After seven years in prison, it appears Thompson will never reveal the location of his loot. Federal authorities are beginning to accept this.
Andrew Welsh-Huggins| Columbus Monthly
As the video stream blinks to life, the bearded inmate appears, sitting impassively as he waits for his virtual hearing to begin. Thomas “Tommy” Thompson, wearing a short-sleeve brown shirt, his graying hair in a ponytail, occasionally glances to his right, scratches his beard and sips from a plastic cup.
It’s April 14, 2023, Thompson’s 2,677th day behind bars for keeping a secret.
The road leading to this moment stretches back decades, to the day in 1988 when Thompson, then a Battelle scientist, made one of the biggest discoveries of sunken deep-sea gold in history. Heralded as a genius at the time, he’s a legal oddity today as he sits in a cell in a federal penitentiary in Milan, Michigan, unable—or unwilling—to reveal the location of 500 coins cast from some of that gold. For his refusal, he’s been declared in contempt of court by Columbus federal judge Algenon Marbley and held for more than seven years, racking up $2.7 million in fines—and counting.
While thousands of documents filed over the years attest to the complications of Thompson’s case, his freedom comes down to a simple fact, Marbley said during that April 14 hearing: “Once he comes to terms with the importance of truth in this case, then that will be the key that will indeed unlock his door.”
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Sept. 11 marks the 35th anniversaryof the day in 1988 that Thompson, a research scientist and inventor, located theS.S. Central America, known as the “Ship of Gold.” The gold rush-era ship sank in a hurricane off South Carolina in 1857 with thousands of pounds of gold aboard, contributing to an economic panic. A few weeks after the ship’s discovery, a high school marching band played “When You Wish Upon a Star” and other songs, and hundreds later cheered Thompson as he sailed into Norfolk, Virginia, aboard a ship laden with gold coins and bars.
“Part of our American heritage, this was history in the form of a national treasure. And we had found it,” Thompson wrote in “America’s Lost Treasure,” his account of the find.
His jubilation was short-lived. The very day that Thompson sailed into Norfolk—Oct. 4, 1989—39 insurance companies sued Thompson in federal court, claiming they had originally insured the gold that sank with theS.S. Central America. The treasure, they contended, belonged to them. Exacerbating Thompson’s legal woes, a handful of his investors sued in 2005, arguing they paid him $12.7 million to find the ship but never saw any money. As his troubles mounted, Thompson moved into a mansion in Florida, refused to use his real name on utility bills and paid his rent with moldy $100 bills.
In 2012, federal judge Edmund Sargus ordered Thompson to appear in court in Columbus to disclose the whereabouts of the 500 coins minted from the ship’s gold. Instead, Thompson disappeared. Three years passed before U.S. marshals tracked him down to a hotel near Boca Raton, where he was living with his longtime companion, Alison Antekeier. As recounted in court filings, the pair had taken numerous steps to avoid detection, counting “How to Be Invisible”—a book about evading law enforcement—among their possessions.
In April 2015, Thompson pleaded guilty to failing to appear in 2012 and was sentenced to two years in prison and fined $250,000. Thompson’s criminal sentence was then delayed until the issue of the gold coins was resolved. (Even if Marbley released him tomorrow on the contempt charge, Thompson must still serve those two additional years.)
Thompson’s plea deal required him to answer questions in closed-door sessions about the whereabouts of the coins, which the government says are worth about $2.5 million. Importantly, he had to “assist” interested parties in finding the coins under that deal. Despite that arrangement, including an hours-long interview in fall 2015, lawyers representing those suing him contended his responses weren’t forthcoming.
On Dec. 15, 2015, Marbley found Thompson in contempt of court and ordered him to stay in jail—and pay that $1,000 daily fine—until he responded. In the years that followed, in hearing after hearing, Thompson would maintain there was nothing more he could say.
“Are you ready to answer the seminal question in this case as to the whereabouts of the gold?” Marbley asked him at an October 2020 hearing, one of 19 such appearances over the past seven years.
“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,” Thompson responded. “I feel like I don’t have the keys to my freedom.”
Thompson previously said, without providing details, that the coins were turned over to a trust in Belize. The investors, a group of Columbus-area business leaders—including the late Donald Fanta, former president and CEO of the Ohio Co. brokerage firm, and the late John F. Wolfe, whose family ownedThe Columbus Dispatch—said Thompson had no one but himself to blame for his incarceration. A federal appeals court in 2019 rejected Thompson’s argument that the law limits his incarceration to 18 months, saying his refusal to provide information violated the conditions of his plea agreement. Near the end of the April 14 hearing, he showed little inclination to change his situation.
After some hemming and hawing, he gave a one-word answer when federal prosecutor Peter Glenn-Applegate posed the question at the heart of the case. “I’m asking you whether you are willing to take any steps at all, whether you believe them to be effective or not, to assist with the recovery of assets,” Glenn-Applegate said.
“No,” Thompson said.
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Federal law typically prohibitsjailing defendants on contempt charges longer than 18 months. But such incarcerations can run much longer, with Thompson’s tenure behind bars equaling a handful of others nationally. In each of those cases, judges ultimately released the individuals, ruling that further incarceration wouldn’t change their minds.
Recent developments suggest Thompson may, too, finally see the light of day. Beginning in September 2022, Marbley hinted he was feeling conflicted about the situation. “Though the court has not found sufficient merit in Mr. Thompson’s motions, the court does hold its own concerns about the duration of Mr. Thompson’s incarceration,” Marbley wrote in a court order.
The government is also ready to relent. In a May court filing, Glenn-Applegate said it was time to lift the contempt order and force Thompson to serve his two-year criminal sentence. He’d already said as much at the April 14 hearing.
“Given the duration of Mr. Thompson’s incarceration, we think it’s reasonable to question whether further incarceration will ever coerce him into compliance,” Glenn-Applegate said in April. “I want to be clear. That’s not because he’s unable; just if he’s been unwilling for this long, he may be unwilling forever.”
He added: “In our view, it would not be an abuse of the court’s discretion if the court said, OK, that’s enough.”
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Perhaps appropriatelygiven his current circ*mstances, the scientist-turned-treasure-hunter grew up for the most part in Defiance, Ohio, the son of a nutritionist mother and engineer father. His talent for science emerged early, from the day at age 8 when he landed his parents in hot water with the telephone company by splitting a telephone wire and creating his own phone line.Peoplemagazine once called him “the kind of guy who could fix a rocket ship with two paper clips and a piece of twine.”
Thompson was a 31-year-old oceanic engineer at Battelle, the nonprofit Columbus-based research organization, when he approached investors with the possibility of raising theS.S. Central America. On Sept. 11, 1988, aboard a refitted Canadian icebreaker ship christened theArctic Discoverer, years of Thompson’s research paid off. Cameras on the ship’s submersible, “Nova,” recorded the first images of the discovery.
“The bottom was carpeted with gold. Gold everywhere, like a garden,” Thompson wrote of the moment when they located the treasure.
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Thompson has long contendedhe suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome, and attempts to diagnose and treat the ailment in prison have frequently delayed hearings over his contempt case. He also has burned through multiple attorneys over the years, leading to additional delays. His latest attorney, Keith Golden, a lawyer who previously represented him in state court, told Marbley that Thompson is in the upside-down position of having been in prison longer than many defendants accused of serious crimes such as cocaine dealing, a situation Golden called “out of whack.”
“This is supposed to be a coercive effect,” Golden argued on April 14. “This is not supposed to be a hammer over someone’s head.” He went further in a May court filing, saying in effect there’s no evidence Thompson is going to change his position. That, combined with Thompson’s “belief that his deteriorating medical condition could lead to his ultimate death if he remains in custody, are strong indicators that Mr. Thompson will never comply, even if he believes he might receive fatal consequences for his refusal,” Golden wrote.
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Meanwhile, the legendof Thompson’s discovery continues to grow. In January 2022, the largestS.S. Central Americaingot ever offered at auction, an 866.19-ounce find known as a Justh & Hunter ingot, sold for $2.16 million through Dallas-based Heritage Auctions.
And on April 14—the same day as Thompson’s latest hearing—National Geographic and BBC Studios’ Documentary Unit announced the development ofa three-part limited series,Lost Gold, that will tell Thompson’s story. Next May, a 20th-anniversary edition of Gary Kinder’s definitive history of theS.S. Central Americadiscovery—“Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea”—will be released by Grove Atlantic Books.
Marbley will likely rule later this summer whether Thompson might celebrate that release free from his contempt charge, though still facing more time for the criminal conviction. But despite his comments last year, Marbley noted on April 14 that Thompson’s continuing lack of cooperation remains an obstacle to his freedom.
“If I had the ability to purge him of the contempt, I would do so,” Marbley said. “Because I derive nothing from having Mr. Thompson incarcerated.”
This story is from the July 2023 issue ofColumbus Monthly.
