A DEEP-SEA explorer who never revealed the location of his treasure trove has been released from prison after a decade.
American treasure hunter Tommy Thompson, 73, claimed he didn’t know where he had put 500 gold coins he hauled up from a famed shipwreck.
Thompson, an Ohio-born research scientist, was hailed as a hero after finding the S.S. Central America and its thousands of pounds of sunken treasure that sat at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean for more than 150 years.
He had spent five years searching for the 1857 wreck, using multi-million dollar equipment paid for by investors.
In 1988, he hit the jackpot, locating the ship 160 miles off the coast of South Carolina and 8,000ft below the surface.
When it sank, the ship was carrying 30,000 pounds of gold newly minted in San Francisco.
435 people drowned when the ship sank and the loss of the gold contributed to an economic panic.
Thompson’s find was one of the greatest shipwreck discoveries in American history.
He sold some of the loot to a gold marketing group in 2000 for about $50m.
But investors who had backed Thompson’s venture sued him in 2005, saying they had yet to receive any money from the sale.
Thompson, who was living in Florida, went into seclusion and then later became a fugitive when an Ohio federal judge issued a warrant for his arrest in 2012 after he failed to show up in court.
Authorities tracked Thompson to a Florida hotel three years later.
The judge then held him in contempt and sent Thompson to prison at the end of 2015 for refusing to answer questions about the location of missing coins.
Thompson maintained that the coins valued then at $2.5million were turned over to a trust in Belize and said the $50million from the sale of the first batch of gold mostly went toward legal fees and bank loans.
He remained locked up even though federal law generally limits jail time for contempt of court to 18 months.
A federal appeals court in 2019 rejected Thompson’s argument that the law applied to him, saying his refusal violated conditions of a plea agreement.
In 2020, when asked if he was ready to reveal the location of the gold, Thompson said he couldn’t remember.
“Your honor, I don’t know if we’ve gone over this road before or not, but I don’t know the whereabouts of the gold,” he said.
“I feel like I don’t have the keys to my freedom.”
Last year, a judge ruled that Thompson was never likely to answer where the missing coins were and ordered his release.
