Is Tommy Thompson a scam artist who ripped off his investors and secretly hid millions in gold, or a brilliant deep-sea pioneer who pulled off one of the greatest treasure hunts in history?
After spending a jaw-dropping ten years in prison for refusing to reveal the whereabouts of missing booty, the elusive ‘Ship of Gold’ explorer is finally free but the mystery surrounding his fortune is far from solved.
Don’t expect to hear the truth from Thompson himself – especially about where 500 commemorative gold coins, made from melted gold bars extracted from the famed shipwreck and worth about $2 million, are still hidden.
His continuous refusal to give up the loot is why Thompson was imprisoned for more than ten years on contempt of court charges.
He has said the coins are in a ‘blind trust’ in Belize and claims he doesn’t know how to get them.
It’s a case that the University of Florida law professor and attorney Ryan Scott, who helped to secure Thompson’s release, told the Daily Mail was a ‘travesty of justice.’
The 73-year-old pulled off one of the greatest engineering feats in modern history in 1988 by successfully locating the wreck of the gold bar and coin-laden SS Central America, which went down in a hurricane off South Carolina in 1857.
The ship sank along with 425 of her 578 passengers and crew and 21 tons of gold from the California Gold Rush, contributing to a worldwide economic crisis known as the Panic of 1857.
Tommy Thompson (in 1991) was sued by investors who said they paid him $12.7 million to find the treasure, but never saw any returns. Thompson went into hiding in 2012
Thompson (in 1989) is pictured holding a $50 pioneer gold piece which was part of the three tons of gold he retrieved from the shipwreck of the SS Central America in 1988
‘Part of our American heritage, this was history in the form of a national treasure. And we had found it,’ Ohio-born Thompson wrote in America’s Lost Treasure, his account of the discovery.
The Daily Mail can reveal that Thompson is currently living with friends in Columbus, Ohio, after being released from federal prison on parole on March 6.
He has not spoken to the media for decades and is now both traumatized by his prison stint and suffering from an autoimmune disorder that has landed him in a wheelchair, according to multiple sources close to him.
He still faces more than $3 million in civil fines and $252,000 in criminal fines.
‘When you’ve lost everything, you don’t have the energy to talk to the world,’ Thompson’s sister, Sandy Butterworth, told the Daily Mail in an exclusive interview.
‘He’s trying to figure out how to make a cup of coffee again. He has nothing. We’re literally trying to find ways to feed him.’
Thompson has been portrayed for years as a Howard Hughes-style shyster who stiffed his backers and went on the lam to Florida where he lived in a hotel with his girlfriend and used fake names before his 2015 arrest.
But his friends and family – who include many of his original investors – say it was Thompson who was unfairly targeted by both greedy insurance companies that wanted a piece of the gold and by a powerful media company in Ohio that tried to destroy him.
The gold remains of a wooden cargo box unearthed from the SS Central America. The gold was unearthed after Thompson successfully located the wreck, which went down in a hurricane off South Carolina in 1857, killing 425 people
Thompson in a 2018 court appearance. He is suffering from an autoimmune disorder that has landed him in a wheelchair
Gold bars recovered from the SS Central America on display at the Museum of American Finance
After bringing up more than $50 million in gold, Thompson’s supporters say he was hit with claims from 39 insurance companies, all saying they had legal rights to the wreck dating back to the 19th century.
But only two investors, John Wolfe of the Dispatch Printing Company that owned the Columbus Dispatch as well as a TV station and other media companies, and Columbus businessman Donald Fanta, both of whom are now dead, actually sued.
Numerous sources told the Daily Mail that Wolfe, the second cousin of one of Thompson’s original investors, had a vendetta against him and used his family’s considerable influence with its own media ventures as well as local judges and law enforcement to go after Thompson.
The Wolfe family sold off most of their media properties about a decade ago and consolidated into a real estate firm called Journal Capital in Columbus.
A spokeswoman there told the Daily Mail the company has no comment about Thompson.
Gilman Kirk, an early investor in Thompson’s deep-ocean ventures, told the Daily Mail that the public story of Thompson as a fugitive who hid missing treasure is ‘completely false’.
He described Thompson as a brilliant explorer and savant whose success in finding the wreck of the Central America triggered decades of litigation, financial collapse, and, eventually, imprisonment.
‘He’s a combination of a nerd and an Ohio boy and he’s a wonderful human being,’ Kirk said.
This undated drawing made available by the Library of Congress shows the US Mail ship SS Central America, which sank after sailing into a hurricane in September 1857, killing
A 1989 photo shows gold bars and coins in situ while they were being recovered by Thompson
‘His reputation has been destroyed by lies and fabrications. They said he stole gold coins. He didn’t ever do that. It’s been a nightmare for him.’
Kirk said Thompson remains frightened of saying anything publicly that could trigger further legal trouble.
‘He’s scared to death,’ Kirk said.
Thompson was a young oceanic engineer at Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus in the 1980s when he teamed up with a crew of undersea specialists as well as with Kirk and other investors and used high-tech robotics and equipment he had designed to bring up millions in gold bars and coins.
But to hear Kirk and others tell it, Thompson’s group incurred a lot of debt while financing the expedition and Thompson found himself having to pay creditors while being hit with thousands in legal fees to fight the insurance companies.
Almost all the gold was sold to a gold marketing group run by Dwight Manley in 2000 for $50 million to pay off debts, Kirk said.
Kirk said Thompson and the early backers saw little from the recovery despite what he described as a monumental discovery.
‘None of us turned on him,’ Kirk said. ‘There were only two who sued him – and that was all John Wolfe’s doing.’
Kirk stressed that the most contested point in Thompson’s story – the allegation that he stole 500 gold coins – is inaccurate and misleading.
Thompson, who in 1988 located what was known as the Ship of Gold off the coast of South Carolina, was released on March 6, after a ten-year sentence, according to federal Bureau of Prisons records
Coins from the Central America were restored in labs in Santa Ana, California
What Thompson actually took, he said, were newly minted pieces created from recovered gold, not original treasure coins – and that Thompson treated them as an offset against unpaid salary he believed he was owed.
‘All Thompson did was take the restrikes,’ Kirk said. ‘That’s all he ever did.’
A court eventually appointed a receivership to take over from Thompson’s group. It launched its own expedition down to the shipwreck and brought up more gold that Kirk said more than compensated the two investors who sued.
Kirk maintained that Thompson did not steal original treasure from the wreck and said the inventory of the recovered treasure had been meticulously tracked.
Dwight Manley echoed Kirk’s claims.
‘After I bought the treasure, I paid (Thompson’s group) a royalty of a $1.7 million check and 500 restrike coins that I had made from some melted gold bars from the ship,’ Manley told the Daily Mail.
‘And those 500 restrikes that I made in 2001 are what have been turned into this clickbait narrative about Tommy stealing $50 million. I don’t think he’s a thief at all. He just may be a little bad at accounting.’
But Manley added that the entire saga seems to have been cursed.
‘I found that people that have come in contact with this thing, it’s the same thing as King Tut’s curse,’ he said. ‘They get gold fever, and they become whack jobs.’
Asked why Thompson disappeared and stopped appearing in court, Kirk said the answer was not greed or a lavish life on the run, but fear and chronic illness.
Kirk said Thompson’s imprisonment was especially tragic because, in his view, the explorer had never been motivated by stealing treasure and in any event had no rational reason to do so.
He noted that Thompson held a major ownership stake in the companies involved and said it would have made no sense for him to jeopardize that by skimming assets.
‘Why would he do that?’ Kirk said. ‘He owned 40% of both companies. All he was really guilty of is doing this fantastic thing that nobody’s ever gotten close to doing.’
Sandy Butterworth said she had a four-hour conversation with her brother a few days after he got out of prison.
‘We feel brokenhearted over what’s happened to him,’ she said.
‘I mean he used to be Ohio’s hero until some very powerful people turned on him. It’s unbelievable to us as a family that he is being painted as a thief.
‘But you know what? He’s still optimistic and trying to be positive about the future and what more he can do.’
