Tommy Thompson released from prison after Ohio treasure hunter refuses to reveal location of heist
A former deep-sea treasure hunter who discovered one of the largest shipwrecks in American history and spent the past decade in prison after refusing to reveal the whereabouts of some of the lost gold coins is now free, federal records show.
Tommy Thompson, who in 1988 found what was known as the Ship of Gold off the coast of South Carolina, was released last Wednesday, according to Federal Bureau of Prisons records reviewed by the Associated Press.
Thompson, an Ohio-born research scientist, was hailed as a hero after finding the SS Central America and thousands of pounds of its sunken treasure that had been at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean for more than 150 years.
But in the decades that followed, he battled investors who accused him of swindling them out of millions and spent years on the run before being jailed for defying court orders while claiming he didn’t know what happened to the ship’s 500 gold coins.
Central America was hit by a huge drag from the California Gold Rush when it sank in a hurricane in 1857.
Four hundred and twenty-five people drowned, thousands of pounds of gold were lost, which contributed to the economic panic.
Investors backing Thompson’s work sued him in 2005, claiming they had not received the proceeds from the $50 million sale of more than 500 gold bars and thousands of coins – just a fraction of the ship’s loot.
Thompson, who lived in Florida, went into hiding and later became a fugitive when an Ohio federal judge issued a warrant for his arrest in 2012 after he failed to appear in court.
Authorities tracked Thompson to a Florida hotel three years later.
A judge then held Thompson in contempt and jailed him in late 2015 for refusing to answer questions about the location of the missing coins.
Thompson, now 73, has maintained that the coins – valued at $2.5 million – were transferred to a trust in Belize and said the $50 million from the sale of the first batch of gold went mostly to legal fees and bank loans.
He remained incarcerated even though federal law usually limits the term of imprisonment for contempt of court to 18 months.
An appeals court in 2019 rejected Thompson’s argument that the law applied to him, saying his refusal violated the terms of the plea agreement.
The following year, Thompson appeared via video in another case where US District Judge Algenon Marbley again asked if he was ready to talk about the gold’s whereabouts.
“Your Honor, I don’t know if we’ve been down this road before or not, but I don’t know where this gold is,” Thompson replied. “I feel like I don’t have the keys to my freedom.”
About a year ago, Marbley agreed to end Thompson’s sentence for public contempt, saying he was no longer convinced that keeping him in prison would produce the answer.
The judge then ordered Thompson to begin immediately serving a two-year sentence for skipping a 2012 court hearing.
Dwight Manley, a California coin dealer who bought and sold nearly all of the treasure, said Monday that Thompson paid a large price for what he said amounted to a business dispute.
“Going to prison for 10 years because of a business dispute is not American,” Manley said. “People kill people and get out in the middle of time.”
The sentences in civil contempt cases are somewhat unlimited, but they shouldn’t go on forever, said Ryan Scott, a law professor at the University of Florida who studies contempt law and worked to secure Thompson’s release.
“It’s very unusual to go on for 10 years,” Scott said.
He said Thompson should have been released years ago — since at least 2018, after a court dismissed the original case — calling it “a miscarriage of justice because this has gone on for so long.”
