After 10 years in prison for refusing to disclose the location of some missing gold, authorities have finally released treasure hunter Tommy Thompson. Authorities still don’t know where the gold is, though.
In 1988, Thompson, 73, an American deep-sea explorer, found millions of dollars’ worth of treasure from a sunken ship. Thompson discovered the ship, the SS Central America, a vessel commonly referred to as the Ship of Gold, off the South Carolina coast.
Despite Thompson finding more than $50 million worth of treasure, investors claim they received nothing
With the understanding that they would receive a return on their investment, 161 investors contributed $12.7 million to Thompson to find the ship. He did. In 1988, he and his team recovered thousands of gold bars and coins, and they ultimately sold most of them to a gold marketing group for roughly $50 million in 2000.
He insisted that he primarily used the first batch of gold’s sales proceeds for bank loans and legal fees, and that he transferred the coins to a trust in Belize. Thompson then went missing in 2012 after an Ohio federal judge issued a warrant for his arrest after he failed to show up in court.
After years on the run, authorities caught Thompson and imprisoned him in 2015 on a criminal contempt charge after investors in his business accused him of defrauding them of promised profits. They accused him of refusing to answer questions about the location of approximately 500 missing gold coins.
Thompson spent more than 10 years in prison for an initial two-year sentence
A judge sentenced him to 24 months in prison in December 2015 for contempt. However, since he wouldn’t divulge the location of the missing coins, his sentence for contempt continued on indefinitely. This, despite the fact that the case brought by his investors was dismissed in 2018.
In 2016, Thompson claimed severe memory loss due to chronic fatigue syndrome. The judge in his case at the time responded, “This selective amnesia, it adds up to a lack of credibility.”
A judge finally terminated Thompson’s contempt order in 2024 because keeping him locked up any longer was unlikely to produce an answer. A processing error prevented him from receiving credit for time served and forced him to remain in prison for several months longer. The prison finally released him on March 4.
According to his lawyer, Keith Golden, despite Thompson never revealing the location of the missing gold coins, “Every last piece of gold dust was accounted for.”
In an interesting bit of timing, a 64-pound, $10 million California gold rush bar recovered from the shipwreck of the SS Central America by Tommy Thompson is currently on the market. According to Numismatic News, a collector privately purchased the bar in 2002 for $8 million as part of a larger deal that included other ingots and gold coins recovered from the shipwreck site, setting a record for numismatic rarity.