What Really Ever Happened to Tommy Thompson???

ok, i don't get it!! didn't he strike it rich then never pay his investors? how does that make him a great/misunderstood man.......a folk hero of sorts
salvors looking for investors would be greatly hurt by this!!!
by the way, im from columbus and once worked at the same company as one of the main investors and knew him(the investor). maybe im missing something?

chuck.
 

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I believe he's also being sued by his crew , the people who made it possible for him to recover the treasure,! People who steal or don't pay their employees are at the bottom if the barrel
 

4justice4tom said:
Columbus Dispatch is a media mogul in Ohio who is one of the 2 investors out of nearly 300 who are Suing Columbus Discovery Group. They are leading the slander regarding Thompson and THEY bought the fugitive billboards not US Marshals. Thompson is a brilliant scientist and a man of integrity who has been smeared and slammed by American Greed at every turn and from every angle. And now, because missed a courtdate is being slandered by CD. An ugly story, a story fueled by greed and funded by Corporate America and the 99 percent. You can't squeeze water from a stone, or gold from a scientist you destroyed financially,mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
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I'm appalled. Quote "Thompson is a brilliant scientist and a man of integrity who has been smeared and slammed by American Greed at every turn and from every angle."

Thompson may be a brilliant scientist, but in my opinion he stole tens of millions of dollars from the investors that PAID for the Salvage.The only Greed that I see is from Thompson who paid no one and took off with all the investors money. Thompson, made it harder for everyone in this business to find investors. Because of Thompson, a lot of investors won't even look at investing in treasure salvage operations.
If I was an investor, I'd sure like to find Thompson and get my investment money back. plus my share of the profits.
 

old man said:
I'm appalled. Quote "Thompson is a brilliant scientist and a man of integrity who has been smeared and slammed by American Greed at every turn and from every angle."

Thompson may be a brilliant scientist, but in my opinion he stole tens of millions of dollars from the investors that PAID for the Salvage.The only Greed that I see is from Thompson who paid no one and took off with all the investors money. Thompson, made it harder for everyone in this business to find investors. Because of Thompson, a lot of investors won't even look at investing in treasure salvage operations.
If I was an investor, I'd sure like to find Thompson and get my investment money back. plus my share of the profits.
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Along with wringing his Neck!
 

I don't know Tommy Thompson. He may be the most honest guy on the planet. But in reading Ship of Gold... I was struck by the fact that he has all the necessary atributes of a really, really good con man.

At this point he walks and talks a lot like a duck.
 

He might be a con man but I don't think that con men go through what he did to con people. There has to be an easier way. I think he had vision and a dream only when it all worked the vultures descended and shredded it.
 

Denarius said:
He might be a con man but I don't think that con men go through what he did to con people. There has to be an easier way. I think he had vision and a dream only when it all worked the vultures descended and shredded it.
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Denarius, I disagree about the Motive. I personally don't think Thompson was a " Con Man ". A Con Man dreams up a Scam and takes investors money. I think Thompson had a dream to find the Central America and followed that Dream in the beginning.
I don't believe that when Thompson found the Central America. That the Vultures descended and shredded it.

Everyone that has ever been in the Treasure Salvage Business or any other Business for that matter. Knows that you have a Contract with Investors.
That contract lays out out much money each investor invested and what he expects as a return on his money.
No, I think the Investors had Contracts with Thompson and that Thompson got Gold Fever and turned Greedy and Just screwed everyone. I think he deserves to spend many years in Prison for the " FRAUD " that he committed against his Investors. :treasurechest:
 

Everyone that has ever been in the Treasure Salvage Business or any other Business for that matter. Knows that you have a Contract with Investors.
That contract lays out out much money each investor invested and what he expects as a return on his money.
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I agree with you completely. I wasn't including the investors in with the vultures. I'm an investor. But you gotta admit that the minute the gold shows up a lot of people line up with their lawyers. Some are deserving some not.
 

Some years back, a small group of friends hit it fairly big when a tech start up they founded received a massive buyout offer.

There are people who will kill you for the $10 in your pocket. As the financial stakes get higher, more and more men of integrity in their daily lives are willing to become dishonest. When you arrive at extremely large sums of money, it's like a frenzy of lawyers and clingers-on and beggars and come-lately's and people who insisted that they're due a cut of the action and willing to lie in court to prove it, consecutive years of intensive IRS audits, more courtrooms, more week long meetings with accountants... and the dissolution of four friendships.

Huge sums of money can often times be more trouble than whatever you ultimately get from them in terms of being able to fly private and have a few different vacation homes. The trade-off is often times peace in your life. Speaking only for myself, I'd much rather have 'enough' money and a quiet, peaceful life than more money than I could ever know what to do with but all the enormous baggage associated with that.
 

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I gave a good friend some stock tips and helped him manage his inheritance. He tripled his money in 18 months (yes there was definitely a lot of luck involved) and made half a million dollars. Six months later we weren't talking to each other. He dumped some childhood friends too, though they probably deserved it as they went money crazy too. Two years later it was almost all gone. Such is money.
Get this, a while ago I was riding my bicycle and I saw something shiny and stopped to pick it up. (don't laugh I've found two gold rings that way) Some woman saw me and almost rammed me with her bike and demanded to know what I found. Greedy greedy!
Ok I just realized maybe I just answered the "What happened to Tommy Thompson?" question.
 

Denarius said:
I gave a good friend some stock tips and helped him manage his inheritance. He tripled his money in 18 months (yes there was definitely a lot of luck involved) and made half a million dollars. Six months later we weren't talking to each other. He dumped some childhood friends too, though they probably deserved it as they went money crazy too. Two years later it was almost all gone. Such is money.
Get this, a while ago I was riding my bicycle and I saw something shiny and stopped to pick it up. (don't laugh I've found two gold rings that way) Some woman saw me and almost rammed me with her bike and demanded to know what I found. Greedy greedy!
Ok I just realized maybe I just answered the "What happened to Tommy Thompson?" question.
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But Tommy had already figured out 2 years before that there was a real good chance that the woman would be riding up the sidewalk...
 

One man knows for sure. Maybe he saw crocodiles with eyes only for GOLD approaching, even outside those with a vested interest, and decided it was not worth wrestling them in or out of court depending on the who,s and whys.
 

Those commenting on this thread are making a lot of assumptions without all of the facts. We simply do not know what happened and should wait until we do. Best I can tell from what I have read and heard there may not have been anything to return to investors: apparently an advance of something like forty million dollars was made by an auction house in exchange for the right to sell the recovered material. These funds were apparently used to keep everything afloat during the ten or fifteen or twenty years of legal battles. This advance would have incurred interest. A sum of fifty million up front has been talked about as the money put up by the group that eventually marketed the material. Given the length of time the advance was outstanding the entire fifty million may have gone to pay of the advance and interest due in order to free the material from the auction house obligation. The incredible tragedy in this whole story is that the cost of the litigation and keeping the company alive during the litigation seems to have been ten to twenty times the cost of the search and salvage. I look forward to the day when we do know the whole story. A lot of us in the salvage community might have to eat crow.
 

Micronesia is nice, and has no extradition treaty with the U.S. Pick an island, there are thousands.

 

Boatlode said:
Micronesia is nice, and has no extradition treaty with the U.S. Pick an island, there are thousands.

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Yes, they do.

http://2001-2009.state.gov/documents/organization/97103.pdf

In the cases of microstates where there is no extradition treaty (ie, Vanuatu), they'll just fly in a team of US Marshalls, arrest you and fly back out since there is no meaningful sovereign infrastructure to interfere with them. Its been done. Your only way to avoid extradition would be to move to a substantial nation state that is actively hostile towards the US (North Korea, Iran, a few countries in Latin America, etc) but even Cuba has effected extraditions before and its not like those countries are thrilled about taking in Criminals.

In short, the days of going to another country and thumbing your nose at the US as a criminal fugitive are 100% gone unless you can make it to Tehran or a handful of other places that suck. You'll be in hiding forever.
 

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