US deep-sea shipwreck-salvor Tommy Thompson was released from prison on 4 March after serving more than a decade behind bars. Now 73, he had been sentenced as part of a long-running legal dispute about missing gold taken from an historic shipwreck.
In December 2015 Thompson had been imprisoned for civil contempt by an Ohio district court. He had refused to comply with orders to disclose the location of the 500 gold coins, and their whereabouts remain unresolved with his release.
In 1988 Thompson led an expedition that succeeded in locating the Atlantic wreck of the passenger and mail steamship Central America. The vessel had sunk in September 1857 during a hurricane while carrying a large cargo of California Gold Rush bullion.
Around 425 passengers and crew died when the vessel went down, and the loss of its gold had played a part in a financial panic in the USA.
$100 million treasure
Thompson’s Columbus-America Discovery Group later conducted salvage operations on this “Ship of Gold”, which was located off South Carolina at a depth of around 2.1km.
Using an ROV from the expedition ship Arctic Discoverer, the team recovered large quantities of gold coins and bars and other artefacts, estimated to be worth more than $100 million (£75m).
However in 2005 a group of 161 investors in the salvage brought legal proceedings against Thompson, alleging that he had withheld proceeds from some $50 million in sales of gold from the wreck.
In 2012 Thompson failed to attend a court hearing in Ohio, leading a federal judge to issue an arrest warrant for him. In hiding with his girlfriend, the wreck-hunter had been on the run for three years when he was located and arrested by US marshals at a Florida hotel, where he had been living under an assumed name.
He subsequently pleaded guilty to failing to appear in court and was sentenced to two years in prison with a $250,000 fine, and the understanding that he would disclose the location of some 500 gold coins said to have been minted from recovered wreck gold. Thompson maintained that he knew only that the coins had been placed in a trust in Belize.
Daily fines
Jailed, with the addition of a cumulative daily fine of $1,000 intended to compel compliance with the court order, Thompson’s continued refusal to co-operate kept him incarcerated far beyond the typical 18-month limit for civil contempt. An attempt in 2016 to prove that he had suffered serious memory loss failed.
The daily fine eventually accumulated to some $3.3m but there is no indication that this or the $250,000 fine have been paid. When Thompson was arrested in 2015, the marshals had seized $425,000 in cash, which was not returned to him.
In February 2025 a district judge ruled that the civil-contempt sentence should end because the court was “no longer persuaded that continued confinement will have a coercive effect”.
Thompson had not been released immediately, however, because the court then ordered him to serve a previously imposed two-year sentence for failing to appear in court in 2012. He has made no public comment since his release.
