Cursed Gold: A Shipwreck Scandal - National Geographic’s upcoming documentary on Tommy Thompson and the SS Central America.

[Physics guy]

Here's Nat Geo's 45-sec promotional video for Cursed Gold: A Shipwreck Scandal, scheduled for Aug 21.

 

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Family Maps of Hinds County, Mississippi, Deluxe Edition - Grab it through Amazon!

[BennyV]

Here's Nat Geo's 45-sec promotional video for Cursed Gold: A Shipwreck Scandal, scheduled for Aug 21.

Some story. I’ve read my fair share of stories about it. Wonder if he is still getting fined daily.

 

[Ginger Dunn]

I'd never heard of Tommy Thompson or the SS Central America prior to watching the Nat Geo special on September 1, 2024. By the end of the program, I knew exactly what happened to Tommy Thompson.

I won't go into great effort trying to convince anyone here. At a glance, it seems there are some people with strong opinions about Mr. Thompson's alleged culpability.

The fact of the matter is, Tommy Thompson never stole anything from anyone.

I'm using my real name here, because I hope anyone who wants to know the truth about Mr. Thompson will connect the dots. There is enough about me in public record to reveal/prove significant patterns.

I've been a small business owner since 1996. My husband and I own restaurants in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and Columbus, Ohio.

In 2021, I was ambushed in a South Carolina courtroom by my spouse and a third party from Columbus, Ohio. Along with a small army of crooked attorneys, judges, accountants, and others, this group has engaged in 3 years of predatory litigation to steal my 50% of our family-owned businesses and to hide their own previous years of embezzlement and other crimes.

To the point regarding Mr. Thompson...
South Carolina is one of only two states that allows legislators to pick judges (Virginia is the other). Due to committee head assignments and seniority in the SC General Assembly, this means two criminal defense attorneys (head of the SC House Representatives & head of the SC Senate Judiciary Committee) effectively seat all but the lowest level judges in the state. As a result, the South Carolina judicial branch is corrupted from the inside out which effectively means law enforcement and the other two branches are corrupted as well.

Civil contempt is the blunt weapon used for all manner of harm in litigation. It is the weapon that has kept Tommy Thompson from oversight of his own businesses. It is the weapon that allowed the very people who brought suit to force the company into receivership. Imagine my surprise when I looked up the judge responsible for Mr. Thompson's incarceration to learn the same Judge Marbley in Columbus Ohio currently oversees yet another fraudulent litigation connected to our family owned businesses.

Ask yourself this question... If the court truly believed Tommy Thompson knew the whereabouts of these coins and simply refused to cooperate, this matter could be settled definitely through a simple polygraph. Even an "inconclusive" result would mean the court would be compelled to release Mr. Thompson. Unless Thompson failed a lie detector test, there would be no grounds to jail him for contempt. There is no coercive effect for incarceration if the litigant does not have the information being demanded.

I know this is what has been done to Mr. Thompson because I have experienced it first hand.

Prior to 2021, I had zero experience with litigation and nearly no knowledge of politics or government. Because I've learned all of this from scratch, I know what the law actually says, not how it has been twisted in practice. I identify with Mr. Thompson as a fellow process miner. Knowing I needed to understand the process of how this level of legal corruption had been achieved, and after exhausting all the known avenues for relief from harm caused by what I first thought were incompetent attorneys and judges, I focused on finding cases like mine (pre-meditated, pre-decided, staged only for the purpose of creating legal fees, stealing assets and property, discrediting the targeted litigant, creating false evidence/documents, and inflicting maximum emotional damage). I began cataloging these cases because I knew my own circumstances would prove difficult for others to believe. I have more than 50 of these cases in different courts, in different states, with many spanning over decades like Mr. Thompsons.

For two solid years I've researched every waking minute. When one is constantly held in contempt and threatened with a year in jail, one becomes highly motivated to problem solve. When one has dedicated an entire life to raising good children and protecting their future, protecting all our children's futures... well, I can't go about and pretend I haven't seen the court inflicted horrors I've seen.

What I've discovered is nearly impossible to believe, even for me. The same corrupt attorneys follow the same corrupt protocols. Though debtor's prison was outlawed in the late 1800's, they currently get around the law by citing contempt of the court Order, instead of addressing the debt itself. For me and Mr. Thompson and so many others, the "debt" is information, and the information demanded is knowledge we don't have or that the other party already has, so the "purge" requirement can never be satisfied.

Next, colluding attorneys arrange a contempt hearing in the litigant's absence. This is accomplished primarily by the targeted party's own attorney. The narrative that Mr. Thompson fled to Florida to avoid answering to the court or that he absconded with funds is absurd.

All the predatory litigations tied up any potential profit distribution to investors, and then, by design, the investors filed suit when no profit was distributed. It appears Thompson barely broke even with the sale of the first batch of gold. This is a pattern in all these kinds of litigations. Attorneys write Orders (make no mistake - judges sign their name on a dotted line - they don't write these orders), Orders that make it seem as if the targeted litigant is flush with funds, but then they make sure the attorneys and debtors take everything down to nearly break even.

The false narrative about Mr. Thompson was framed by the Columbus Dispatch and the judges and attorneys in the same pockets which were further lined after Ira Kane was appointed receiver.

On every single occasion, in every single one of these cases I've found, the targeted litigant is the LEAST greedy, most upstanding party in the entire mix. Each one is ALWAYS the party who cares about money the least.

If they (we) were bent toward greed in any capacity whatsoever, there would be no need for others to go to such lengths to steal. The targeted litigant would simply play ball with the corrupt actors who would then help cover up the crime as they all stole from someone else.

For someone like Mr. Thompson who is more interested in the exploration and science, who was so determined and inventive he found and raised a treasure when no one else had even come close, being locked in a jail cell and forced to view page after page of vicious lies about himself would be a special kind of torture.

How much he must long to be on the open water. I know I long for it. I long not to be hunted and threatened every day of my life. I long for the time before I knew I was not safe in my own country, before I knew my children do not have the civil liberties I believed were the birthright of all Americans.

To me, Tommy Thompson is an American National Treasure. He embodies the spirit of exploration, hard work, entrepreneurship, and ingenuity that I believed were the foundation of our country. Tommy Thompson is America's Lost Gold. The time and resources the courts have taken from him is treasure he can never get back. The time the courts have taken from me and my children can never be replaced.

Attorneys use civil contempt to destroy lives because there is profit for attorneys and others. They have privatized prisons, so there are inmate quotas to fill, kickbacks to claim. The courts and others are INCENTIVIZED to jail innocent people. I've been told as many as half the incarcerated in county jails are there for late or missed child support payments. We are not supposed to have debtor's prisons. This is illegal. It destroys lives and does nothing to help the people who rely on support for minor children. When someone loses their job for being incarcerated, they are LESS LIKELY to ever get caught up on payments.

The court assisted in Tommy Thompson being hunted like an animal. They drove him to near complete breakdown after YEARS of unimaginable litigation trauma. Thompson was already in Florida when the 2012 hearing where he was found in contempt was scheduled. If he'd had an attorney who worked for him and Thompson was too ill to travel, his attorney could have arranged a teleconference.

If Thompson's attorney had worked for him, any number of solutions could have been found. They did it that way specifically to get the bench warrant which led to the receivership, which led to the Columbus Dispatch (or it's successor) gaining control of the subsequent salvage. I'm sure all can agree, control of the subsequent salvage effort was/is worth a helluva lot more than whatever percentage of the guesstimated value of the "missing" coins.

Tommy Thompson is being illegally held right now. The case for which he is supposedly being held in contempt WAS RESOLVED MORE THAN FIVE YEARS AGO. The whole thing is absurd, an absolute tragedy.