A well-known treasure hunter has been released from prison after refusing to disclose the whereabouts of 500 missing gold coins found at the site of an 1857 shipwreck.
Seventy-three-year-old Tommy Thompson, who was held behind bars for over a decade, walked free on Wednesday after a judge decided that keeping him locked up had lost its “coercive effect,” Fox News reported.
Thompson maintained he could not recall where the gold was after it had been recovered from the site where the SS Central America, also known as the “Ship of Gold,” sank off the coast of South Carolina.
The ship went down when it was hit with Category 2 hurricane winds. At the time, there were nearly 600 passengers onboard and more than 30,000 pounds of gold, All That is Interesting reported in 2024.
“Only 153 passengers survived, making it the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history at the time,” the article continued:
Over 130 years later, a marine engineer named Tommy Thompson rediscovered the wreck of the SS Central America and collected about two tons of her treasure. The payoff was huge. Thompson walked away with millions, transferring much of his riches to overseas accounts.
But it wouldn’t be smooth sailing for Thompson. After neglecting to pay his investors the millions of dollars he owed them, he went on the run — and even after police finally tracked him down to a hotel in Florida years later, he refused to reveal the location of his loot.
Although he has been released, Thompson is under court supervision and there is $3.3 million in accumulated fines hanging over his head. In addition, the investors are still claiming they were defrauded, the Fox report stated.
Thompson has repeatedly said the coins were in a trust in Belize, but he did not have the records or memory to get them back.
The ship’s gold cargo was from the California Gold Rush, and an exhibit in 2022 displayed numerous artifacts recovered from the ocean floor:
Coin dealer Dwight Manley said he believed the case involving Thompson boiled down to one simple thing.
“Going to prison for 10 years over a business dispute is not America. People kill people and get out in half the time,” he said, per the Fox article.
