{"id":538460,"date":"2026-03-15T18:12:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-15T18:12:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/538460\/"},"modified":"2026-03-15T18:12:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-15T18:12:07","slug":"treasure-hunter-freed-from-prison-after-10-years-but-location-of-gold-coins-still-unknown-us-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/538460\/","title":{"rendered":"Treasure hunter freed from prison after 10 years but location of gold coins still unknown | US news"},"content":{"rendered":"

A US treasure hunter<\/a> who was imprisoned for 10 years after refusing to reveal the location of missing gold coins has been released from prison, without officials apparently ever learning where that gold is.<\/p>\n

Tommy Thompson \u2013 a renowned salvager who in 1988 found the long-lost, so-called Ship of Gold near South Carolina \u2013 was freed from federal prison on 4 March, records and reports recently indicated.<\/p>\n

The ship sailed under the name SS Central America before Thompson, now 73, found it with tons of \u201csunken treasure\u201d inside, CBS News said.<\/a><\/p>\n

The SS Central America was transporting more than 400 passengers and crew as well as 30,000lb of federally minted gold when it sank in 1857. Thompson and his team found the ship about 7,000ft below the surface, at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, as CBS News reported.<\/p>\n

Investors who funded Thompson\u2019s search for the ship later claimed that he bilked them out of their cut of the treasure, and they sued him in 2005.<\/p>\n

Thompson insisted that he didn\u2019t know where 500 coins made from the ship\u2019s gold were in particular. He \u201cwent into seclusion\u201d in Florida and was deemed a fugitive when an Ohio federal judge issued a warrant to arrest him for skipping a court date, CBS News reported.<\/p>\n

Authorities found Thompson three years later, living in a Florida hotel under an assumed name. The judge reportedly held Thompson in contempt and sent him to prison after he refused to answer questions about the coins\u2019 whereabouts.<\/p>\n

Thompson repeatedly claimed that the $2.5m in coins had been given to a Belize-based trust \u2013 and that $50m from selling an initial set of gold largely paid for bank loans and legal fees.<\/p>\n

Although federal laws typically limit prison for contempt to 18 months, US appellate judges decided in 2019 that Thompson\u2019s case was an exception. They found that Thompson\u2019s refusal was in violation of a plea agreement.<\/p>\n

During another plea for release in 2020, Thompson reportedly told a judge: \u201cYour honor, I don\u2019t know if we\u2019ve gone over this road before or not, but I don\u2019t know the whereabouts of the gold.\u201d He also said: \u201cI feel like I don\u2019t have the keys to my freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

The investors\u2019 lawsuit against Thompson was dismissed in 2018. More recently, a judge decided to end Thompson\u2019s contempt sentence more than a year before his release, finding that he no longer believed keeping him behind bars would yield information about the gold\u2019s whereabouts, as CBS News noted.<\/p>\n

Thompson was then ordered to begin serving a two-year sentence for missing the 2012 court proceeding, and he was released after completing that punishment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A US treasure hunter who was imprisoned for 10 years after refusing to reveal the location of missing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":538461,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[45,49,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-538460","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=538460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538460\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/538461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=538460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=538460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=538460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}