VERO BEACH — Famed treasure hunter Tommy Thompson, the former Vero Beach resident famous for digging up millions of dollars of gold from a sunken wreck on the ocean floor, was finally caught and arrested by federal marshals at a Hilton Hotel in Boca Raton last week after several years on the run and living anonymously only off cash realized from gold sales.
His former rental agent in Vero, Vance Brinkerhoff, was amused to hear that Thompson, who is now in his early 60s, and his longtime girlfriend, Alison Anteiker, had paid for their suite at the Hilton for the past 2 ½ years – even since the day they hastily vacated Vero’s historic Gracewood Mansion at 28th Avenue and 20th Street on Oct. 12, 2012 – in cash with stacks of moldy, smelly $100 bills.
“I always got paid with the same smelly, moldy bills for the $3,000 monthly rental for the mansion,” Brinkerhoff recalls, adding that the same type of cash was used for the better part of a decade to reimburse him for paying the utilities on the property, which were in Brinkerhoff’s name. Thompson did not want to have his name appear on any official document.
Thompson and Anteiker were arrested without incident on a federal bench warrant issued in Columbus, Ohio, in civil litigation by Thompson’s former backers who said they invested $12.7 million in financing in deep-sea ocean adventure but never saw a penny in returns. The pair was awaiting transfer back to Ohio by the Marshals Service. The arrest warrant had been issued the day that Thompson disappeared from Vero Beach.
The marshals apparently tracked Thompson down by following Anteiker when she left the hotel on errands. The hotel is located in an upscale suburban area and is surrounded by golf courses, country clubs and gated communities.
“I talked to his former attorney in San Francisco after the news of his arrest broke,” Brinkerhoff said, “and he doesn’t believe Thompson is guilty of anything except maybe contempt of court for disobeying a judge’s order to appear in court. Nobody’s ever been able to prove he stole anything from anyone.”
Thompson made history in 1988 when he found the sunken wreck of the SS Central America off the coast of the Carolinas in 6,000 feet of water and with special technology brought up thousands of gold bars and coins. The ship went down in a 1857 hurricane carrying tons of gold from the 49ers California gold rush that had been portaged across the isthmus of Panama, in the days before the Panama Canal existed, en route to banks in New York. A total of 425 people also drowned in the disaster.
Thompson is known to have sold one quantity of gold in 2000 for about $50 million in cash, but Brinkerhoff said he always suspected Thompson had with him a lot more gold that could easily be converted into cash – and that a lot more gold was still at the bottom of the ocean.
Brinkerhoff said he wasn’t really surprised that Thompson was finally found in Florida, less than two hours from his former residence in Vero. After he gave an exclusive interview to Vero Beach 32963 last year about Thompson’s time in Vero, when he was practically his only contact with the outside world, Brinkerhoff said he got a visit from federal marshals, who aggressively interrogated him, intimating they believed he knew Thompson’s whereabouts – which he did not.
“At that time the marshals sort of led me to think that they believed Tommy was still in Florida,” Brinkerhoff said, adding that neither Thompson nor Anteiker ever made contact with him again after they left town.
“Maybe it’s for the best that they finally caught up to him,” Brinkerhoff said. “Maybe he can make some kind of settlement and live the rest of his life in peace. I had always been hoping that he would have been able to do that from here, and become one of our more colorful residents without having to hide.
“On the other hand, I’m kind of sorry to hear that he got caught,” Brinkerhoff added. “He was a romantic, almost mythical figure, and I was disappointed that he didn’t manage to disappear into the Appalachians and become a mountain man with his scruffy beard, trained in survival techniques. If anybody could do it, he could have.”
