Ship of Gold explorer Tommy Thompson walks free after 10 years behind bars

Tommy Thompson, a deep-sea explorer who spent more than a decade in federal custody for refusing to disclose the location of a cache of gold coins from a historic shipwreck, was released from prison.

Thompson, 73, walked out of a federal correctional facility Wednesday after a judge ruled that his continued incarceration had lost its “coercive effect.”

For the better part of ten years, Thompson had remained behind bars, asserting that a lapse in memory regarding the whereabouts of 500 missing gold coins recovered from the S.S. Central America, the “Ship of Gold” that sank in 1857 off the coast of South Carolina.

“Your honor, I don’t know if we’ve gone over this road before or not, but I don’t know the whereabouts of the gold,” Thompson once told the judge in 2020. “I feel like I don’t have the keys to my freedom.”

Tommy Thompson holds a $50 pioneer gold piece retrieved from the wreck of the ship S.S. Central America, Nov. 1989. (Lon Horwedel/The Columbus Dispatch via AP, File) (Lon Horwedel/The Columbus Dispatch via AP, File)

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Thompson’s downfall began long after his 1988 triumph, when he used a robotic thresher to recover gold from the Atlantic floor.

While the discovery was a feat of engineering, it sparked a series of lawsuits from the investors who funded the expedition and insurance companies claiming rights to the treasure.

Tommy Thompson, now 73, was then sent to prison in 2015 after not disclosing where the ship’s 500 gold coins were located. (Delaware County Sheriff’s Office via AP)

In 2012, after being ordered to appear in court to account for the missing coins, which were valued at the time at approximately $2.5 million, Thompson vanished. He was captured in 2015 by U.S. Marshals at a Florida hotel, where he had been living as a fugitive under an alias.

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Since 2015, Thompson had been held in civil contempt, facing a $1,000-per-day fine and a cell until he “purged” the contempt by cooperating. He consistently maintained that the coins were held in a trust in Belize and that he no longer possessed the specific records or memory to retrieve them.

Thompson has remained locked up even though federal law generally limits jail time for contempt of court to 18 months. In 2019, a federal appeals court rejected his bid for an appeal.

While Thompson is now a free man, he remains under court supervision. His release does not absolve him of the $3.3 million in accumulated fines, nor does it end the civil litigation from investors who claim they were defrauded.

California gold marketing group’s Dwight Manley examines a gold coin, recovered from the S. S. Central America steam ship that went down in a hurricane in 1857 in the laboratory, January 23, 2018. (AP photo/Jae C. Hong, file.)

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Dwight Manley, a California coin dealer who bought and sold nearly the entire fortune, said Monday that Thompson paid a heavy price over what he said amounted to a business dispute.

“Going to prison for 10 years over a business dispute is not America,” Manley told the AP. “People kill people and get out in half the time.”

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The Associated Press contributed to this report.