With evidence including a confession of wreck-looting from diver Yves Gladu and gold bars reportedly sold by US couple Gay & Philip Courter, French prosecutors have now formally requested that these three and another defendant, with a combined age of 317, stand trial for trafficking stolen treasure from an 18th-century shipwreck.
The gold came from Le Prince de Conty, a French East Indiaman that sank in a storm in 1746. Discovered in up to 15m of water in 1974 near Belle-Île-en-Mer, an island off the coast of Brittany, the wreck of the merchant frigate was looted following discovery of a gold ingot during a site survey.
Over time the wreck officially yielded Chinese porcelain and three Chinese gold bars, but archaeological excavations ended in 1985 after a storm had scattered the remains.
Best-selling novelist Gay Courter and her film-maker husband Philip formed a friendship with French couple Gérard & Annette Pesty after meeting them in their home-state of Florida in 1981. Annette Pesty, whose husband died in 1997, is the fourth person lined up to stand trial.
Briefcase full of gold
According to the Courters, Gérard had one day turned up with a briefcase containing 20 gold bars, telling them that his brother-in-law Yves Gladu, an underwater photographer, had recovered them from a wreck.
The Courters said they had agreed to store and later sell the gold on Gérard’s behalf. They held on to the bars for 15 years before starting to sell them on eBay and elsewhere between 2010 and 2018, netting more than US $192,000 (£140,000).
They claim that the proceeds were intended for Gladu, and that they were unaware that the gold was regarded as stolen.
In 2018, a French underwater archaeologist spotted five gold bars for sale at a US auction house. The listing referred to an earlier appearance by Annette Pesty on the BBC TV series Antiques Roadshow, in which she had claimed to have found gold bars she had brought along to the show while diving in Cape Verde.
Gay Courter was identified as the seller and the bars were seized by US authorities and returned to France four years later.
Investigators believe that the Courters had possessed at least 23 gold bars, and say that their relationship with Gladu was long-standing, including going on sailing trips with him in Greece, the Caribbean and French Polynesia.
Gladu has confessed to stealing 16 gold bars from the wreck in the course of some 40 dives between 1976 and 1999, but denied giving any of them to the Courters, claiming instead to have sold them to an ex-soldier in Switzerland in 2006.
House arrest
The Courters were detained while in the UK in 2022 and remained under house arrest in London for six months before being returned to Florida.
A French prosecutor in Brest has now requested that Gay, 80; Philip, 82; Gladu, 77 and Annette Pesty, 78, be tried for trafficking in cultural property and money-laundering. If confirmed by an investigating magistrate, the trial could begin in late 2026.
Lawyer Gregory Levy says that his clients the Courters are innocent of criminal wrong-doing and had not profited from the sales, seeking only to help their friends. “They are profoundly nice people,” he says. “They didn’t see the harm, as US regulations for gold are completely different from those in France.”
Levy has told the Independent that the fact that gold was advertised on eBay showed that there had been no intention to hide sales, adding that the British Museum, which he said must have been aware of its provenance, had bought bullion taken from Le Prince de Conty and should be investigated by the French, “rather than two American octogenarians”.
Gay Courter has written five best-sellers among her seven novels and four works of non-fiction, including I Speak For This Child, a Pulitzer-nominated memoir about the plight of foster-children – a subject that had become the focus of the couple’s documentary film-production company.
Also on Divernet: DIVER’S GENEROSITY RETURNS SHIPWRECK GOLD WATCH TO UK, HOW REX COWAN PERSONIFIED ‘GOLDEN AGE’ OF UK SHIPWRECK HUNTING, STOLEN SPANISH SHIPWRECK GOLD COINS RECOVERED, SAN JOSE SHIPWRECK’s TREASURE IS CONTESTED
