An American treasure hunter who was jailed for 10 years after refusing to reveal the location of missing gold coins has been freed, with authorities apparently never knowing where that gold is.
Tommy Thompson, a renowned salvager who found the long-lost so-called Golden Ship near South Carolina in 1998, was released from federal prison on March 4, records and reports recently indicated.
The ship sailed under the name SS Central America before Thompson, now 73, found it with tons of “sunken treasure” inside, CBS News said.
The SS Central America was carrying more than 400 passengers and crew, as well as 30,000 pounds of gold minted by the federal government when it sank in 1857. Thompson and his team found the ship about 7,000 feet below the surface, at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, as CBS News reported.
Investors who financed Thompson’s search for the ship later claimed he swindled them out of their share of the treasure and sued him in 2005.
Thompson insisted he did not know where the 500 coins made from the ship’s gold were in particular. He “holled in” in Florida and was considered a fugitive when a federal judge in Ohio issued an arrest warrant for missing a court date, CBS News reported.
Authorities found Thompson three years later, living in a Florida hotel under a false name. The judge reportedly found Thompson in contempt and sent him to prison after he refused to answer questions about the whereabouts of the coins.
Thompson repeatedly claimed that the $2.5 million in coins had been given to a Belize-based trust, and that the $50 million from the sale of an initial set of gold largely paid for bank loans and legal fees.
Although federal laws typically limit prison time for contempt to 18 months, U.S. appeals judges decided in 2019 that Thompson’s case was an exception. They found that Thompson’s refusal violated a plea agreement.
During another petition for release in 2020, Thompson allegedly told a judge, “Your Honor, I don’t know if we’ve been down this road before or not, but I don’t know the whereabouts of the gold.” He also said: “I feel like I don’t have the keys to my freedom.”
The investors’ lawsuit against Thompson was dismissed in 2018. More recently, a judge decided to end Thompson’s contempt sentence more than a year before his release, finding that he no longer believed that keeping him behind bars would provide information about the whereabouts of the gold, as noted by CBS News.
Thompson was then ordered to begin serving a two-year sentence for missing court proceedings in 2012, and was released after completing that punishment.
