The Pirate King's Deliverance
BY MICHAEL THURAU
The golden age of pirate captains, buried treasure and adventure on the high seas is well in the past for those of us alive today. But even at this late date we have the chance to witness the final victory of the pirate king of central Ohio over his foes, the wheedlers, the spongers and the hangers-on.
Our captain’s story begins in 1989 with him returning to shore along the coast of Virginia to the grateful fanfare of his admirers and (for the moment) loyal crew. Sadly, this will be the high point of the story, as what follows will be a tale of treachery, pedantry and the casual despotism of District Court Judge Algenon Marbley.
Tommy had just discovered the location of the sunken treasure ship SS Central America, and he was bringing the first shipment of gold with him. More shipments would follow as the ill-fated ship carried over 30,000lbs of gold ingots and coins including the 78-pound Eureka Bar which would eventually be sold for more than $8 million to a private collector in California. The Central America loomed large in the roster of unrecovered treasure ships. It’s sinking precipitated the 1857 financial panic, the first of such panics to go global in scale with the first domino to fall being in Cincinnati when the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, who was counting on the delivery of that gold, went under. It was a fat prize, but an inaccessible one.
Up to this point, recovered treasure ships were found in shallower coastal waters where adventurers could make more frequent expeditions with more primitive gear. When Tommy found the Central America, it was 370 miles off the coast of Georgia and 1.4 miles down.
Without Tommy, the SS Central America would still be at the bottom of the ocean. It was Tommy who designed the submarine that retrieved the gold, Tommy who created the Bayesian search grid to locate the ship in miles of open ocean, Tommy who pitched the idea to the central Ohio investors that funded the expedition, and it was Tommy who captained the ship. Tommy succeeded where other captains dared not even try, but the pirate king’s adventure didn’t end there. He would next be forced to contend with the natural enemies of all pirates, the law and his mutinous mercenary crew whose loyalty was secured only until the next promise of a bigger payout reached their ears. But on that day, Tommy was a hero and his all-or-nothing bet on himself had paid off.
The initial capital to fund the narrow 40 day expedition onto the open ocean was $12.7 million and was furnished by 161 of the wealthiest men and business entities of Central Ohio including the Columbus Dispatch which would go on to make sure that Tommy was cast as a villain in the public mind. When Tommy came ashore that day, he trusted that once the investors were handsomely paid off for taking a risk on him that he and his closest mates would keep a little more than a third of the treasure for themselves. This was the first of only two mistakes.
39 insurance companies immediately descended on Tommy sensing an easy payday. Their claim? They were the successors to the liquidated assets of entities like the long defunct Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company and were therefore entitled to the full cargo. Over the course of seven years, ownership of the gold remained in limbo and Tommy’s legal fees climbed to $43 million. A prudent parasite doesn’t kill its host, but these terrestrial plunderers couldn’t even meet this abysmal standard. Thompson was forced to suspend further trips to the site of the wreck as Columbus Discovery Group the entity formed to retrieve the treasure and distribute the profits was out of money.
No one knows for sure but based on the original cargo manifest of the ship and the amount of treasure brought ashore as much as 15 tons of gold remain in the Central America’s broken hull. By 1996, Tommy had won the legal rights to his own treasure. But in that time, he had gone through an acrimonious divorce (ending with his ex-wife having a claim to a share of the treasure) and the initial investors had filed lawsuits of their own to secure what little rights Tommy still had to the gold. The judge in charge of the case consistently ruled in favor of Tommy, but the goal was never to win a decisive court battle but instead to wear him down with appeals and reviews in the hope of a settlement, or even better, force Columbus Discovery Group into bankruptcy and seize the gold to cover legal debts.
With the insurance companies defeated, the investors went after Tommy in earnest. Led by Don Fanta, President and CEO of the Ohio Company brokerage firm a coup was launched in which an unsuccessful bear hug nearly stripped Tommy of his authority to manage the company he formed to retrieve the treasure of the Central America. As everyone knows, mutineers get the plank, but Tommy was powerless on land, so his war of attrition and endurance continued for another twelve years. He should have been rich, he should have been carefree he should have been pursuing his next adventure, but instead he had been locked in a two-decade battle about what he was allowed to do with his treasure and how much of it was owed to the pusillanimous men who were at home in the arena of legal and administrative procedure.
And then one day, Tommy and his gold disappeared.
Put yourself in Tommy’s boots. If you were a pirate and your treasure was beset on all sides by landlubbers who were just as greedy for it as you, how do you solve this problem? That’s right, you go to the Caribbean and hide it. For 20 years Tommy played by the rules, appeared in court and agreed to assert his right to the treasure the right way. But what kind of pirate story would this be if that’s all he ever did?
While his enemies were filing motions and conspiring against him, Tommy was preparing to vanish. In 2012 he was ordered to appear in court for one of the endless hearings where once again nothing would be resolved but this time Tommy did not appear. He wasn’t at home either and come to think of it, he hadn’t been seen by anyone for quite some time. For two years, the dismal courtroom theater entered intermission and Donald Fanta met his end a rich (but not that rich) man. Stealing the entire haul was impossible, but 500 of the choicest coins were no longer a part of the unsold inventory and Tommy wasn’t returning calls. Police searched his home after a warrant was issued for his arrest and found empty $10,000 bank wraps, a bank statement for “Harvey Thompson” and a book titled How to Live Your Life Invisible with the chapter titled “Live your life on a cash-only basis” dog eared. For a time, it looked like the final fate of Tommy’s treasure would truly never be decided.
If you’re on the run from the law with a suitcase full of cash and chest full of gold and they don’t have any leads on your location, then congratulations, the world is your oyster. You can do anything you want, except for continue to live within the jurisdiction of the U.S. Marshals. In 2015, Federal Marshals had finally tracked Tommy down to a luxury hotel room in Florida that he had been renting with cash. This was Tommy’s second and final mistake. After a failed Hail Mary attempt at avoiding extradition to Ohio by claiming that life in Ohio would aggravate his pollen allergies to a cruel and unusual degree, he found himself in Judge Marbley’s courtroom. He lived invisibly for two years, but now the police had him and soon (they thought) they’d have the gold as well.
His ticket out of jail was to answer a simple question, “Where’s the gold Tommy?” and to that he gave a simple answer, “I forgot”. The judge didn’t buy it and sent him back to jail and tacked a $1,000 a day fine on top of his sentence to jog his memory. Tommy didn’t budge. Every six months they would trot Tommy out of his jail cell and ask the same question. Every six months they would get the same answer. For nearly 10 years, this charade continued. After a while, Tommy changed the script. Sometimes he went a little harder, “Where’s the gold, Tommy?”, “I’ll never tell you. The gold is mine.” And sometimes cryptic, “Somewhere in Belize.” Tommy had no cards left to play and an appellate court already ruled that the law preventing contempt of court charges from imprisoning someone for more than 18 months did not apply. He had no leverage, and the $1,000 a day fines had accumulated to a far greater sum than he could ever hope to pay off with his hidden chest of treasure. He hadn’t received a trial, and it didn’t look like he’d ever get one. He was 72 years old, and his health was starting to fail, but every year he kept the location of the gold to himself, choosing death over capitulation.
And then, on January 31st of 2025, the judge broke before Tommy did. Marbley was forced to admit that he, “no longer is convinced that further incarceration is likely to coerce compliance” and on that day allowed Tommy to finally begin his two year sentence for missing a court date back in 2012.
Another two years of uncompromising endurance, inmate number 07332-104 will walk out of the federal prison in Milan, Michigan a free man in his mid-70’s without a penny to his name. With nothing tying him down to the states and an unpayable debt to keep him from enjoying his final years you have to wonder what options Tommy has left to him. But after over a decade of living as a fugitive and then a prisoner who’s only official crime was missing a court date, I think if anyone deserves a short vacation in Belize it’s Tommy. Or better still, one last submarine trip to the bottom of the ocean.
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