老瓦按：

一个骗子告诉你他找到了沉船里的宝藏，有金砖，金条，金币，。。。你入股，就跟着发财。上当的有原Bank One的头，有律师。。。

在骗到5千5百万美元后，他消失了。

记得俺说过俺自个的故事。再老调重谈一把：一家伙自称是股市天才，料市百发百中。要跟了他，他保证俺每年回报在50％以上。

俺问他："50％以上? 你比Warren Buffet 和Peter Lynch还强？”

“当然！”－－那家伙在电话另一头，俺看不出他脸红没。大概是脸不变色心不跳。

俺说：“啊，那太好了！您可以把您的5年的1040表拷备给俺看看？要真有那么高的回报，俺把房子给抵压出去跟您投！俺还把七大姑八大姨全介绍来跟您投！”

那家伙把电话挂了。

《Forbes》2006年6月19号

On The Cover/Top Stories

Mark Tatge and Miriam Gottfried, 06.19.06

Two decades ago investors gave Tommy Thompson millions for a piece of buried treasure. Will they ever see their money?

Where is Tommy G. Thompson? Not so long ago the marine engineer from Columbus, Ohio was everywhere, raising $55 million in equity and debt financing and promoting the latest underwater technology to salvage gold from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. He once gave frequent press interviews and authorized books and TV documentaries to commemorate his recovery of a vast sunken treasure from the shipwrecked S.S. Central America–hundreds of gold Double Eagle coins, bars and ingots valued at $100 million to $400 million. Some of that loot went on national tour; an estimated $100 million was sold in heavily publicized sales and auctions.

Today Thompson, 54, is hard to find. His last residential address in public records: a trailer park in Fort Pierce, Fla. No one answers the phone there or at his former Columbus address. Investors who financed Thompson’s Recovery Limited Partnership haven’t seen a penny of returns, 19 years after the recovery of the treasure, and fear that Thompson left town with many millions. It’s been so long, the limited partners are dying off. Some of the surviving partners are suing to see their money again–or, at least, get an accounting.

"Has plaintiff’s investment in [the part-nership] been squandered or lost–or worse?" asks frustrated attorney Steven Tigges, who is representing Dispatch Publishing and former Ohio Company president Donald Fanta. Tigges has learned very little because Thompson’s attorneys are doing their best to keep everything secret. In late February they persuaded a state judge to seal the Ohio investor pleadings and dockets. (A federal judge unsealed them in May at the request of FORBES and others.)

The long postrecovery game of legal cat-and-mouse has kept the wraps on nearly everything, including partnership expenses. No one knows the exact contents of the treasure or its real value because those details have been sealed at Thompson’s request–even as he boasted to the world outside the court that his find was worth as much as $1 billion. All this has led some investors to suspect the worst. "I think he was dishonest from the word go," says John G. McCoy, 94, former chief executive of Bank One (now part of JPMorgan Chase), who invested $219,000 with his wife. Adds Columbus attorney John J. Chester Sr., who invested $180,000: "Everything to him is a deep dark secret."

What’s clear is that treasure hunting captivated Thompson ever since he graduated as an engineer from Ohio State University in 1975. A nerdy introvert, known for wearing black socks and hard leather shoes with Bermuda shorts, Thompson was hired in 1981 by the R&D firm Battelle Memorial Institute at its Columbus lab to study mining the ocean for minerals. But Thompson was more inclined to mine for shipwrecked gold. By the 1980s technological advances made it feasible to scour the ocean’s depths using tiny unmanned submarines. Thompson began studying charts and manifests of wrecks like the Titanic and the Andrea Doria for information about the location of the ships and the values of their cargoes.

Exploiting a certain dorkish charm, Thompson in 1985 started pitching to a handful of Ohio investors, over bites of lunch, a plan to find the Central America, a wooden side-wheeler that went down in a hurricane off the coast of North Carolina in 1857, killing 425 people on board and taking a fortune in bullion and newly minted $20 coins 8,000 feet down to the ocean floor. It was a great story. "Everybody knew the probability of finding gold was zero, but people still wanted to invest," recalls Donald D. Glower, retired dean of Ohio State University’s College of Engineering and a mentor to Thompson. Glower was happy to make the introductions. "I always thought he was honest."

Buried treasure–what better way is there to captivate speculators? One hundred sixty-one investors, including developer Don M. Casto, Columbus Dispatch publisher John F. Wolfe and Worthington Industries founder John H. McConnell, anted up in a series of private partnership deals over the next nine years. Thompson borrowed tens of millions more. As general partner, Thompson stood to receive 40% of net income.

At first the limited partners could see their funds at work. Thompson rehabbed a 180-foot, four-story-tall Canadian research vessel, the Arctic Discoverer, with side-scan sonar and the latest in electronic detection gear. After discovering its location, he hired surveillance planes and satellites to fly over and monitor the wreck site. He employed engineers to build Nemo, a 6-ton, remote-controlled underwater vehicle equipped with seven video cameras, nine high-precision robotic arms and thrusters to blow away silt covering the wreckage while engineers watched safely from more than a mile above the wreckage. Total estimated cost: $10 million.

But a bigger, more costly challenge suddenly loomed. Thirty-nine insurance companies filed suit in U.S. District Court in Norfolk, Va. in 1987, laying claim to the treasure shortly after it was found. A 13-year legal battle ensued over who owned the gold. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals finally ruled in 1992 that insurers should get a piece, but it took another eight years to set the insurers’ share at $5 million in gold, which they got.

Guilford D. Ware, lead attorney for the insurance companies, says his adversary’s legal fees in the case had to be huge. He tried to coax Thompson to settle early on but was stonewalled at every turn. "I never could quite understand what they were trying to accomplish," Ware says. "They all thought they were going to be multimillionaires, and they were spending money like water."

Ware believes that Thompson went to all this trouble because he wanted to make new law–to establish a finders-keepers precedent for the deep sea. Investors say Thompson saw the Central America as the first of a series of big-ticket recovery operations using the submarine technology he had pioneered.

If that’s true, it would help explain Thompson’s repeated efforts to keep the treasure’s location, his salvage methods and a complete inventory under wraps. Legal briefs filed by insurers call Thompson’s demands for secrecy excessive, even "absurd." By sealing the briefs, judges allowed him to pump up demand for the gold.

Outside the courtroom, Thompson could be chatty. In a carefully crafted high-profile media campaign, he relentlessly promoted the treasure. By 1990 he observed that some 3,000 stories had been written about him. "We are counting on this amount of positive press to be very helpful when it comes time to market the gold," he wrote, according to court filings.

Thompson always controlled the information flow. He gave his brother-in-law, Milt Butterworth Jr., rights to film the expedition and photograph the haul, which was published in a sumptuous 1998 book called America’s Lost Treasure. Writer Gary Kinder was given access to the ship, crew and treasure hunt for his Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, also published in 1998, in return for giving Thompson final review of the book. Thompson gave a nihil obstat to the mostly flattering portrayal of the expedition, and Kinder’s book became a bestseller.

Curiously, Kinder’s book asserts that 21 tons of gold went down with the wreck. That has led some to speculate that as much as 18 tons still lie on the ocean floor. "To me, that’s an outrageous question," says Fred N. Holabird, a mining consultant hired by the court to inventory the loot. "Common sense tells us they would have looked for it if they thought it was there."

Who received money from the book sales, photographs and film rights? Not clear, since those records are sealed. The publicity certainly didn’t hurt Thompson’s ability to sell the gold. After striking an agreement with him to handle the treasure’s sale, Christie’s advanced him $36 million, probably in the late 1980s. Thompson apparently found a better deal and backed out, since Christie’s sued him in 1998, seeking the $36 million plus interest–a case that was sealed and cloaked in the pseudonym "ABC versus HIJ."

To sell the treasure, Thompson turned to sports promoter Dwight Manley and his California Gold Marketing Group in Santa Ana. Manley put together a $50 million deal with lenders and investors to buy out Thompson and Christie’s. (Was it a distress sale? Was Thompson holding back?) Manley arranged a road trip to exhibit $20 million of the gold. From 2000 to 2003 rare coin buffs got to view the treasure through brass portholes on a dry-docked 40-foot-long, 15-foot-tall mock-up of a wooden steamship that traveled the country. Thompson showed up to sign autographs. The exhibit was such a hit that extra guards had to be hired for crowd control.

Manley had little trouble unloading the hoard’s 7,800 coins. Gold ingots were either marketed as bars or melted down and struck into commemorative $50 gold pieces, using dies made from the 1855 originals from Kellogg & Humbert of San Francisco. (The coins are hardly discernible from those minted in the 1850s, except that they’re stamped "S.S. Central America gold CHS" in tiny letters on one side.)

How much did the sale raise? That’s anybody’s guess. A Nov. 19, 2003 press release from the California Gold Marketing Group says that the treasure "is virtually sold out" and characterizes its value as more than $100 million. But now Manley refuses to confirm the figure. "I’ve never been quoted on that," he says. "That’s pure speculation." He declines to say how much the sale raised or what Thompson pocketed.

Fed up, shareholders, as well as other members of the recovery effort, who say they’d been promised a share of the treasure, filed suits in 2005 and 2006, demanding an accounting of the gold and expenses. But in April, after learning that a state judge considered opening the case, Thompson’s lawyers moved it to a federal court–where most of the case was unsealed. Thompson’s attorneys are contesting that decision, arguing that records must remain secret to preserve sensitive trade and business information.

There may be something to that. Some investors who, inexplicably, are still loyal to Thompson say that he has been trying to raise as much as $40 million for another stab at the rest of the treasure down there. "He’s brilliant," says Columbus insurance broker Donald E. Garlikov, who invested $200,000. "I’d happily give him more if he asked for it."