Off the Wall: He Outlasted the Feds, Now He's Old With Gold
Deep-sea treasure hunter freed after decade behind bars for refusing to reveal gold location. The now 73-year-old explorer claimed memory loss about 500 missing coins.
Deep-sea treasure hunter freed after decade behind bars for refusing to reveal gold location. The now 73-year-old explorer claimed memory loss about 500 missing coins.
(FOX) - Tommy Thompson, a deep-sea explorer who spent more than a decade in federal custody for refusing to disclose the location of a cache of gold coins from a historic shipwreck, was released from prison.
Thompson, 73, walked out of a federal correctional facility Wednesday after a judge ruled that his continued incarceration had lost its “coercive effect.”
For the better part of 10 years, Thompson had remained behind bars, asserting that a lapse in memory regarding the whereabouts of 500 missing gold coins recovered from the S.S. Central America, the “Ship of Gold” that sank in 1857 off the coast of South Carolina.
“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 once told the judge in 2020. “I feel like I don’t have the keys to my freedom.”
hompson’s downfall began long after his 1988 triumph, when he used a robotic thresher to recover gold from the Atlantic floor.
While the discovery was a feat of engineering, it sparked a series of lawsuits from…
Can’t let the little guy any kind of win that’s why we had to fight a war about this already cuz government just won’t leave us dumb Southerners alone and we will see who survives, FUCK EM I WOULDNT HAVE GIVEN IT TO A BUNCH OF TRAITORS