As a mail steamer known as the S.S. Central America chugged alongside the Atlantic coast In 1857, sure for brand new York, it was hit by a hurricane off the coast of South Carolina. Greater than 400 folks died, 38,000 pieces of mail were lost, and Memory Wave an estimated 21 tons of gold - a huge portion of the nationwide wealth not too long ago prospected in the California Gold Rush - plunged to the bottom of the Atlantic after a sinking that took upwards of forty hours. The shipwreck took with it a lot business gold, and so many newly-wealthy gold prospectors, that the incident triggered a downturn within the U.S. And also you'd better imagine folks tried to search out and retrieve the "Ship of Gold," as it turned recognized. For 130 years, treasure hunters scoured shallow waters of the Atlantic off the coast of the Carolinas for signs of it, however nobody had any luck even estimating the location of the wrecked ship. No one, that's, till 1988, when an Ohio engineer named Tommy Thompson found the shipwreck - with relative ease, apparently.

Convincing 160 buyers (principally from his dwelling state of Ohio) to give him virtually $13 million to invent a robotic device to find and retrieve the loot from beneath 8,000 ft (2,438 meters) of open ocean, Thompson turned a hero. In case you're fascinated, when an infinite treasure is discovered, it's no easy matter parsing out who it belongs to. When Thompson and his crew first found the wreckage of the Central America, authorized troubles arose almost instantly. Insurance corporations claiming to have insured the ship within the 1800's, as an example, immediately sued for a cut of the income. In 2000, when Thompson offered a portion of the primary 3-ton haul for an estimated $50 million, the traders who had funded the expedition sued him for their share of the gold (they have not seen an ingot of it yet). Then, in 2012, when Thompson was referred to as into courtroom yet once more, he did not show up.

A warrant was issued for his arrest, but when the police tried to search out him, they discovered as a substitute that he had disappeared completely. And catching him and his girlfriend Alison Antekeier was difficult