Jesus, what a tale
> Investors in Thompson's venture accused him of cheating them out of promised proceeds and after years on the run he was jailed in 2015 on a criminal contempt charge.
> They had been staying in a hotel for two years, paying cash for their room under a false name and using taxis and public transport to avoid detection.
But unless he plans on leaving secret wealth to his children, it scarcely sounds like a win even if he did actually get the $400 million. The investors are likely to watch him closely post-release for any actual accessing of the money. But even otherwise, what a life. Even if you have the $400 m worth of money somewhere, you're still living for years out of a hotel in Boca Raton, FL only going places via taxi and public transport while trying not to leave a paper trail. Then you're in jail for 10 years.
I suppose he can live out his seventies and later, but damn.
I wonder if there is a statute of limitations on suing an estate.
Let’s say he dies in 5 years. 10 years later his children suddenly clearly become rich and can’t explain how. Clearly it looks like he passed the gold to them somehow.
Could the investors then somehow sue his estate then to get the value of the gold back? Or would it be too late?
For all we know he stole money, but not what they thought. Maybe after his time in hiding there’s only a few thousand left and it’s all largely moot anyway.
He’d be more sympathetic if he hadn’t been hiding and suspiciously paying cash for everything for years.
Living out of hotels in Boca Raton, FL and going places via taxis is a win for at least 90% of the world's population.
Haha, true! But he could have had millions any way. It's not like he was going to live like a p90 person in the world!
Well look at it this way, sure he could have split the money, paid his share of taxes and still had enough left over for a nice house.
But the kind of person who thinks that way never becomes a treasure hunter in the first place.
The rest of the gold was actually recovered after he was originally sued - the downstream owners of the original insurance company that paid out (they get the rights to the recovery when they settle a loss policy) sued and won rights to the gold - they then hired a larger recovery company that successfully recovered the 95% that was left. Kind of crazy that this guy didn't recover more than 5% and shot himself in the foot by trying to steal $2.5M of coins.
The thing about gold is, it’s probably quite easy to secretly leave to your heirs.
Yes, I think so too. It's the only worthwhile reason to commit this crime, surely. You'd be relying on the claimants abandoning their claim at some point because surely the statute of limitations doesn't just apply because you were particularly good at hiding something. Realistically, they'd have to sell this to a collector many years later for much less than what they're worth (since they can't be sold on with proper provenance tracking).
It doesn't even seem worth it since the original investors wanted a fraction of the proceeds not all of it. Just seems like a strange choice, but I suppose that's why I'm not an intrepid underwater gold adventurer and this guy is.