A former American treasure hunter who spent ten years behind bars for refusing to disclose the whereabouts of missing gold coins has been released from prison, with officials still no closer to recovering the treasure. Tommy Thompson, 73, was freed from federal custody on 4 March 2026, according to prison records cited in recent reports. He became famous in 1988 after locating the wreck of the SS Central America, a shipwreck often dubbed the “Ship of Gold”, off the coast of South Carolina.
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The vessel sank in 1857 while carrying more than 400 passengers and crew, along with around 30,000 pounds of gold minted by the federal government. Thompson and his team eventually found the wreck about 7,000 feet below the Atlantic Ocean, recovering part of what became one of the most celebrated treasure discoveries in modern maritime history.
His legal troubles began years later, when investors who had backed the expedition accused him of denying them their share of the proceeds and took legal action in 2005. Thompson later failed to appear in court, went into hiding in Florida and was eventually found living in a hotel under an assumed name before being arrested in 2015.
At the centre of the dispute were 500 gold coins, reportedly worth about $2.5 million, whose location Thompson repeatedly refused — or claimed he was unable — to reveal. He maintained that the coins had been placed in a trust based in Belize, while also saying that tens of millions of dollars from earlier gold sales had largely been used to cover loans and legal costs.
Although civil contempt sentences in the United States are normally limited, Thompson remained imprisoned for far longer after judges concluded his case fell outside the usual rules because of a plea agreement violation. A judge later ended the contempt sanction after determining that further imprisonment was unlikely to force new information from him, though he still had to complete an additional two-year sentence linked to his earlier failure to appear in court.
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His release brings to a close one of the stranger and more protracted legal sagas in American treasure-hunting history. Yet the central mystery remains unresolved: the missing coins have still not been recovered, and there is no indication that authorities ever discovered where they were hidden.
