Finding three tons of gold on the shipwreck, Thompson decided not to say anything about the hiding place, even though he was being held in an American prison with a huge fine.
Thompson and part of the gold found from the shipwreck. Photo: WP
Tommy G. Thompson is one of America’s most famous treasure hunters, after finding a treasure trove of gold in a shipwreck at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in 1988, according to the Washington Post.
The ship S.S. Central America carrying 425 people and at least three tons of California gold sank in a storm while passing through the waters off the coast of South Carolina, USA in 1857. Since then, many people have devoted their efforts to searching. wreck of this gold ship but to no avail.
130 years later, Thompson, a young engineer from Columbus County, Ohio, built a scuba diving robot named “Nemo” to find the exact location of the Central America ship, then dived to the bottom of the sea 2,400 meters deep. to recover the treasure.
To carry out this ambitious treasure hunt project, Thompson raised capital from more than 160 investors. He spent many years studying the details of the ill-fated ship’s journey, and developing scuba diving robot technology to reach depths no one had ever reached before.
Thompson’s hunting team recovered 19th-century gold coins, a ship’s bell, and gold bars 15 times larger than the largest known California gold bar, the Chicago Tribune reported. news in 1989.
This announced amount of assets is only 5% of the gold in this huge treasure worth about 400 million USD, the Washington Post reported a year later. “This is the largest treasure trove in American history and the most ambitious seabed salvage effort ever made in the world,” the newspaper commented.
Thompson’s efforts attracted the attention of the entire United States, making the engineer who had researched nuclear submarine systems before going on this treasure hunt become famous. “Thompson is not the romantic, adventurous type, he works very scientifically and systematically,” Forbes commented.
Despite his national fame, Thompson rarely spoke in public, always trying to downplay his role in the discovery of the huge treasure.
Wanted
Gold coins and bars were discovered on the wreck of the Central America ship. Photo: WP
But a few years later, accused of defrauding investors into investing money in a treasure hunt, Thompson became one of the people most wanted by the US Judicial Police.
The two largest investors in the treasure hunt decided to sue Thompson in court in the 2000s, accusing him of hiding and secretly selling almost all of the gold recovered on the ship for his own personal use.
A federal judge accepted the lawsuit and asked Thompson to appear in court in 2012, but he did not appear. An arrest warrant was issued, but this famous treasure hunter has disappeared.
During the next two years, the US Marshals Service launched a fierce search to capture “one of the most intelligently wanted suspects” in the agency’s history.
Peter Tobin, a US Marshals Service official, admitted that Thompson “had unlimited resources and was 10 years ahead of authorities” in the hunt.
According to police records, Thompson and his girlfriend lived leisurely for many years in a villa in Florida, despite being highly wanted. They paid their rent with damp, old bills that they had buried underground. By the time the police discovered the house, the two people had left.
Searching the house, the police found many cell phones, sealed bills with a value of $10,000, and a book on how to escape the wanted force titled “How to become invisible”.
In January of last year, Thompson was finally arrested, after agents tracked down the $200 his girlfriend spent to pay for a night at a hotel near West Palm Beach.
In a statement after the arrest, the US Marshals Service happily said that they had mobilized “all resources and intelligence” to search for Thompson. But nearly two years have passed, they still haven’t found the treasure.
The treasure disappeared a second time
US authorities believe that Thompson is hiding 95% of the gold found on the ship. Photo: TCPalm
After being arrested, Thompson was sent to a prison in Ohio, where US authorities tried every way to get him to reveal the location of the gold found from the Central America ship. But despite threats, persuasion and huge fines every day, Thompson never said a word about where the gold was hidden.
Thompson’s investors, who had hoped to make tens of millions of dollars from the treasure, claim he hid hundreds of gold coins in a secret trust account for his children.
Initially, the journey to find this gold seemed very promising. Thompson admitted to concealing the treasure during the April 2015 trial, saying the gold was hidden in Belize and agreed to reveal the exact location. But this man later changed his mind and decided not to reveal where the gold was hidden.
Thompson’s lawyer said last month that his client could not remember who was assigned to manage the gold, even after reviewing thousands of pages of documents related to the treasure.
The federal judge said that Thompson had intentionally fabricated information, so he decided to imprison him for a period of one year. Thompson will not be released from prison until he reveals the location of the treasure, and for each day of silence, he will have to pay a fine of $1,000.
However, up to now the above measures have not been effective. “Maybe at some point he will remember,” Judge Algenon Marbley commented on December 12, when ordering Thompson to answer questions about where the gold was hidden.
To this day, the gold on the Central America continues to be a treasure that has disappeared twice in two centuries, and the only person who knows how to find it is still silent, like the sailors lying with the old ship’s wreck. .
