.” By Friday, September 11, the steamer was being pulverized by furious winds and relentless ocean waves, which at times broke so high over the bow of the ship that each sidewheel was completely submerged. That same day, Chief Engineer George Ashby discovered the problem that would eventually doom the steamer. “The ship had sprung a leak, water was rising in the bilge,” writes Kinder.
Pounded by gale force winds, the steamer listed to starboard. Crew members charged with delivering wheelbarrows of coal to the engines were thrown off balance. If the engines couldn’t be fired, the sidewheels would stop turning, making it impossible to keep the bow of the ship facing the waves. A bucket brigade was enlisted to pass the coal, but it didn’t matter: By the morning of Saturday, September 12, the engines, boilers, and furnaces were 14 feet under water, too much for the bilge pumps to belch back into turbulent seas. Another bucket brigade, this one to bail water rapidly filling the hull, also failed.
“The sea broke over us in avalanches, completely swamping the cabin and staterooms, and the vessel would be so completely buried that it was as dark as Erebus,” recalled survivor Virginia Birch.
A passing ship, the brig Marine, assisted in a hazardous rescue operation, as dozens of Central America passengers were transported by three lifeboats across the tempestuous Atlantic. Another ship, the schooner El Dorado, arrived on the scene but had only one lifeboat and could do little to help. Panic set in among the passengers, compounded by the fact that the gold many carried was too heavy for the rowers to bear. The choice was clear: Ditch your gold and hope to survive, or cling to it and sink into a watery grave.
Two women wept as they shook $11,000 in gold from a satchel and onto the floor of the Central America before making for the lifeboats. Another two passengers had to abandon $16,500 in 20-dollar coins on account of the immense weight. One man threw 20-dollar, double-eagle gold pieces, 825 in all, onto the floor of the captain’s cabin. Others, crazed or resigned to their fate, flung gold coins at the wind. One passenger noted that “hundreds of thousands of dollars” were thrown away, Kinder writes.
The SS Central America sank at 8 p.m., plunging at a 45-degree angle into the ocean. Many of the 470 passengers and crew still on board fell into the sea. As the steamer descended beneath the surface, it created a vortex that pulled many down with the ship. Those who resurfaced fought for their lives by clinging onto planking. Not all survived. “I struck against many of them,” noted survivor John C. Taylor. “They were all provided with life preservers, yet dead, and with their heads down in the water.”
It was America’s most horrific maritime disaster.
Steve Ringman The “tow fish” device holding the ballast and electronics (sonar) being lowered into the Atlantic off of coast of South Carolina in search of the SS Central America that sank in 1857 with 30,000 pounds of gold. Also lost in the shipwreck were 425 of the 578 passengers and crew. 209779 Back at home, Thompson was spending much of his time outside of work reading voraciously about old shipwrecks. In 1983 he recruited Evans, then a consulting geologist for the state of Ohio, into his plan. The two met frequently to talk over which shipwreck they would hunt. They considered the Republic, a luxury liner that sank off the coast of Nantucket in 1909, whose passengers were rumored to have carried millions of gold coins—but no official documentation existed. There was the San José, a Spanish galleon sunk by the British in 1708, but it lay off the coast of Colombia, which meant it was in sovereign waters. Why try to convince a foreign government to let two Americans go fishing for gold off its coast?
Over time, the ship that emerged was the SS Central America. It had sunk in the mid-1800s, so detailed manifests of its cargo existed. Its navigational equipment was accurate—and records showed the ship’s approximate location when it went down. Because it had sunk off the U.S. coast, Thompson believed he would be insulated from any international entanglements. The large iron works that powered the sidewheels would make a good target for sonar detection. And, of course, there was all that gold.
The Central America and its bounty had become a target of other treasure hunters. At least six previous expeditions had failed to find the ship. But Thompson worried there would be more. With so much gold aboard, Thompson expected more treasure hunters to go after the Central America. He needed to hurry.
Determined to not make the same mistakes he had witnessed when he worked for Fisher in the summer of ’76, he began piecing together a recovery plan. It had taken Fisher 16 years to finally discover the Atocha, and Thompson had no intention of using that much time. He wanted to aggressively fund a mission, one that would use comprehensive scientific analysis to increase the probability of a find.
To determine where the ship most likely went down, Thompson and Evans compiled 33 accounts of the sinking, pulled mostly from news stories published in 1857. Crucially, they had figured out that the steamer probably sank in an area that collected no more than one centimeter of sediment every 1,000 years. (Why search for a ship subsumed by oceanic silt?) They then approached Lawrence D. Stone, a noted search theory expert who helped find the sunken U.S. nuclear submarine Scorpion in 1968. As Thompson writes in America’s Lost Treasure, Stone pulled data to create “thousands of computerized models of possible sinking scenarios” based on the ship’s last known coordinates, the wind speed and direction of the hurricane, and the likely ocean currents at the time the steamer went down. The result was a search grid of 1,400 square miles, almost the size of Rhode Island. Each square on the grid was assigned a number—the higher the number, the greater the probability of finding the Central America in that spot.
To cover the costs of the multimillion-dollar expedition, Thompson needed investors. He pitched his plan to anyone who would listen. By all appearances, he was out of place in the conference rooms of Columbus’s moneyed class. But despite his tousled hair and thrift-store clothes, Thompson proved to be convincing. He was transparent about the inherent risks of the expedition and the very real chance he might come back empty-handed. But he always emphasized that regardless of the outcome, this would be a chance to chase history.
“He was really charismatic, really personable,” says Michelle Hopkins, former assistant editor of the Columbus Monthly. “I think that’s what made him really successful. He was able to take the science behind his outlandish idea and make it seem like something that was in reach.”
Naturally, the possibility of finding gold attracted many who chipped in. In his pitch, he speculated that an investment of $50,000 could be worth more than $1.5 million—if the ship indeed contained hundreds of millions in gold. Keith Golden, Thompson’s lawyer, says the documents signed by investors made it clear that they might not get anything from this mission. It was a fact some of the investors apparently embraced. In an article published in 2019, journalist Dylan Taylor-Lehman noted that “one investor had famously even written ‘Bye Bye’ on the memo line of the check he gave to Thompson, fully appreciating the venture’s quixotic nature.”
After two years, Thompson raised $12.7 million from 161 backers, including $1 million from the late John W. Wolfe, who at the time owned the Columbus Dispatch. Additional investment rounds brought the total to $22 million, enough to pay for a ship, technical equipment to reach the bottom of the ocean, a crew, and whatever additional services he might need along the way. The money flowed to two companies he had established: Recovery Limited Partnership was the company through which Thompson solicited investors to back his venture, while the Columbus-America Discovery Group was the operating entity under which Thompson organized the personnel and material needed to conduct the search.
Search operations commenced in the summer of 1986. First came the sonar scan, a project they hoped to complete in 40 days with a price tag of $1.1 million. For the job, Thompson hired Mike Williamson, who owned a SeaMARC, a state-of-the-art sonar device that could perform deep-water scans to 19,000 feet, one of only two such machines existing at the time. (In addition to his fee, Williamson struck a deal with Thompson, the Seattle Times reported in 2019: He would agree to keep the scan data a secret in exchange for 1.975 percent of the gold.) Uncooperative weather, cramped living conditions, and disagreements strained the mission at times. But the biggest stressor by far was the question of how Williamson and Thompson wanted to tackle the search area.
More than a month into the search, the team had only scanned roughly half the grid. But one sonar ping in particular stood out. To Williamson, a large, dark shadow in the middle of one image looked to be a paddle wheel. He was so certain that he named this target Sidewheel. The crew returned to the site several times, but Thompson didn’t want to linger any longer; he wanted to complete the entire search grid and directed the ship to the areas that had not yet been covered.
Doral Chenoweth III/The Columbus Two men control the arms of Nemo, the robot gathering gold and information at the bottom of the sea. The men did not want their names printed. It was a magnificent Sight: A 30-foot-high Pile of gold. All around it, coins sparkled on the ocean floor. Williamson was furious. “I know what I’m doing, I’m an expert,” he reportedly told Thompson. “We are wasting our time out here.” Their disagreements got so heated that at times crew members would see Williamson “shaking with rage, blue veins popping out his neck,” Kinder writes in Ship of Gold.
To those who knew Thompson well, his insistence on searching the larger area was another sign of his meticulous nature. At sea, Thompson’s focus often was on more than finding gold. In his book America’s Lost Treasure, he calls the Central America a “time capsule,” filled not only with treasure but also with “information and artifacts of an era in which the very character and spirit of America blossomed.” During his search, he reached out to scientists and invited them to study the pictures of deep-ocean marine life that the cameras on the Nemo were photographing. He wanted to unveil a lost, hidden world of treasure, history, and marine science.
“Tommy Thompson is not a treasure hunter; he’s a deep-sea scientist,” Golden says. “Treasure was a means to an end, the end being deep-sea exploration.”
Nonetheless, the prospect of gold was driving the mission; all those investors expected a return. And word was out that Thompson was closing in on the Central America. Another team might swoop in at any time.
Thompson prevailed in the debate with Williamson, and the crew continued along the search grid. It would be two more years before the team found anything as promising as Sidewheel. In 1988, the crew returned to the search grid on a new ship, the retrofitted icebreaker Arctic Discoverer, which they positioned over an area that Thompson and Evans had nicknamed Galaxy II. The mood on board was tense: It was early September and the Atlantic Ocean was getting rowdy. Fall storms were on the horizon. Winds some days kicked up to 35 knots, and waves as high as 20 feet pounded the ship, cresting the bow. On September 11, they decided it was time to send the Nemo to the bottom of the Galaxy II site. At 11:30 a.m., they dropped the submersible into the ocean and waited 90 minutes as it drifted down nearly 8,000 feet. After lunch, the crew carefully watched the monitors, waiting for the Nemo to relay images of the deep. Someone saw a plate, then a bottle, and then a large shadow in the left corner of one of the screens.
“Oh, my God!” shouted Thompson, as a huge paddlewheel, part of it obscured by ocean silt, entered the frame. They had located the Central America—but where was all the gold?
The team launched the Nemo more than a half dozen times that month. Each attempt came back empty. Then, on October 1, with winds ripping overhead at nearly 30 miles per hour, the team sent the Nemo into the seas once more. After its descent, a crew member fired one of the submersible’s thrusters, blasting sediment with water until it puffed into a murky cloud. As it dissipated, the picture on the monitor came into focus, and soon everyone saw clear piles of gold. There were shimmering bricks stacked at odd angles, some on top of each other, some resting on their side. To the crew watching from the Arctic Discoverer, it was a magnificent sight: a 30-foot-high pile of gold. All around it, coins sparkled on the ocean floor.
This was it. The recovery expedition that began over swigs of alcohol on a darkened porch, that had required years of planning, millions of dollars from investors, and dangerous, painstaking work out on the ocean, had paid off. In a message back to shore, Thompson called it “unquestionably the greatest American treasure ever found.”
Shortly after the discovery, Thompson was back on shore, and in late November he invited investors to a meeting at the Columbus Athletic Club. On display were just a few items: two 1857 double-eagle 20-dollar gold coins, a 25-pound bar of gold sitting inside a two-and-a-half-gallon aquarium filled with water, and a 300-pound solid bronze bell, which the team had also recovered from the SS Central America. The investors were giddy. When Thompson finished showing off the items, one of them, Donald Dunn, made an impromptu speech.
“I don’t know how the rest of the people in this room feel, and I don’t know whether you’re really going to find any more gold, Tommy,” he intoned, “but whether you do or not, I want you to know it’s been a privilege and a pleasure to be associated with you and to have been on this journey with you.” At that, the room roared with applause.
Thompson indeed would find more gold. Over the next three years, his team would revisit the shipwreck every summer, pulling more gold from the seabed each visit. By 1991, his team had brought up about 7,500 gold coins, more than 20 pounds of gold dust and nuggets, and 532 ingots—some that weighed more than 900 ounces, or close to 60 pounds.
Meanwhile, the discovery catapulted Thompson to celebrity status. People magazine called him “the kind of guy who could fix a rocket ship with two paper clips and a piece of twine.” But a nagging fear remained. Now that he had found the gold, would someone try to take it from him?
Doral Chenoweth III/Columbus Dis FILE-Tommy Thompson (left) with Bob Evans (center) and Barry Schatz (right) in control room of the Arctic Discoverer in this file photo from Aug. 29, 1991. No sooner had the Arctic Discoverer made its way into the harbor of Norfolk, Virginia, after the initial find—to a high school marching band playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” no less—did Thompson’s trouble begin.
First came the insurance companies. Lawyers for 39 firms argued that the gold belonged to the insurers, as they had paid claims on the cargo they guaranteed on the original voyage. Arguments between Thompson and the insurers lasted until 1998, when a U.S. District Court judge in Virginia ruled that his share of the recovered gold equaled 92.5 percent.
But the experience had been draining. Because of the lawsuits, Thompson had put further recovery efforts on hold in 1991. Making matters worse, while Thompson was tied up in court, unable to sell his gold, the rare coin market began to slide. By the time Thompson published his book about the expedition, the recovered gold was valued at closer to $100 million—a massive sum, but just a fraction of what they had anticipated.
If Thompson was going to pay back investors, he had to sell the treasure. Bob Evans, in an article published in 2013, wrote that they negotiated with the California Gold Marketing Group, which sold much of the recovery to various gold and coin dealers in 2000 for a total of $52 million. That included 5,000 commemorative restrike coins specially minted for the California Gold Marketing Group from some of the Central America’s gold bars.
Thompson ultimately received 500 of those restrike coins, valued around $2.5 million. Investors pressed for their share, but Thompson had loans and legal fees to pay down, he told them, according to the journalist Taylor-Lehman. In 2005, two investors sued him. So did Williamson and 12 other sonar technicians. At issue were those 500 coins. The complaint was the same: They were owed profits, and they hadn’t seen a dime.
“Tommy screwed all of us,” Williamson, now in his 70s, said in 2019.
Golden, Thompson’s lawyer, says the coins were given to his client by the board of directors of Recovery Limited Partnership.
Tasked with sorting out the messy ordeal, a U.S. District Court judge in 2006 ordered Thompson to submit an inventory of the gold as part of the civil lawsuits against him. For six years, Thompson failed to provide a full accounting. Finally, in 2012, Thompson was ordered to appear in court with the coins, or swear under oath that he didn’t know where they were. But Thompson never showed. He was held in criminal contempt of court by the judge, who issued a warrant for his arrest. U.S. Marshals were called in to track him down.
Federal agents initially believed Thompson was hiding somewhere in Ohio, but they soon expanded their search to Florida, where he had been living part-time since 2006. Unbeknownst to those agents, he was renting a million-dollar mansion in Vero Beach from real-estate agent Vance Brinkerhoff. He wasn’t alone. Alison Antekeier, his administrative assistant (and, by some accounts, girlfriend) was with him. In 2012, after Thompson failed to show up in court, they moved to Vero Beach full-time.
The manner in which he kept house went beyond just not wanting to be bothered. He didn’t want to leave any traces behind. In a criminal complaint filed in 2013 that charged Thompson with contempt for failing to comply with a court order to provide information on the location of the gold coins, Deputy U.S. Marshal Mark Stroh recounted some of the items a handyman had found in the residence after Thompson had apparently moved out. The belongings included 12 cellphones, each assigned for a different purpose, as well as a book, How to Be Invisible, which offered advice on protecting one’s personal privacy.
Stroh testified that “a woman matching Antekeier’s description” paid the rent for the residence in Vero Beach in cash that he described as “sweaty.” The U.S. Marshal then noted that money, if buried underground, typically becomes damp.
“Thompson was smart—perhaps one of the smartest fugitives ever sought by the U.S. Marshals,” Peter Tobin, a marshal for the Southern District of Ohio, told the Washington Post.
Thompson and Antekeier evaded law enforcement for several more years, but their luck ran out in early 2015. Antekeier had been running the errands, as Thompson’s face was now plastered under the word “Wanted” on billboards that the U.S. Marshals had put up across South Florida. Federal agents had learned that “an individual matching one of Mr. Thompson’s associates,” according to court documents, had been buying medication—using a false identity—from a pharmacy in West Palm Beach. On January 27, after surveilling Antekeier for several hours, agents descended on a Hilton hotel in Boca Raton, where both she and Thompson were apprehended. The marshals found Thompson with $425,380 in cash. He was 62 years old, a man clearly in psychological turmoil, ground down by the years spent juggling everything that followed once he struck gold.
“He wasn’t really hiding,” says Golden. “You could find him if you wanted to.”
On April 8, 2015, Thompson and Antekeier appeared in federal court wearing prison jumpsuits and chains, according to Taylor-Lehman. Antekeier entered a guilty plea to one count of criminal contempt and received a $5,000 fine and a three-month prison sentence. Thompson also struck a plea deal: a two-year criminal sentence and a quarter-of-a-million-dollar fine. As part of the deal, he agreed to turn over the cash he had upon arrest and to assist in identifying and recovering the missing assets, including the 500 restrikes.
Thompson couldn’t have known it then, but in 2014, while he was hiding from law enforcement, someone else went after the Central America gold. It wasn’t a pirate or another enterprising explorer. It was the entities he had established to find the steamer in the first place.
In 2013, with Thompson nowhere to be found, a judge put Thompson’s companies into receivership and appointed a Columbus-based lawyer, Ira Kane, to oversee them. The next year, Kane contracted Odyssey Marine Exploration to go back to the Central America and recover the rest of the gold. This mission went to sea in April 2014—with Evans again acting as chief scientist. Taylor-Lehman reported that the endeavor brought up more than 45 gold bars and 15,500 coins, as well as numerous artifacts that had been preserved for more than 150 years, including a pair of glasses, rolled cigars, ticket stubs, and shaving equipment.
California Gold Marketing Group again managed the sale, making around $30 million for the receivership. It would seem like a good payday for the investors, but ocean explorations are expensive. Around $15 million had to be paid to Odyssey for its work, according to Quintin Lindsmith, the attorney who represented the receivership. The remaining money was used, in part, to pay back creditors. The Dispatch Printing Company, which loaned about $7 million to keep the receivership afloat and help fund the new recovery operation, got its money back, according to Lindsmith. In the end, about $5.5 million remained. So far, Lindsmith says more than $2 million has been distributed to the investors. The location of Thompson’s 500 gold restrikes, however, is still a mystery.
In 2018, the lawsuit brought by the sonar techs was dismissed with prejudice, and the civil case the receivership brought against Thompson concluded the same year, with the court issuing a $3.2 million judgment against Thompson.
By then it had been three years since Thompson struck his plea deal to serve a two-year criminal sentence. However, he remained in prison for civil contempt. (The court put his criminal sentence on hold until his civil contempt issue was resolved.) Several months after he struck his plea deal in 2015, he agreed to sit for a “debtor’s examination” in U.S. District Court to answer questions about the location of those 500 restrikes. But he refused to answer any questions. The judge held him in civil contempt of court, which is essentially a coercive measure that would keep Thompson in jail until he gives up the location of those coins.
But Thompson, ever since he stepped through the doors of the Federal Correctional Institution in Milan, Michigan, has maintained that he doesn’t know where those 500 gold coins are. He claims the coins were transferred to an irrevocable trust in Belize.
“I don’t know the whereabouts of the gold,” Thompson said during an October 2020 hearing. “I feel like I don’t have the keys to my own freedom.”
Golden claims that Belize’s strict trust laws make the scenario plausible. Once a trust is established, the person who opened it can’t access the assets if the manager of the trust—in this case, a bank in Belize—believes the person is under duress.
“Once either you or your money that they’re holding is under duress, they can hide it and that’s what they’ve done,” Golden says. “So he doesn’t even know where it is.”
Lindsmith doesn’t believe Thompson will ever pay back the money that the courts say he owes. But that doesn’t make Thompson a villain, he says. “Make no mistake, he is a brilliant, brilliant person,” he says. The imbroglio that has tied him up for more than 30 years is too complex to boil his story down to a single question of whether he is a good or bad man. “I think the more appropriate characterization,” Lindsmith says, “is he’s a tragic figure.”
Thompson’s fall from grace has been almost four decades in the making. But there is, perhaps, time for Thompson to rewrite parts of his legend. On January 31, 2025, a U.S. District Court in Ohio terminated the civil contempt charge against Thompson that would have kept him imprisoned until he revealed the location of those coins. With that removed, Thompson now must serve out his two-year criminal sentence, which is up in January 2027. Maybe then he can retrieve the gold coins—wherever they are.
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Ping!..........................
All just dead wrong. If you ever have something there will be people scheming to take it from you.
My BIL and I were at a BBQ joint years ago seated in a booth with high dividers made of wood planks. Behind me there sat a group of young fellows I knew to be newly or nearly newly minted lawyers. The conversation they were having that I overheard was about who in the area had enough money to be a lawsuit target for something, anything they could come up with. I knew one of the targets, an older fellow in town and told him to be wary. He died before the pettifogging lawyers came up with anything against him.
You don’t have to be guilty of a thing to be sued and ruined. It happens every day.
In Henry IV, Dick the Butcher conspired to kill all the lawyers to facilitate their overthrow of the government as they were obstacles to their ambitions by upholding the law. That view of lawyers as noble pillars of the community is much changed now. “First thing let’s do is kill all the lawyers.” but for much different reasons now.
“Rust-covered gold coins recovered from the S.S. Central America steamship that went down in a hurricane in 1857, sit in small containers filled with water while being restored in a laboratory”
Gold doesn’t rust... at all. It’s a noble metal.
The Federal government is filthy. They go after treasure hunters like nobody else.
I hate the legal system. Here we have one creative, intelligent, industrious, and thoroughly trained individual who discovered and recovered all that wealth upon which "the system" subsists chugging off millions to pay for air conditioned courtrooms, bailiffs, clerks, reporters... virtually all useless people toward creating wealth. Yeah, he owed the sonar techs and such, but he didn't deserve all this.
BTW, the author of this piece is a great storyteller.
While pure gold is unaffected by saltwater, gold alloys—such as 18K gold, which contains other metals like copper or silver—can be more susceptible to corrosion or tarnishing over time, especially if exposed to harsh environments................
Fascinating story. Thanks for posting 👍
No, gold doesn’t rust - but if is near iron, the rust from iron oxidizing will adhere to the surface of the gold.
Thanks Red Badger.
I had no idea this saga is still ongoing since the gold recovery from the shipwreck.
Very interesting. Thanks for posting.
There needs to be some kind of law reform, that insurance companies have a 75 or 100 year limit, to either the lost cargo, or it’s open for whoever can salvage it.
Even in old Spanish galleon wrecks the modern Spain gets a cut..........
I know one of the guys mentioned in the article. He went on to develop some amazing underwater equipment.
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