CINCINNATI (AP) — A Florida company has reached an
agreement to recover the remaining gold from a ship that sank off the
Carolina coast in 1857 and more recently has been embroiled in legal
fights involving a fugitive treasure hunter, the firm announced Monday.
Tampa,
Fla.-based Odyssey Marine Exploration can begin working to recover gold
bars and coins from the SS Central America as soon as April, pending
approval of the agreement from an Ohio judge.
In 1988, shipwreck
enthusiast and Ohio native Tommy Thompson led an expedition that found
the vessel, also known as the Ship of Gold. He took gold from the ship
that later sold for between $50 million and $60 million.
The
treasure became the subject of various lawsuits involving a group of
Ohio investors who paid $12.7 million to fund Thompson’s expedition but
say they never saw any returns and workers who said they weren’t
properly paid for signing confidentiality agreements to keep the ship’s
location and other information secret.
Thompson, described as a
secretive Howard Hughes-like figure by an attorney on one of the cases,
has been a wanted fugitive since August 2012 after he failed to show up
for a key court hearing. He was last seen at a mansion he was renting in
Vero Beach along Florida’s Treasure Coast.
Liz Shows, a spokeswoman for Odyssey Marine, declined to say how much gold is believed remaining on the
ship.
Ira
Kane, who was appointed receiver over Thompson’s companies after he
fled, is overseeing the project to recover the remaining gold and has
exclusive salvage rights over the shipwreck, granted to him by a federal
court judge in Virginia.
Kane chose Odyssey Marine for the
salvage operation after considering proposals from nine companies, the
Florida firm said in a news release.
"We’re now looking forward to
their team completing the work that was started more than 25 years
ago," Kane said in the news release.
The S.S. Central America
was
in operation for four years during the California gold rush before it
sank after sailing directly into a hurricane in September 1857; 425
people were killed and thousands of pounds of gold sank with it to the
bottom of the ocean.
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