What Really Ever Happened to Tommy Thompson???

capt dom

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jeff k

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Re: What Really Ever Happened to Tommy Thomson???

The E-Sylum: Volume 9, Number 26, June 25, 2006, Article 21

WHERE ARE YOU, TOMMY THOMPSON?

Regarding Bob Evans' response to the Forbes article on the Central
America investors, Alan V. Weinberg writes: "I read the article.
Any alleged Forbes author bias or refusal to print Evans' laudatory
comments on Thompson must be seen in the context of the numerous
complaints from many S.S. Central America financiers and investors
who've not seen a penny return on their investment over a decade
ago. Additionally, since no one knows where Thompson is and any
investigation as to his whereabouts has been futile, it could well
be that he is hiding from his creditors and authorities. Thompson,
until he surfaces and explains, must be condemned.

I felt the greatest weakness in the Forbes article was not including
a photograph of Tommy Thompson (several readily available color images
in the rear of the Gold Rush Bowers book ) instead of a generic artist's
rendition which could apply to hundreds of thousands of men. Including
a color photograph could have resulted in some positive sightings
amongst the multi-million person Forbes readership.

I went the next day to the public library and read the Forbes Thompson
/Central America article. Several pages - plenty of clear, crisp
pictures of the primary wealthy investors (3 or 4 closeup), some deep
sea pictures of the submerged gold, etc.

I found it very odd that the entire article did not have a photographic
picture of Thompson, the alleged absconder no one could now locate so
that one of the millions of readers might spot him somewhere.

The only image was on the article's 1st page, an artsy computer
graphic image of a handsome bearded man, from the side at an angle,
closeup. I said this looked like thousands of bearded 30-40ish men.
What, no photograph of him? How odd. I went to my Bowers Gold Rush
book, which was as I recall even mentioned in the article, and sure
enough, there were plenty of good clear color pictures of Thompson,
many depicting him wearing wire rim spectacles which the article's
computer graphic image was not. That's like issuing a Wanted poster
with a pencil sketch of the criminal sought when you have unused good
clear photographic images of the criminal at hand. What a waste!"

Wayne Homren, Editor
 

OP
OP
capt dom

capt dom

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Re: What Really Ever Happened to Tommy Thomson???

I understood Mr. Thomsom has always been a bit eccentric.

I met the author he retained to write "Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea"
Gary Kinder and he told me Tommy maintained complete editorial control
on what went into the book.

What I surmise is that Mr. Thomson used the "lust for gold" mentality
of the typical "investor market place to raise the necessary funds and war chest
so as to, actually capture the technology base for deep water research and recovery.

One he achieved this - he found himself within a den of jackals, {lawyers & promoters}
who have the ability to wring the life out of any great deal and turn it into the "pirate business"

I for one hope he got on his white or black horse and road off into the sunset with some of the
fruits of his labor. Projects like, The Columbus America Project end up getting a life of their own.
The infrastructure to keep them afloat becomes very expensive and {un-fun} to be involved with...
Maybe I'm wrong.... Maybe he went completely bananas..... Maybe a disgruntled investor
had him capped.... I for one hope he is out there someplace having fun
and not being one of the shipwreck's modern day victims
 

jeff k

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Re: What Really Ever Happened to Tommy Thomson???

About five years ago Greg Stemm told me he saw Thompson at a coin show. He thought he was living somewhere in Florida. He is currently being sued by the investors (and crew?) in the Ohio federal court. The suit was brought in April 2006, and is still open.

U.S. District Court
Southern District of Ohio (Columbus)

Williamson et al v. Recovery Limited Partnership et al

Defendant
Columbus Exploration, LLC

Defendant
Thomas G Thompson
 

OP
OP
capt dom

capt dom

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Nov 9, 2006
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Re: What Really Ever Happened to Tommy Thomson???

I heard he was in a trailer park in Fort Pierce!

Not exactly the place you would think someone who had
possibly absconded with "billions if not millions" of golden treasure
from beneath the sea??? With our litigious society anyone can sue
anyone - that is unless you are the government, then it becomes a bit more complex.

I prefer to think of him swinging on a hammock, on the fan tale of an obscure yet well equipped
tramp steamer; but of course with a "moon pool" and a neat ROV with lift capability....
Policing all of the "timeless time capsules out there"

The link below doesn't answer the original question:
http://www.zoomcoin.com/rare-coin-news/article/wrongful-seizure-by-us-marshals/
but it blows some smoke away about some of the crazy law suits...
 

PyrateJim

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Re: What Really Ever Happened to Tommy Thomson???

i come up with 185 Tommy Thompson's living in florida. Anyone have a middle name/initial and a date of birth or approx. age?
 

lucky d

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Re: What Really Ever Happened to Tommy Thomson???

interesting...after reading the book i did internet searches for hours and came up with nothing aside from the book...t.t. it seems, is a ghost...hh
 

mad4wrecks

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Re: What Really Ever Happened to Tommy Thomson???

Part I: The Greatest Treasure Ever Seized
S.S. Central America Gold Confiscated in Long Beach

By Leon Worden
COINage magazine • Vol. 43, No. 1
January 2007

Almost from the outset, it was inevitable that the eccentric deep-sea explorer Thomas G. "Tommy" Thompson and his attorneys would spend a lot of time in court.
As soon as Thompson began pulling his sunken treasure from international waters off of South Carolina in 1989, representatives of the insurance companies that paid on property-loss claims 132 years earlier were standing on his dock. The federal courts were tied up for a decade.
Less predictable was the success Thompson's old crew members would have in exploiting a quirk of U.S. maritime law just this year to seize some of his aureate bounty.
"We were robbed!" said Adam Crum, vice president of Monaco Financial LLC of Newport Beach, who watched helplessly as a deputy U.S. Marshal and armed security guards packed up six gold bars and a $20 gold coin from Monaco's display case at the Long Beach Coin, Stamp and Collectibles Expo on Sept. 14.
Unknown to Monaco, a federal judge in Los Angeles had ordered the seizure three days earlier of 63 ingots and 7,000 gold coins that Thompson had brought up from the wreck of the S.S. Central America, a sidewheel steamship that sank in 8,000 feet of water in 1857 with a cargo of California gold.
Technically, the writ of garnishment applied to all persons in the federal Central District of California — everyone in seven Southern California counties — who possessed even the tiniest nugget of Tommy Thompson's treasure. Monaco had purchased a large part of that treasure.
Monaco eventually got its gold back, but not without a fight. Now, after a month of uncertainty, all bona fide owners of treasure from the "Ship of Gold" can rest easy.
Here is the bizarre story.
In April, some of the people Thompson hired in 1986 to help him locate the lost shipwreck filed in a claim in federal court in Ohio. They alleged that Thompson made and subsequently broke promises to share percentages of the spoils.
To prove their claim, Seattle-based International Deep Sea Survey Inc. and nine former employees produced documents purporting to bear Thompson's signature. The papers show the explorer agreed in 1986 to award them a combined total of about 2 percent of all future proceeds in exchange for their secrecy about the ship's location and their vow not to raise the treasure without him.
Two percent split 10 ways might not sound like much, but the plaintiffs are estimating the value of the treasure at $400 million. With interest, they believe Thompson's companies owe them $11.8 million.
The main case against Thompson is ongoing in Ohio, where his companies are headquartered, and in New York, where some of Thompson's partners' bank balances were seized.
So far, Thompson has offered no evidence to suggest he paid IDSS or its workers any percentage of the profit. (No one disputes that Thompson paid their hourly wages and equipment rental fees at the time.)
Complicating matters for the plaintiffs, Thompson no longer owns any of the gold. He sold all he owned several years ago for an undisclosed sum to an investor group headed by Southern California sports agent Dwight Manley.
Manley told COINage he acquired the treasure "with clear title." By the end of 2003, Manley had sold it all to third parties. One of the biggest buyers was Monaco.
Knowing Monaco would be displaying S.S. Central America treasure in Long Beach in September, as it had done in the past, the plaintiffs took their case to Los Angeles. There, they convinced a judge to take Monaco's gold and hold it in the custody of the court until their claim could be adjudicated.
"I thought it was 'Ocean's Fourteen,'" Crum said. It was as if George Clooney was staging one of his elaborate heists. ("Ocean's Thirteen," due in theaters next June, had already finished filming.)
"I didn't even believe the guy was a marshal," Crum said. "I told him, 'I don't know you're real. You've had six weeks to set this up, based upon media exposure that [the gold] was going to be here. This could be an elaborate hoax.'"
After an hour of fact-checking phone calls with attorneys, Crum was satisfied it was no hoax.
In all, the marshal seized $3 million to $4 million worth of gold, which was put in storage at a deputized armored transport company's facility in Pico Rivera, California.
Clearly, the seizure fell far short of the number of ingots and coins in the court order. Monaco had sold most of the ingots identified in the writ of garnishment — and it never owned 7,000 coins from the S.S. Central America.
The garnishment applied in name both to Monaco and to Manley's California Gold Marketing Group. Manley told COINage he didn't know about Thompson's alleged promise to International Deep Sea Survey (IDSS) or the crew members until after the Long Beach raid.
"It was all news to me," Manley said. No attempt was made to confiscate any of Manley's assets, and though the order authorized the marshal to raid Monaco's offices and garnish its bank accounts, that did not happen.
Monaco's gold (and the Thompson defendants' cash in New York) was seized under Rule B of the Supplemental Rules for Certain Admiralty and Maritime Claims. Rule B is invoked when there is a good chance the subject of a dispute — in this case, the gold — will disappear unless it is literally "arrested" at the outset of court proceedings.
Rule B allows a claimant (the IDSS plaintiffs) to garnish any asset owned by the debtor (the Thompson companies) that is held in the physical possession of a third party.
The seizure order was premised on the mistaken notion that Manley's group and Monaco were such third parties, selling the gold on Thompson's behalf and sharing the profits with him.
In an unusual October hearing in Los Angeles that saw attorneys take the witness stand, plaintiffs' attorney James T. Shirley Jr. stated his reasons for thinking Monaco and Manley were agents for Tommy Thompson.
Shirley told of a Monaco sales brochure that identified Monaco as "an authorized S.S. Central America ingot dealer" — suggesting that Monaco was "authorized" by someone else, perhaps Thompson or Manley, to market the treasure. (Had Shirley viewed Monaco's Web site, zoomcoin.com, he also would have seen this language: "Monaco Financial is the primary authorized dealer for the most precious items of the treasure, the unique gold ingots.")
As to the Manley group, Shirley cited a 1999 asset purchase agreement that transferred title to the gold from Thompson to Manley "free and clear of any liens and encumbrances" — but left Thompson with an interest in the property.
Monaco's litigator, Richard K. Howell — who had earlier represented Manley during 18 months of complex negotiations to purchase Thompson's treasure — showed that the 1999 purchase agreement was superseded in June 2001. The 2001 amendment wiped out Thompson's reversionary ownership interest in exchange for "a lump sum of cash" from Manley's group, Howell said.
With the 2001 agreement, Manley's group had purchased all of Thompson's numismatic items outright — just as Monaco later bought many of Manley's gold bars (and about 400 gold coins) outright through a separate purchase agreement, testimony revealed.
Under intense grilling from Howell, Shirley could produce no evidence to show that Manley was anything other than, in Howell's words, "a bona fide purchaser in good faith" of Thompson's gold.
Certain details of Monaco's and Manley's purchase agreements are not known. U.S. Magistrate Judge Jennifer T. Lum concealed their contents from this writer.
From the witness stand, Thompson's attorney, Richard T. Robol, said Thompson's companies do not receive "an income stream from any assets from the S.S. Central America" today.
Evidently, "authorized dealer" was simply a clever marketing term. Or, considering the confusion it caused, not so clever.
Shirley said if it's true Monaco bought the gold outright and was not funneling any money to Thompson, his clients would be willing to vacate the seizure order.
"We have no desire for treasure that our clients have no [legal] interest in," Shirley said.
By day three of the scheduled hearings, the plaintiff's attorneys were satisfied it was true: Manley, then Monaco and others, had purchased the gold outright.
Ironically, Monaco no longer owned most of the gold that was seized. It owned the 1857-S $20 double eagle, but it had already sold five of the six ingots to its customers. Monaco was merely displaying them in Long Beach.
(The sixth ingot, a mammoth, 754.95-ounce bar by assayer Justh & Hunter, was in the personal collection of Monaco President Michael A. Carabini. Following the seizure, the nervous owners of two of the ingots sold them back to Monaco, Carabini said.)
Today, Monaco buys and sells items from the shipwreck in the aftermarket. Everything it bought from Manley, Monaco had sold by the end of 2004.
In a further touch of irony, Monaco had purchased one of the seized ingots — a 622.28-ounce Kellogg & Humbert bar — in a Sotheby's auction of S.S. Central America gold that had been awarded in the 1990s to various insurance companies (see separate story). It never officially belonged to Tommy Thompson.
"This has affected me emotionally and physically," Monaco's Adam Crum told COINage. "I have customers who obviously are concerned. They purchased something in good faith; we purchased something in good faith. It is appalling to me that laws even exist that would allow what has happened. No one even knows if they have a claim against the defendants, and the court allows the seizure of property that doesn't even belong to them? It is unbelievable to me."
All was well in the end — and not only for Monaco. In court on Oct. 18, Howell and the plaintiffs' litigator, Michael J. Frevola of New York City, hashed out a settlement agreement. The seizure had "put a chill on the treasure as a whole," Howell told Frevola. Now it was lifted. Monaco got everything it was seeking. In exchange, Monaco promised not to sanction the attorneys or sue their clients for wrongful seizure and malicious prosecution.
The seizure order was dissolved in its entirety. Monaco got the gold back, and the plaintiffs stipulated that they "will not assert any claims against any bona fide purchasers of artifacts recovered from the S.S. Central America."
People who have purchased S.S. Central America treasure from Monaco or anyone else need not fear the long and invasive arm of U.S. maritime law — at least, not from these plaintiffs.
For its part, Monaco is free to go about its business as the chief seller of S.S. Central America treasure. The company has carved a niche for itself, helping countless collectors and investors realize the childhood dream of owning sunken treasure — which Monaco avails in every form, from little packages of gold dust for only $49 to big ingots in the high hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"It's the greatest thing that has ever hit the market," Crum said of the treasure. "It has done a tremendous amount of expansion to the collector base. People who never considered owning a coin bought one, and then they fell in love with the idea of coins. They became either investors or collectors or people who are just looking to store wealth in interesting items. Not just our company, but our entire industry has had a huge benefit as a result of the S.S. Central America."
 

godisnum1

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Re: What Really Ever Happened to Tommy Thomson???

A picture, DOB or approximate age would help out alot. I know a Tommy Thompson...

Bran <><
 

godisnum1

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Re: What Really Ever Happened to Tommy Thomson???

Did anyone on here know him personally and know if he had any recognizable tattoos on his arms?

Bran <><
 

LM

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Re: What Really Ever Happened to Tommy Thomson???

There's no question that a few dishonest salvors bilk investors to fund their 'action lifestyle' that isn't otherwise sustainable on merit. On its surface, this one always kinda-sorta appeared to be a case of someone who actually did hit the gin card- found the fantastically rich wreck- but didn't pay out what he had agreed to, once the gold came up.

It will probably be an interesting case.
 

jeff k

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Dom... I heard the legal costs were $10 million at one point, and they went much higher. I don't believe Thompson wound up with as much as everybody thought. The attorneys and the syndicate that bought the treasure came out smelling like a rose. :(
 

jeff k

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capt dom said:
.... and who are the true black pirates of the 21st century......
like ghouls...... they are even taking similar names.....

You got that right! :thumbsup:
 

LM

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In tournament poker, there's a saying- "overselling yourself".

It's common for winning tournament players to sell pieces of their action to offset the up-front costs and variance.
From time to time, a dishonest one might get strapped for cash and intentionally 'oversell' themselves- meaning, they'll go to 50 people and sell each one 10%, pocketing the balance. Obviously, this means that they must bust out early, since cashing would put them in deep doo-doo. It's usually not that hard to lose on purpose if you're trying but from time to time, randomness smiles and players who've oversold themselves wind up hitting a few miracle cards in a row and find themselves with a huge stack- or even chip leader- with not enough time to dump it all off before the bubble breaks and they're in the money, owning 10%, forty times over.

I wonder if that isn't what happened here.
Does anyone if the investments were structured in terms of shares, or raw percentages?
It's not too hard to imagine someone getting 'the fever' and selling percentage after percentage to fund the quest, until one day they actually found the ship that they had already sold off 180% of the rights to and too many people were involved in the location efforts to deny it.
 

OP
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capt dom

capt dom

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"Faustus" lives!

There are a few guys in the treasure business that
may have found themselves in the same position.....

Now the ones that survived themselves limit private placement investment to
individual deals. I hate the words "investment" or "investor" myself.....
That is when it comes to shipwreck exploration.... I prefer the word
"patron" .... or one who buys in to be a part of the passion of the event.

Once hard money is placed upon the table.... or even the smell of it
the true jackels - - - over 82,000 of them in the State of Florida alone,
begin to surface from the depths...

So much for the age of piracy being over....
 

C

Cappy Z.

Guest
LSMorgan said:
In tournament poker, there's a saying- "overselling yourself".

It's common for winning tournament players to sell pieces of their action to offset the up-front costs and variance.
From time to time, a dishonest one might get strapped for cash and intentionally 'oversell' themselves- meaning, they'll go to 50 people and sell each one 10%, pocketing the balance. Obviously, this means that they must bust out early, since cashing would put them in deep doo-doo. It's usually not that hard to lose on purpose if you're trying but from time to time, randomness smiles and players who've oversold themselves wind up hitting a few miracle cards in a row and find themselves with a huge stack- or even chip leader- with not enough time to dump it all off before the bubble breaks and they're in the money, owning 10%, forty times over.

I wonder if that isn't what happened here.
Does anyone if the investments were structured in terms of shares, or raw percentages?
It's not too hard to imagine someone getting 'the fever' and selling percentage after percentage to fund the quest, until one day they actually found the ship that they had already sold off 180% of the rights to and too many people were involved in the location efforts to deny it.

Reminds me of the 1960's movie...Spring Time for Hitler... starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder...
They over sold the play with spinster money..then the thing became a raving success...very funny movie.
 

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