For treasure hunter Tommy Thompson, after losing more than a decade of his life in federal prison for contempt of court, everything changed on March 4, when he was finally released. Members of Congress should dig far below the headlines and take a fresh look at reforming the contempt power to prevent similar tides of injustice. This case is not just about gold; it’s about perseverance and due process. It is also a case I have spent the past few years working on and writing about.
Tommy is an extraordinary individual who, in the 1980s, enjoyed a comfortable job as a maritime engineer at Battelle in Columbus, Ohio. But Tommy still wanted to push the boundaries of possibility; he dared to do more. He became obsessed with a seemingly impossible challenge: locating and salvaging the SS Central America, a paddle-wheel steamship that sank off the Carolina coast in 1857, carrying at least 21 tons of gold from the California gold rush.
The ship lay approximately 1½ miles below the surface, and no one knew its precise location. Thompson created the Columbus-America company to recover the shipwreck, devised an ingenious search strategy using Bayesian theory to locate it and custom-built an ROV capable of recovering artifacts from nearly 8,000 feet deep. In 1988, Thompson was an immense success. Then the litigation started.
There have been countless books, television specials, documentaries and news articles written about this story, covering the more than three decades of litigation and disputes that stemmed from this amazing find.