REVIEW: CURSED GOLD: A SHIPWRECK SCANDAL

  

I will begin by stating that I am not unbiased, having given over 40 years of my professional life to the S.S. Central America, its remarkable treasure, and almost every aspect of its amazing story. So, readers may wish to consider this as they read my thoughts.

First, this three-part series (3 one-hour broadcast episodes, with commercial breaks) is far more about the "Tommy" Thompson story than it is about the S.S. Central America story, its treasure, or the many aspects that make the SSCA so compelling for the numismatic community. As a result, much of this review will address what the show is not, rather than what it is. It is entertaining television, but not really any more engaging than average episodes of "True Crime" TV shows.

It also contains some errors and misinformation, particularly for a detail-oriented community such as numismatists, "facts" that I feel obligated to correct.

Last year, I was solicited heavily to contribute to this story, but I declined. I told the producers that I had no interest in further advancing the Tommy Thompson story. Bear in mind, I have been deeply involved with the Central America since the fall of 1983, when Thompson, whom I knew as Harvey, asked me to take over much of the historical and scientific background research. I worked WITH Thompson for 9 years, then worked FOR him for another 8 years. During that time, I learned plenty about his dark side. When the treasure was sold to California Gold Marketing late in 1999, I followed it.

I have now worked on the SSCA entirely without Thompson for 24 years, curating, studying, and publishing its numismatic wonders, serving as a principal spokesperson and exponent for the treasure and story during the public outreach and marketing. I resumed my role as chief scientist during the return expedition to the shipwreck to recover additional treasures in 2014, 23 years after Thompson last left the site. The 2014 expedition is often attributed to Odyssey Marine Exploration, and that mischaracterization continues on this show. Tommy Thompson ran away from Federal Court in 2012, and a court-appointed receiver assumed control over his leaderless and insolvent company.

The receiver, Ira Kane, hired me to join my old company and help direct at-sea operations, along with Craig Mullen, a legend in deep-sea operations (Space Shuttle Challenger, lost airliners, military targets, etc.) Kane put out a request for proposals to every company in the world who could operate down 10,000 feet. Odyssey won the contract, and they were hired to explore, dig, and recover additional treasure. I worked at sea for 5 months in 2014. Odyssey brought in the A-Team for this one, because everyone wanted to work on the Central America. I have great admiration and appreciation for everyone involved. It was Odyssey's ship, equipment and crew, but it was Thompson's original company, now known as RLP-CX, that hired and directed the operations. Craig Mullen and I were at sea monitoring the operations, and participating as members of the expedition team, 24/7, mid-April through mid-September.

It is 10 years after the 2014 expedition, and as far as I am concerned, Tommy is old news, like an ex-spouse from decades ago. But, because I spurned the advances of BBC Productions, they rather successfully managed to keep me out of the story. However, I guess I am unavoidable in any rendition of the SSCA Project. I show up in many of the video scenes and pictures, the strains of my synthesizer/piano waft into one of the clips about relaxation aboard ship, and even my parents and brother show up in the scene showing our arrival in Norfolk with the gold in 1989.

I will say that the production and execution of the documentary is first-rate, except for their pathetic gold props (see below.) They found some very credible contributors for interviews, including some of my former crewmates who were critically important to our success. John Moore is a world-class ROV pilot and mechanic. Alan Scott is the incredibly brilliant electrical engineer, programmer and mathematician who served as our navigator during operations. Captain Bill Burlingham was, well… the Captain. Obviously important, he served as Alan's backup among the five-man control room crew, as well as running the ship, and directing the deck operations during launch and recovery. I didn't at first recognize John Lettow, who was on the Mike Williamson (also appearing) sonar team, because John has lost a lot of weight. (I congratulate him for this; he looks great.) I feel that his role was given disproportional attention by the production, given that he was only at sea during sonar operations in 1986 and 1987. But John is a wonderful guy and a great character, and author Gary Kinder loved his accounts and antics. So, that carries through into this show. It made me smile to see these old colleagues, now a bit older.

Another key individual is absolutely ignored, and the implication is that Tommy, in his "genius," somehow determined the search area, moving numbers around on a gridded page. Tommy Thompson began the gathering of historical accounts, the initial library research. I took charge of this in late 1983, augmenting that research until Thompson and I turned it over to Dr. Larry Stone, the world's leading expert on the mathematical theory of optimal search. This employs Bayesian probability calculations, and 10,000 experiments were run through Larry's computer algorithms to create the probability map. It was not Tommy Thompson scrawling on a page.

I would refer readers to the ESPN FiveThirtyEight 19-minute video, In Deep Water. You can find it at: https://vimeo.com/126835368

Our project's attorney Rick Robol recounts the complicated legal machinations around the admiralty law case that ensued. There is an attorney who represented plaintiffs suing Thompson, so there is some balance here. Former company treasurer Paula Steele provides some inside look into the early years at the corporate office. Sandee Butterworth, Thompson's sister, provides the family perspective. There are representatives of Thompson's investors as well, with mixed opinions about the result of the project. So, there is some give and take in the telling. I think the apologists for Thompson got more play than his detractors, so the overall feeling is "poor Tommy." But there is at least some lip-service paid to balance.

This series claims up front to be based on a New York Times Bestseller, and so it is a reworking of material from Gary Kinder's 1996 book, Ship of Gold: In the Deep Blue Sea. Kinder is interviewed extensively throughout the series, so it is very much his own spin on the Tommy story. There is another reporter "expert" who appears a lot here as well: Dylan Taylor-Lehman, who wrote an article around the time of Thompson's state court trial in 2019. I guess that makes someone an "expert."

There are a half dozen (at least) other key individuals who receive no mention here.

The early years of the project involved multiple at-sea seasons, various pieces of equipment, and different leased work vessels, until the project purchased its own ship in 1988. Footage from the different seasons is mixed, edited, and conflated with the story to make something like a cohesive whole. Because I was there, I found this distracting, jolting from year to year, back and forth. The "blowing" scene depicting 1988 used footage from 1990. I know, because I planned that 1990 dive and watched in wonder as we uncovered the second ton of gold, implied here as the first ton found two years earlier. Others will not find such discontinuities as distracting, since they don't know what I know. But some details are missed or misrepresented. The scene where the crew is supposed to be looking at the newly discovered treasure is, in reality, a meeting with biologists discussing the animals we were finding on the shipwreck.

Personally, I found the third and final episode to be the most interesting part, since it deals with the manhunt after Thompson ran away from Federal Court, which included some details of the story I didn't know.

Misinformation:

This show brings no new knowledge to the world of numismatics. The title explains the creators' thesis; it is about a curse and a scandal. It plays loose with details, using old facts from 35 years ago, data that refuses to die no matter how many times I have corrected it.

So, here we go again: the shipwreck is approximately 7,200 feet deep (2200m), not 8,000 feet.

We did not recover 3 tons of gold. To date, if reckoned in tons, it is approximately 2.3 tons. This still makes it the greatest lost treasure in United States history, now found. It is beyond comparison, and there is no need to inflate the numbers. The arena of public press and media like to deal with superlatives. Higher numbers are better than lower. And so, figures like these get bandied about in a few loosely fact-checked publications, and they are written in cyber-stone. I want to assure the detail-oriented community of numismatists that the real numbers are absolutely known.

There is a segment of this series where the former treasurer of the company refers to seeing "undocumented" gold. This is simply not true. It may have been undocumented as far as she was concerned, and even as far as the company treasurer's records were concerned. And it wasn't even stored the way she says it was. Anyway, I and my department had complete documentation on each and every piece, from the time it was recovered from the shipwreck site on the seabed, to the time it arrived in my lab aboard ship, to the movement records after recovery, until the sale and acquisition by California Gold Marketing Group in 1999. Then, intellectually attached to the treasure, I followed it on its journey into the public sphere, continuing to track everything as its curator until it was delivered to PCGS or the market.

Thompson was very secretive about the treasure inventory throughout the 90s, and so a lot of innuendo and conjecture crept into the numismatic conversation. And he never wanted to be corrected. The culture of secrecy and the "need to know" was pervasive throughout the company as well. So, as far as many within the organization were concerned, Tommy's information was the real information, and it stayed that way: 8,000 feet and 3 tons.

I reported to Thompson. What he did or did not do with the information was not my bailiwick, and, while I worked for him, I did not share information with any others unless directed to do so. And so, whatever he chose to share with the treasurer of his own company was not my concern. Annually, I travelled to secure storage facilities with an outside forensic accountant for annual audits. These consisted of opening randomly selected sealed, numbered containers, and comparing the contents with what our records said should be in that container. Records of all examinations, movements, and displays were signed and witnessed. All activities in laboratories were videotaped. If Thompson wanted treasure to show someone, he asked me to get it for him. So, he never had physical or informational control over any of the gold.

I cannot stress this enough: there is not, and there never was, any undocumented gold. There has always been a record. I always maintained a record of everything. Always. A full record.

In 2012, during the receivership hearing, I testified that I would be willing to consider working for such a court-appointed receiver. I had always advocated for an eventual return expedition to the SSCA site, since there obviously was still a lot of gold down there. Over $90,000 (1857 value) remained from the listed commercial shipment, to say nothing of the enormous amount that was carried by passengers, an amount widely reported to match the $1 million – plus commercial shipment.

  

The series correctly refers to the missing 500 gold coins as commemoratives, which they are. The press has botched this in the past, saying that they were coins "from the treasure." They were struck using the original 1855 Kellogg & Co. $50 design, transferred from the original dies, using gold derived from some of the larger Kellogg & Humbert ingots from the treasure. I found it strange that they did a terrible job with props simulating those coins, as well as a similar amateurish simulation of gold bars from the shipwreck. There are actual examples of those wonderfully executed relic commemorative restrike coins out there, and there are real ingots too, if not to buy for the production, then at least to photograph and film. The prop pieces they concocted for this show would only convince those who have never seen actual gold coins and bars. And the scene with the coins: no PCGS holders, no sophisticated packaging, handling the raw, unslabbed coins crudely, thumbing and grabbing the "struck" surfaces, (although these actually look more like cast chocolate.) You can see these in the title graphic at the beginning, and they appear later as well. In my opinion, they could have done a much better job with this.

But my biggest disappointment is that the whole series treats the SSCA and its treasure as a black box, simply a vehicle for the story about the inventor "Tommy," and the treasure "he" found, and all the trouble it brought him. The special aspects of this particular treasure are little emphasized, and, in this way, it is reduced to just any old vast sum of wealth that people argue over and go insane about.

As for my own feelings about Harvey Thompson, these are very complicated. I love the project he welcomed me into 40 years ago, all the subjects and fields it allowed me to study and pursue, and all the discoveries I was a part of. Once he was my good friend. Early on, I enabled his activities and his style in many ways, and for this I harbor some regrets. Some of these actions, very secret, may have emboldened him to try more extreme actions and secrecy. But I kept records, and I had limits. These led to disagreement, cooling and distancing, and it ushered in the period when I say I worked for him rather than with him. Around this time, I decided that my allegiance should center on the SSCA and its treasure rather than on Thompson and whatever he might do with his company.

Once the treasure was acquired by California Gold Marketing Group, I followed it, maintaining my role as the curator. I was free of Thompson's operations and its stifling secrecy, and I launched into the curating and exposition of the gold with enthusiasm. CGMG's manager, Dwight Manley, who is never mentioned in this show, produced all the outreach magic through which numismatists now know the treasure, including the Ship of Gold traveling exhibit, and the massive Q. David Bowers book, A California Gold Rush History: featuring the treasure of the S.S. Central America.

I had very little contact with Thompson in the 2000-aughts. He was involved in some of the numismatic marketing through the first couple years, but nothing much after that. It wasn't really his area of interest or expertise.

Ultimately, that may be the lesson of the "Tommy" Thompson story. It is possible, even likely, that someone who is a genius in one field is utterly deficient in others. When the business and legal pressures mounted on him, Thompson froze, unable to make the decisions that could have led the company and its operations to more financial success. In my opinion, he should have focused on engineering and left the business decisions to others in the tremendous business community he had tapped for investment. But Tommy could delegate some things, and some things he could not. I believe he was the kind of guy who never wanted to get his final grade unless it was an A+. He let the perfect be the enemy of the good (or whatever similar proverb you may wish to apply.) Whatever you believe about his motivations and intentions, he was manifestly unequal to the business management task he faced.

My own opinion of Thompson is extremely conflicted. I will be forever grateful to him for involving me in the SSCA Project, and I hate like hell what he did with our project, the clouds he cast over the technical triumph of our operation, and the taint with which he has smeared the historical legacy of this superlative American treasure.

In 2005 and 2006, when a couple major investors and a group of sonar techs asked for an accounting, he obfuscated for 6 years, until a federal judge ordered him to appear in court and provide that accounting. Unable to face this reality, for whatever reason, he fled and remained in hiding for 2 1/2 years. It is hard to believe that this was the action of someone completely innocent.

I believe that many viewers will find this series entertaining. But I object to the premise implied in the title "Cursed Gold: Shipwreck Scandal." This is the hyperbole of sensationalist reporting.

It was a hurricane that sank the S.S. Central America, not a curse.

And, in large part, whatever curse or scandal sank Tommy Thompson was his own doing.

To read earlier E-Sylum articles, see:
BOB EVANS ON THE LATEST S.S. CENTRAL AMERICA ARTICLE (https://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v16n19a26.html)
BOB EVANS ON THE DISPOSITION OF THE S.S. CENTRAL AMERICA TREASURE (https://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v16n16a32.html)
ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS BOB EVANS' RETURN TO THE SS CENTRAL AMERICA (https://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v17n19a25.html)
SS CENTRAL AMERICA SALVAGE: THEN AND NOW (https://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v17n45a08.html)
SS CENTRAL AMERICA CASH BOX FINDS (https://www.coinbooks.org/v22/esylum_v22n07a15.html)
VIDEO: SS CENTRAL AMERICA SILVER COINS (https://www.coinbooks.org/v25/esylum_v25n36a10.html)
CURSED GOLD: A SHIPWRECK SCANDAL (https://www.coinbooks.org/v27/esylum_v27n33a16.html)

 

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