US4 min(s) read
Published 12:57 02 Jun 2026 GMT
A man who was fined $1,000 a day for refusing to reveal the location of a $2 million treasure has finally been released from prison.
Tommy Thompson, a research scientist turned deep-sea treasure hunter, rose to fame after locating the long-lost SS Central America, often referred to as the "Ship of Gold", in 1988.
But the discovery led to a legal battle that kept him imprisoned for nearly a decade and saw him rack up daily fines of $1,000.
The SS Central America sank off the coast of South Carolina during a hurricane in 1857.
The ship was carrying more than 400 passengers and crew, along with 30,000 pounds of federally minted gold from the California Gold Rush, The Guardian reported.
More than a century later, Thompson and his team located the wreck roughly 7,000 feet beneath the Atlantic Ocean.
His remarkable find earned worldwide attention, but debates over the recovered riches would eventually overshadow the historic discovery.
At the center of the controversy were 500 gold coins minted from treasure recovered from the ship.
Authorities spent years trying to determine where the coins were located, but Thompson consistently refused or failed to provide answers.
He repeatedly maintained that the coins, valued at approximately $2.5 million, had been transferred to a trust based in Belize.
The situation escalated after Thompson failed to appear at a 2012 court hearing in Ohio related to the coins.
Investors who had funded the search for the ship had previously accused him of denying them their share of the treasure and filed a lawsuit against him in 2005.
Following his missed court appearance, the hunter went into hiding in Florida and was later declared a fugitive.
US Marshals eventually tracked Thompson down three years later. Per reports, he was found living in a Florida hotel under an assumed name.
In April 2015, Thompson pleaded guilty to skipping the Ohio court hearing and received a two-year prison sentence, according to CNN.
But his legal problems were far from over as Thompson repeatedly refused to reveal what had happened to the missing coins, prompting a judge to hold him in contempt of court in December 2015.
The judge ordered him to remain behind bars until he cooperated and imposed a $1,000 daily fine for every day he refused to provide information about the coins' whereabouts, per Fox News.
Federal law generally limits imprisonment for contempt of court to 18 months.
Thompson argued that the restriction should apply to his case, but an appeals court denied that claim in 2019.
Judges ruled that his refusal to cooperate violated the terms of a plea agreement, making his circumstances an exception to the normal limits.
Thompson has maintained that he simply did not know where the coins were. During a request for release in 2020, he reportedly told a judge: "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 added: "I feel like I don't have the keys to my freedom."
In 2025, Thompson received a rare victory as US District Judge Algenon Marbley ruled that he "no longer is convinced that further incarceration is likely to coerce compliance."
The decision effectively ended his civil contempt sentence after years of imprisonment.
However, the judge also mandated him to begin serving the separate two-year sentence connected to his criminal contempt conviction for missing the 2012 court proceeding.
Thompson was ultimately released from federal prison on March 4 after completing that sentence.
Despite years of legal pressure, officials appear no closer to learning what happened to the missing gold coins.
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