Tommy Thompson did the impossible in 1988 and has been paying for it ever since.
He found a gold-laden ship that sank in the Atlantic Ocean in the 1800s and developed equipment that plucked the treasure from the ocean floor.
His salvaging of the SS Central America, one of the richest shipwrecks in history, was going to be the first of what he hoped would be equally dazzling expeditions enabled by his new technology.
Instead, it was the beginning of a 34-year nightmare that continues today.
The discovery of the gold led to ruptured friendships, criminal charges, dozens of lawsuits and a two-year disappearance where his lifestyle evoked the final days of Howard Hughes.
Thompson, 70, has spent the last seven years at the Federal Correctional Institution in Milan. He is being held for contempt of court and can be released as soon as he tells a judge where some of the gold is located. For seven years, he has refused to do so.
“The Tommy Thompson story is unfortunate,” said Bob Evans, 68, a geologist who was the chief scientist of the treasure expedition. “I’m happy he got me involved in the project, but I hate like hell what he did to himself. So much of it seems self-inflicted.”
U.S. District Judge Algernon Marbley, who threw Thompson into prison, might be reconsidering the punishment.
In September, Marbley told Thompson and federal prosecutors that he plans to question them about the benefit of continuing the incarceration. He also wants them to discuss alternative solutions that might yield the treasure. A court hearing is scheduled for Dec. 9.
Thompson, who was once the subject of adoring magazine articles and books, stopped talking to reporters in the 1990s. He didn’t respond to several letters from The Detroit News seeking an interview.
His supporters describe the ordeal as the second of two tragedies involving the Central America, whose sinking led to 425 deaths.
“He is a major-league genius who probably would have changed the world,” said Gil Kirk, 81, a real estate developer who invested $1.8 million in the project. “He is so brilliant I can’t even begin to tell you. He created things that nobody else was even thinking about.”
Kirk said Thompson once referred to his discovery as the "plague of the gold."
"Finding the treasure was his mistake," Kirk said. "Once he found it, boom, here comes every single ... . It's like a house with nothing but cockroaches, and then you pour a gallon of honey in the middle of it."
An unconventional engineer
When Gary Kinder wrote a book about the discovery of the SS Central America in 1998, he was worried about how he would describe Thompson. Everyone he interviewed spoke so glowingly about the treasure hunter that he didn't sound like a real person.
Thompson grew up in Defiance, Ohio, 30 miles from the Michigan border, according to the book, “Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea.” As a child, he was always tinkering, taking things apart and reassembling them to understand how they worked.
When he was 8, his family received a visit from a telephone company worker who said they needed to pay for both of their phones. His mother said they had only one phone.
They discovered that the third grader had split the phone line running into the home and attached it to an old jewelry box, turning it into a phone.
“He wanted to take old ideas, turn them inside out and apply them in new ways,” Kinder wrote. “He wanted to suck the world through his senses and exhale a vision.”
Thompson got a degree in mechanical engineering from Ohio State University and became an oceanic engineer for the Battelle Memorial Institute, a prestigious technology development company in Columbus.
His dad was an engineer who taught him the most important part of engineering was the questions you asked, friends told The News.
Thompson never tried to solve a problem in the conventional way, they said. He always approached it from various angles, probing, poking, studying it in a methodical way. He asked questions no one else did.
He was more a scientist than engineer, brimming with ideas about a wide variety of subjects, proposing innovative ways of doing something, friends said.
"His mind is incredible," said Mike Lorz, 79, a publicist who helped Thompson deal with the media after the discovery of the gold. "He's the most creative person I ever met. He never stops trying to find better ways to do things."
Searching for sunken gold
The SS Central America, a massive sidewheel steamship, was traveling from Panama to New York in 1857. It carried three to six tons of gold bars, coins and nuggets, courtesy of the California Gold Rush. The gold’s worth today would be an estimated $165 million to $495 million.
The so-called Ship of Gold was struck by a hurricane 200 miles off the coast of South Carolina and sank 1½ miles to the ocean floor. And that’s where it remained untouched for a century and a half.
Even if someone managed to find the shipwreck, how would they even begin to retrieve its riches? It had never been done before at such a depth.
“This stuff is very difficult,” Thompson would later tell a federal judge during his legal troubles. “This is like going to the moon.”
Still, he had a few ideas about how to find and raise the treasure.
He led a group that scrutinized survivors’ accounts of the sinking, using a computer analysis to connect their descriptions to maps, meteorological and navigational records from 1857. The researchers narrowed the ship’s location to 1,400 square miles and searched the area with specially made sonar equipment for six weeks.
After finding the sidewheeler, the crew lowered what looked like a giant refrigerator with arms to the shipwreck. The contraption also had remote-controlled lights, cameras and claws. A Thompson-led group of engineers designed the machine to resist the heavy pressure at the ocean floor.
The technology developed by the team is now standard practice for ocean exploration.
“We did a pretty amazing thing,” said Mike Milosh, 64, a Michigan Technological University graduate who was the lead engineer of the project. “We did some stuff, quite a bit of stuff, that nobody else had done. Things seem to have gone awry, but there’s no putting down what we accomplished.”
Kinder, the author, compared the group's ability to work on the ocean bottom with the U.S. going to the moon. Instead of NASA's 400,000 workers and $100 billion budget, Thompson did it with just a dozen people spending $57 million, Kinder said.
When Thompson found the gold, his financial supporters turned giddy. Their long shot had come through. They were suddenly wealthier. Or at least they thought they were.
Legal battles focus on gold
Thompson’s joy didn’t last long.
No sooner had he brought the gold ashore than he was sued by an insurance company claiming the gold was theirs because it had insured it during the 1857 voyage.
Another 38 insurance firms would say the same thing. In all, 114 entities would file legal claims, including an order of Capuchin monks. The religious group said Thompson stole information it was given by a Columbia University professor who had used sonar to search the spot where the gold was found.
After a decade-long legal fight, Thompson was awarded 92% of the treasure in 1998, with the rest going to insurance companies. In the ruling, Judge Donald Russell of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals lauded the treasure hunter and his company, Columbus-America Discovery Group.
"What Thompson and Columbus-America have accomplished is, by any measure, extraordinary," Russell wrote. "We can say without hesitation that their story is a paradigm of American initiative, ingenuity and determination. Its efforts provide a standard against which all others should be judged."
After winning the legal case, Columbus-America sold 532 gold bars and thousands of coins to the California Gold Marketing Group for $52 million, according to Ohio state court records. It also amended Thompson's contract so he could receive $2 million and 500 commemorative coins worth $2.5 million.
The sale of the gold and Thompson’s new compensation came as a surprise to investors.
Investors see no money
When Thompson came ashore with the gold in 1989, investors from around the country met him at the port in Norfolk, Virginia.
They held a mini-celebration as the crew, carrying the booty in green metal boxes, loaded them into armored trucks. Shotgun-toting police officers offered protection. A high school marching band played "My Way."
But that would be the closest the financial supporters ever got to the gold.
The 300 investors bankrolled the expedition by contributing $22 million. Another $35 million was raised through bank loans. The supporters said they were drawn by Thompson's smarts and small-town roots. They also liked his talk of increasing their investment 50-fold.
"He did something I never thought could happen," said Don Garlikov, 79, an insurance agent who invested $200,000 in the project. "He found three tons of gold. Tell me what's not to be impressed with."
After Thompson won his court fight, however, he became harder and harder to reach.
Meetings and newsletters became less frequent, investors said. Years would pass with no word from Thompson. He would finally hold a confab only to say he couldn't answer any questions, that he had to be careful because of competition from other treasure hunters.
When the financial backers asked about the $52 million sale to California Gold, Thompson said all the money was used to pay legal fees and bank loans.
Meanwhile, scientists who worked with Thompson on the shipwreck said he seemed to change during the protracted legal fight.
Thompson originally didn’t seem that interested in getting rich, said Mike Williamson, 77, a prominent Seattle geophysicist who directed the sonar search for the ship. He said Thompson always seemed more focused on the science and breaking new ground in ocean exploration.
At some point, Thompson became more fixated on money, said Williamson. Among the people he stiffed were Williamson and the other sonar technicians, who filed a lawsuit against him.
“He’s gone through some sort of transformation that I don’t understand,” Williamson said. “He was a techno nerd like me, and then he turned into a different person. Whatever you call it, the gold sickness, he caught it.”
In 2005, several investors sued Thompson for pocketing some of the proceeds without giving them anything. That began a legal odyssey where Thompson argued he deserved the compensation because he hadn’t received a salary during the three years he worked on the expedition.
The investors and sonar staff eventually won their cases but received just a small fraction of the money they were owed, according to Ohio state court records. For the sonar workers, it was an average of $50,000 each.
Investors said the ordeal would have been easier to stomach if the gold were never found. They knew it was a long shot and would have written off its failure as a grand adventure. The various legal battles lasted so long that some investors died without ever seeing a dime.
Thompson goes missing
After failing to appear for a hearing in federal court in 2012, Thompson went on the lam for 29 months.
In truth, he began disappearing long before then, investigators said.
In 2006, he moved to Florida, began using aliases and paying for everything with cash, according to an affidavit filed by the U.S. Marshals Service in federal court.
When Thompson later abandoned a rented mansion in Vero Beach, Florida, he left behind voice-changing equipment, literature about which countries have extradition treaties with the U.S. and a book titled “How to Live Your Life Invisible,” according to the affidavit by Deputy Marshal Mark Stroh.
A handyman discovered a pile of metal pipes and money wrappers stamped $10,000 at the residence, Stroh said. Stroh learned that Thompson paid the rent with $100 bills that were sweaty and moldy. He surmised Thompson hid money by placing it in the pipes and burying them underground.
The handyman, James Kennedy, also found a dozen cellphones and hundreds of microcassette tapes, said Stroh. Each phone was marked for a different lawyer or family member. Stroh said Thompson turned on the phones only long enough to collect several weeks’ worth of voicemail messages that he placed on the tapes.
Kennedy said he once saw Thompson walking on a pool deck at the mansion in his underwear, black socks and black shoes.
"His hair was all crazy," Kennedy said in a deposition in federal court. “After that, me and (a friend) referred to him as the crazy professor because it just fit."
Thompson contracted a rare disease in the 1990s that made it difficult to wear clothes, investor Kirk told The News. Thompson is sensitive to polyester, fiberglass and other materials, Kirk said.
Another item that was left at the Vero Beach residence was a large plastic tub filled with 500 types of medications prescribed under false names, authorities said.
In 2015, Thompson was caught by the Marshals Service at a Hilton hotel in upscale Boca Raton. In the closet were a bunch of bound-together suitcases that contained $425,000.
Inventor goes to prison
Thompson was sentenced to two years in prison for failing to appear for the court hearing in 2012, but he won’t begin serving the time until he finishes his current incarceration. And he won’t finish his current incarceration until he surrenders the 500 gold coins he received in 1991.
Besides the seven years in prison, which is unusually long for contempt of court, he’s also being fined $1,000 a day, which has now reached $2.6 million.
Several times a year he appears before Marbley, the federal judge, to determine if he’s ready to hand over the gold. Thompson repeatedly tells the magistrate he doesn’t have access to the coins because he placed them in a blind trust in Belize in 2010.
“I don’t have access to anything,” he told Marbley last year. “I feel like I don’t have the keys to my freedom. I know it seems odd in some ways.”
Authorities have confirmed the existence of the trust but haven’t been able to determine whether anything is in it. They need Thompson’s written consent to examine the trust, but he has refused to give it.
The treasure hunter also has been murky about details surrounding the trust, including why he created it, who benefits from it, whether disbursements have been made, and the identity of the trustee, federal prosecutors said. He has failed to provide receipts or balance statements.
Thompson, who uses a wheelchair during court appearances, said he has trouble recalling specifics about the trust because of memory problems. He said he suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome and that any type of exertion — physical, cognitive or emotional — hampers his ability to think or remember things.
Marbley doesn’t believe him. The judge has said he’s skeptical about Thompson’s illness, his memory problems and his purported lack of access to the gold.
He has described Thompson as a deceptive malingerer with selective amnesia. The judge said he is mystified how someone who created a patent for a Trident submarine can’t recall the simplest details of a financial arrangement.
“He sounds like the savvy treasure hunter that he is,” said Marbley during a hearing in 2017. “You consistently dazzle this court with your recall about other matters. Yet you claim not to remember that which is the crown jewel, if you pardon the pun, of your career.”
The judge accused Thompson of dragging out the legal process by frequently changing attorneys, sometimes on the eve of hearings. Thompson's current attempt to find a lawyer has been extended by the judge five times.
Thompson said it is difficult to hire an attorney because the prison limits his time on the telephone.
Marbley said during the 2017 hearing he believed Thompson was trying to wait him out and, if this was true, he had bad news for the defendant.
"He seems to be possessed of a steely will that will require him to just wait out all of his investors and everyone," the judge said. "The fortunate part of it is I have life tenure, too. So we'll always have a special place to accommodate him and others like him who don't believe that laws apply to them."

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the big issue i see here is that a judge can remand a US citizen for 7 years unilaterally just because he has not said where the gold is....cough 5 the amendment violation much , cough.....tyrant

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dude literally turned into gollum and refuses to say where the rest of the gold is, that's insanity

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dude literally turned into gollum and refuses to say where the rest of the gold is, that's insanity

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the big issue i see here is that a judge can remand a US citizen for 7 years and counting  unilaterally.,  with no sentence, no crime conviction other than he has not said where the gold is....cough 5 the amendment violation much , cough.....tyrant

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Interesting read

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AIUI, it doesn't fall under the 5th Amendment because answering the question ("where's the gold you were given, and also you need to turn it over!") doesn't actually incriminate him.  He's not being charged with theft or misappropriation, the Court is saying he shouldn't have been given that gold and he needs to hand it over.  He's held for Contempt because he won't cooperate with the Court's decision.


Fifth Amendment protections would come into play if he had been charged with Theft (or something in that vein) and refused to answer questions about whether he possessed those 500 coins.

From the article, even he's not saying anything about the Fifth Amendment.

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So, life in prison for not incriminating yourself?

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the big issue i see here is that a judge can remand a US citizen for 7 years and counting  unilaterally.,  with no sentence, no crime conviction other than he has not said where the gold is....cough 5 the amendment violation much , cough.....tyrant