Picture it - it's 1857, and you are on a ship filled with gold from San Francisco to the East Coast of the USA! There are so many things that could go wrong crossing Panama, heading up the Caribbean, pirates, probably? Then the boat DOES sink along with a crap-ton of gold. Fast forward to the 1980s when Tommy Gregory Thompson (treasure hunter, thief, crazy man) starts to find the gold!
Picture it - it's 1857, and you are on a ship filled with gold from San Francisco to the East Coast of the USA! There are so many things that could go wrong crossing Panama, heading up the Caribbean, pirates, probably? Then the boat DOES sink along with a crap-ton of gold. Fast forward to the 1980s when Tommy Gregory Thompson (treasure hunter, thief, crazy man) starts to find the gold!
Hi Friends! Our transcripts aren't perfect, but I wanted to make sure you had something - if you'd like an edited transcript, I'd be happy to prioritize one for you - please email doomedtofailpod@gmail.com - Thanks! - Taylor
Taylor: My kids are gone. They just left to go to a friend's house
>> Taylor: In the matter of the people of the State of California vs. Orenthal James Simpson, case number BA096.
>> Farz: And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can. Taylor, how are you?
>> Taylor: Good. I'm in a much better place than I was the other time. I found my headphones. My kids are gone. They just like left to go to a friend's house. Didn't even say goodbye. They're just gone.
>> Farz: Kind of nice living their lives. They're doing. They're doing their things.
>> Taylor: I assume they're fine.
>> Farz: Well, welcome to your show.
>> Taylor: Thank you. Welcome to your show.
>> Farz: Thank you. It's so nice.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: Wow. That was very, very, very kind of me.
Welcome to Doomed to Fail. We bring you historical disasters and failures
Well, Taylor, do you want to introduce us?
>> Taylor: Yes. Hello. Welcome to Doomed to Fail. We bring you historical disasters and failures and I am Taylor, joined by fars.
>> Farz: Join here. I for those that are joining us late in our run. I used to do the introduction and Taylor fired me. So you can do it again.
>> Taylor: I can't. I forgot. I forgot about that. That wasn't so long ago. What did it used to be like?
>> Farz: I don't know. It was probably terrible because I just kept forgetting about it and I started forgetting about it when you were doing it and I think that's when you were like, it's, we're done. We're done with. As far as I'm taking over. So here we are.
>> Taylor: That was hundreds, hundreds of episodes ago.
>> Farz: Hundreds and hundreds. Well, Taylor and esteemed audience, today is going to be a far story and it's going to be a really, really fun one.
>> Taylor: Excited.
>> Farz: It's going to be really fun. This was probably the most fun I had researching a topic in a very, very long time. So, yeah, I think from now on I'm just going to do fun topics because it puts me in a really happy mood and I like to think about them afterwards when I research topics like gory and gross. I don't want to. I don't want to think about it, you know.
>> Taylor: Yeah, that's fair. Let's do fun stuff.
>> Farz: We'll do fun stuff going forward.
>> Taylor: I mean, this is for us.
>> Farz: So this. Yeah, literally, literally just for us, an audience of two. So today I'll be covering a fun treasure hunting story that sounds like it happened centuries ago, but it is a saga that's actually still going on today as of like two weeks ago. So very modern. It started a long time ago, but it is very modern.
>> Taylor: I think there was an art heist just this week.
>> Farz: This is not that I know, but
>> Taylor: I'm Just saying that, like, heist still going on. Oh, yeah. A Renoir, Cezanne and Matisse were stolen from the Parma Museum just this week. It happened in three minutes.
>> Farz: Looks so fun. Well, we're never going to see those again.
>> Taylor: They did it fast. They went. They were in the front door and out the garden. Bing, bang, boom.
>> Farz: Yeah. Those are already on some billionaire Saudi's yacht.
>> Taylor: Yeah, they're on the island. Yeah. It's not good.
The SS Central America was launched in 1852 with the purpose of moving gold
>> Farz: So the treasure in question for today's story was treasure aboard a ship called the SS Central America. So we're going to start the story with SS Central America. This one's going to be a fun winding pattern that is so relevant to our modern times. Please listen, Please stay tuned. This is going to be really fun.
>> Taylor: Yay.
>> Farz: The SS Central America was known as the ship of gold, which is a very fitting name for. Was launched in 1852 with the purpose of moving California Gold Rush gold around the country. Specifically up to New York.
>> Taylor: Around the country?
>> Farz: Yes.
>> Taylor: How? From where? Like all the way down.
>> Farz: I'm going to tell you because this was part of. This is so interconnected. It's so fun. I had the exact same thoughts. I was like, I was like, wait, this is, this makes no sense.
>> Taylor: Tell me the way I like, I feel like it's like the SS Rob Me.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah. When you name it the ship of gold, it's like, hey, pirates, please show up and take all my s***.
>> Taylor: Yeah. By the way.
>> Farz: So the route it used was it would go for San Francisco. So San Francisco is on the Pacific Ocean side. That's where all the gold is being mined. It would go down south to Panama, cut across the Isthmus of Panama because back then that wasn't the Panama Canal. And then it would go up to New York and that's where it would disembark. There's a little more nuance to it because it would actually go to like Cuba and then New York. But I'm just giving you those shorthand.
>> Taylor: What's the. It's Isthmus of Panama. I thought you couldn't get through Panama. What's an isthmus?
>> Farz: So you could. It was just very, very long, windy and treacherous to get through it. That's why they built the Panama Canal, to make it a straight line through instead of like just complicated journey.
>> Taylor: Oh, I didn't even know it was an option. I thought it was like you always had to go all the way down.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah.
>> Taylor: Cool. Cool. Thanks.
>> Farz: If you look at a map of north and South America you, you assume these people were nuts for making this trek. And that's why Taylor asked question, she just asked why Research the h*** out of this thing. To go from San Francisco to Panama, straight across as the growth flies is a 3,300mile journey. It is huge. It is like if you look at on a map, you're like, why would anybody do this? Going from the east coast to the, the west coast to the east coast, from San Francisco to New York, it's like 2,500 miles. So it's dramatically shorter than going this route. But this was before the US built the transcontinental railroad that was completed in 1869. So this path was actually the easiest way to ship gold around the U.S. okay, this is where it gets really fun.
Back in 1850s, developing railroads became the hot speculative market
So what was going on in the US at this time that would necessitate the shipping of copious amounts of gold around the country? And this is a part that's going to be really familiar to people who are living right now in terms of what's happening to the markets in the U.S. back in the 1850s, developing railroads across the U.S. became the hot speculative market. The opportunity seemed limitless, with potential massive upside to investors who took part in it. There was a huge amount of capital, about 6% of the GDP was being poured into the construction of railroads. But there wasn't a demand for railroads because there weren't any railroads. To create the demand for the railroads to need to exist. The idea was let's build them and then there's going to be demand for these once we build them. It's like this new technology. It's cool, it's interesting. It's going to totally, you know, unify the entire country and there would be a ton of demand for it. But there wasn't. There was a small group of mega rich people within companies along with huge investments from regular folks who were building up massively expensive infrastructure around the entire country way ahead of demand, assuming that the demand would be there eventually. And the idea was it would arrive relatively quickly, which it obviously did not. Hence we got the panic of 1857, which is when the railroad speculation over leveraged banks and institutions resulting in liquidity crisis necessitating gold being shipped around the country through this channel essentially.
>> Taylor: Taylor, Panama is an isthmus. So crossing it just means like walking across it.
>> Farz: I don't know what an isthmus is.
>> Taylor: It's a, it's a, I looked it up. It's a tiny piece of land that connects two big areas of land.
>> Farz: Ah, okay then I use the wrong term for an isthmus. It's like a, I don't know, river cruise we'll call it.
>> Taylor: Right. But not that straight line.
>> Farz: But it's not a straight line.
>> Taylor: No, I have been listening. I'm just learning that, like, it's like they. You learn that word in the archipelago on the same day in like sixth grade.
>> Farz: I missed that day. I was definitely sick. Taylor, can you draw a corollary between the history of railroad speculation in modern times?
>> Taylor: I don't know. Is it every market that oil, Is it AI? Is it the housing crisis? Is it. Okay, cool.
>> Farz: Think about that. We don't know. Ex. We know it's important. We don't know exactly what it is going to do, and yet companies are throwing trillions and trillions of dollars into it. And on the speculation that eventually we will understand how to extract the value out of this thing.
>> Taylor: Right.
>> Farz: And then it'll be worth more than what we spent on it, essentially. Right.
>> Taylor: And Juan was explaining that to the kids how like, they don't make any money.
>> Farz: Yeah, they only burn money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's also, it's also really interesting because just like AI, all these AI companies are popping them out of nowhere, but really they all know that, like, it's a race for maybe two of them, maybe three of them. Right? So like it's speculative in every conceivable way.
The SS Central America lost 425 people and 30,000 pounds of gold
So anyways, back to the SS Central America. So in September of 1852, it set sail from Panama to Cuba to New York with about 578 souls aboard and 30,000 pounds of gold worth approximately $9 million in 1857. Money. So probably like hundreds of trillions of dollars more money than has ever lived in the world. For today's money. After it left Fort in Havana, it was struck by a hurricane somewhere off the Carolina coast and sank 425 people. And all the gold went down with it. The remaining people were saved by passing vessels. So that's our layup for the story.
>> Taylor: Cool, cool.
>> Farz: Let's lay some very, very fun, interesting legal groundwork for what happens when things are lost at sea. You have two key maritime principles that the courts have to interpret based on the specific situation they're addressing. You have the loss salvage. And this principle assumes that lost property has an owner and that someone who salvages a property can own some sort of compensation, basically. Does it have an owner? Does it not have an owner? That's kind of the legal question.
>> Taylor: I know all this from Ghost Ship.
>> Farz: You know, I know I Know, this is, this is for the audience that is less esteemed and does not watch Ghost Ship. Would you should pause this right now and go watch Ghost Ship and then
>> Taylor: come back and then you're welcome.
>> Farz: At least watch the, the intro. Then you have the law of fines, which again is a ghost preference. That principle applies if property is abandoned, meaning there's no owner who can demonstrate that they have any interest in the property, in which case you can just keep it like whoever finds it. Finders keepers. That's basically it.
Tommy Gregory Thompson founded Columbus America Discovery Group in 1985
Now to our protagonist, slash antagonist. In 1985, a guy named Tommy Gregory Thompson founded the Columbus America Discovery Group. I'm going to call it CADG for short. Because that's a lot of words to say.
>> Taylor: Can I pause you. How did it sink?
>> Farz: Oh, a hurricane.
>> Taylor: Okay, so it was a hurricane, like normal, nothing weird.
>> Farz: Yeah, it was like a cat too, if I remember correctly. It wasn't anything insane.
>> Taylor: Got it.
>> Farz: So we have this guy Tommy. So he was a brilliant engineer, he's a water jet propulsion expert, and his goal for this newly formed company was to use all his expertise to try and find the long lost SS Central America. And nobody had found it up until this point. This is 1985. He would raise about $12 million from around 160 different investors to help kind of fund the search. And he hired this guy, this mathematician, a guy named Larry Stone, who used a methodology called Bayesian search theory to narrow down the search to about 1400 square miles of ocean of where this thing probably went down. I was going to do a deep dive into Bayesian search theory. And the second I started researching, I was like, there are so many squiggly math lines here that I can't even. Lost me immediately. It's, it's, it's a ton of math.
>> Taylor: Right. Because you could, it could be at like any depth, even if it's deeper place.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: Because it could be like stuck on a thing or could go down or whatever.
>> Farz: Yeah, 100%. But, but this guy was the key. This guy was like the one that kind of like helped them whittle it down to some, some task they actually searched for. Tommy designed and built a deep sea ROV remote operated vehicle named Nemo. Very cutely. And on September 11, 1988, Nemo's cameras picked up some broken dishes and other man made artifacts at about 7200ft below the surface. After some more dives and closer inspection became clear that they had actually discovered the SS Central America for the first time since it went down for the next three years, they worked to recover the wreckage and a ton of gold. During that time, they recovered 10,600 gold coins and 577 gold bars, most of which were stamped and attributed to what's called the Aayer, which is like, back then, those are the guys that would do the stamping of the gold so you can understand, like, its lineage and make it traceable to where it came from. Because it had the AER stamp, they knew that this obviously was sourced from Gold Rush, California, and then was part of the Central America. During this time, Tommy had sold off approximately $52 million worth of the gold he had recovered, which was still somewhere around 5% of what was actually down there. So there was a ton of gold down there.
>> Taylor: Wow.
>> Farz: In 1990. This blows my mind. In 1990, 39 insurance companies who had paid out a claim in 1852 or who had bought and absorbed other companies that had paid out claims, they showed up saying that because we paid out claims in 1857 for that wreck, we now have the rightful ownership over what you found, this wreckage.
>> Taylor: Right.
>> Farz: There was a lot of back and forth to this and appeals, like, there was a lot of appeals like sued and not sued, whatever. Like, this part's irrelevant, basically. Long story short of it is that the courts found that this was a salvage, meaning that there was ownership and an ownership interest associated with the wreckage. It was never abandoned. And they granted 92% of the treasure to Tommy, but the rest of it had to go to the insurance companies. So make them whole. But you also get that this is part of your compensation. Then CADG investors also came for Tommy. In 2005, the business was sued by investors claiming that Tommy had took all the money and ran. He never paid back the $12 million investment with interest to conduct a search. There were a ton of delays on this, and by 2012, nothing had really been resolved yet. But Tommy had violated a court order to appear to hearing, and then he disappeared. So you. He had a contempt charge for not showing up to court. Basically like that.
>> Taylor: Does he have pockets full of gold coins?
>> Farz: I imagine he looks just like Jack Sparrow, but he walks around jingle jangling everywhere, gold clacking on gold. It's got to be really fun being him. I hope he has a merit for real. So he is held in contempt by this court, this federal court, for not showing up when he was ordered to. An order was issued for U.S. marshals to find and arrest him. And so this would have been three years later. So in 2015, he was found Living under an alias in Boca Raton, Florida, and arrested. He was ordered by the court to turn over 500 recovered gold coins, which he said he would, but then immediately said he has no access to release them, so you can't have them. The judge obviously didn't buy that. Again, held him in contempt of court and sentenced, sent him to prison. It wasn't like a fixed sentence. It was like, we're used. We're doing this to coerce you into giving us the gold coins. Like, give us the gold coins. Give us a location that's we're going to use to use prison to get this out of you, because you owe it to these insurance companies and your investors. He spent 10 years incarcerated without revealing the precise location of the shipwreck or the location of the missing gold coins.
>> Taylor: Wow.
>> Farz: Eventually, a judge decided that further incarceration was unlikely to pry this information out of him. And so he was released. He got released like. Like March 4th of this year.
>> Taylor: Oh, my gosh.
>> Farz: Yeah. He spent 10 years. He spent from age 62 to 73, because there was a little bit of a timeline overlap there. In prison, in federal prison, denying that he could get access to this. This gold.
>> Taylor: Wow.
>> Farz: But while he was incarcerated, another company was founded, most likely by his previous investors that couldn't actually figure this out. A lot of folks want this to be secret, so there actually wasn't a ton of information about this. That company was called Odyssey Marine Exploration. And it seems like they figured out at least where part of the wreckage is, because later on, remember the A. Sayer stamp? I mentioned a bunch after he was incarcerated, a bunch of those started showing up at auction houses. And so we think that somebody figured out exactly where it is, or at least parts of where it is and is trying to recover the gold. Apparently, there's still a ton that's down there. Like I said, by the time they had spent three years doing a recovery on this, only 5% of it had been actually recovered. So there's still a ton down there. The closest coordinates that are publicly available say the ship is between 7,200 and 8,000ft below the surface, 160 miles off the coast of South Carolina and roughly 200 miles off of Cape Hatteras in North Carolina. And that's the closest that's publicly, publicly available right now.
How deep is that? Like, how do you get there
>> Taylor: How deep is that? Is that like. Like, how is that? Like, how do you get there?
>> Farz: It's like a mile and a half to. Yeah, it's like a mile and a half under.
>> Taylor: Okay, that's pretty Deep.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah.
>> Taylor: How do they get stuff from there?
>> Farz: So they said. So back when he was doing it, they were doing it through RVs because back then doing it with like a manmade vessel wasn't considered safe enough to do. And so they're using ROV, like suction based ROVs to kind of scoop things up down there and bring it up to the surface.
>> Taylor: Fun.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah. Really wild story. That is a short one, but it's really fun because it tells you a lot about what the world looked like, you know, 200 years ago and how it looks like now and then. Also, this guy's an absolute cartoon character.
>> Taylor: I mean, he could still have a lot of money if you told them where it was.
>> Farz: I know. I don't know what his deal is.
>> Taylor: It's not like his deal is you get $0. Like you still get a lot of money and then you can like go find more treasure, you know, don't. In jail for 10 years.
>> Farz: I know, but he's like a pirate. Like, you know, you can't really. He's not gonna be like, yeah, let me give my money to this, this insurance company. These suits with ties on, Like, I
>> Taylor: don't know, 10 years since there's a lot to give up for that dude.
>> Farz: What a story though. What a story.
>> Taylor: He could have been out stealing art. Maybe he did steal that art since I hope he's out in that arch Scottsdale.
>> Farz: I hope he's on a beach somewhere drinking rum with a parrot on his shoulder telling people he just got out
>> Taylor: of jail and he's just dug up a treasure chest that he buried there.
>> Farz: Yeah. So fun. That's my story.
>> Taylor: That's cool. I'm looking at pictures. There's pictures of the people and stuff that were, on the boat and like, we're saved. And that is wild. Oh, I do see a. Honestly, I see a box of treasure.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: Pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah.
>> Farz: So that is the story of Mr. Tommy Thompson, the SS Central America. And I did try and look up other stories like that, but I was like, this is going to take me down a weird rabbit hole, so I probably don't need to go any deeper than that. But there's plenty of other stories like that. Apparently being a profess little shipwreck person is like a real thing, which is great.
>> Taylor: Shipwreck. The world is so cool. I mean, yeah, obviously, like, I'm thinking like what I've seen in like pirate movies, but it is super, super fun just to be like, oh, by the way down There, there's tons of like how many. How much gold is the bottom of the ocean?
>> Farz: So much.
>> Taylor: And like all the stuff like when, like the even like thinking like obviously the Titanic, like there's just like silver and dishes and candlesticks and shoe buckles and just like stuff that'll be on the forever, you know?
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: Crazy.
>> Farz: So that's my story. I would love to get feedback on this one because it is kind of fun. So please write to us at Duben to fell pod@gmail.com or write to us on the socials at dubnafil Pod. Ross, we got Taylor.
I have a fun Victorian era murder to tell you next time
>> Taylor: That's it. I don't have anything new since yesterday. I have a fun. I have a fun one. I'm reading a book about it next. So I do our. The one that you did on like that nurse who murdered his family was like really popular and that's fun. And not that I don't want to do like gruesome things, but I do want to do like, I have a fun Victorian era murder to tell you next time.
>> Farz: I'm into it. I'm into it. That's fun, right?
>> Taylor: It's like, it's not like blood and guts. It's like a mystery kind of. And like kind of fun, you know,
>> Farz: if the person would be dead now anyways, it can still be fun.
>> Taylor: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like so much. Enough time has passed.
>> Farz: Exactly.
>> Taylor: Fun. Yeah, I get it. I get it. I don't want to. I mean, everything is so awful. What did I watch? I watched. I did watch. I watched Ready or Not, the new one.
>> Farz: Is it good?
>> Taylor: Yeah, it's fine. It's just like, it's extraordinarily bloody. And it also hits a little bit different at like post Epstein stuff because it's like rich people hunting people and like, I don't know, they do that.
>> Farz: Did you see Don't Blink?
>> Taylor: No.
>> Farz: That one is probably the most Epstein island one I've seen.
>> Taylor: Yeah. And I did watch Scream and Scream, Chew on the Plane and those were obviously also buddy but fun.
>> Farz: Yeah. They're slashers. They're supposed to be fun.
>> Taylor: Yeah. Don't Blink has one star in Rotten Tomatoes. 22%.
>> Farz: Oh, no. It's called Blink Twice.
>> Taylor: Okay. I was like, that can't be it.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah, it's Blink Twice. Well reviewed.
>> Taylor: Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. I see.
>> Farz: It's a good one.
>> Taylor: I see, I see. Yeah. Oh, fun. That's new.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah. Last year, first years ago. Yes, got it.
>> Taylor: 74% rotten tomatoes. I Don't know. If anyone has a movie as good as Ghost Ship, let us know, but I've yet to find one.
>> Farz: Also, why don't people make movies like Ghost Ship anymore? Ships are such good horror venues.
>> Taylor: There was a Queen Mary movie, but it wasn't very good. It was like.
>> Farz: It sucked. I saw that, too.
>> Taylor: Budget. Yeah, but like. Yeah, no, exactly. That's. That's scary.
>> Farz: There's also a zombie. Zombie N*** movie. Yeah. I can't. I don't know what that was called. That was. I remember that was pretty good. But, like, again, it's so. It can be so fun and moody if you place on a ship, because ships are scary anyways and the ocean is terrifying. So, like, you already got, like, 90% of the problem solved by just putting on a ship. So if you are a Hollywood producer, writer, or director, please write to us and tell us why y' all are totally whiffing this.
>> Taylor: Oh, God, there is so many. Like, wait, there's an old one from the 70s called Shockwaves about undead SS soldiers on a remote island.
>> Farz: That's fun.
>> Taylor: That sounds super fun. I should watch that. It has a really great, great picture of zombie Nazis. Oh, wait, what's. I tell you, there is a thing that is. Oh, my God. I heard this, like, a really long time ago, but have you ever seen that picture that someone took in an abandoned boat, but there's a man with an ax in it?
>> Farz: No.
>> Taylor: I'm like, I know this is gonna come up.
There's a 2014 picture of a dry dock in Australia that's very scary
So there's a 2014 picture, and I don't know if this is true, but of a dry docked. Okay, so this is my Googling. It's a dry dock. Decommissioned decommissioned vessel in Australia. A man was taking photos at night without. Without the flash, just, like, taking pictures in it. And I don't know if he, like, worked there or whatever, but one of the pictures that he developed afterwards or whatever saw afterwards had a man standing at the end of a hallway with an ax. And so it was like, probably a squatter. But, like, it's. I'm going to do. But it's very scary.
>> Farz: I found it.
>> Taylor: Like, I'd watch a movie about that guy.
>> Farz: Yeah, let's find that guy.
>> Taylor: Yeah, I think that's fun because also, like, when you're out in the middle of the ocean, like, these shipwrecks, like, they're fun to look at also, but, like, when you're dying on a shipwreck, I mean, just that feeling of, like, this is it. There's nowhere no one can save me. There's nowhere to go, you know? Yeah, there's nothing that can help you. And even, like, we were at the. There's like, a air museum here, and they have, like, a Pearl harbor harbor exhibit. And like, all the dudes who, like, died in Pearl harbor like, eight days later because they couldn't get him out,
>> Farz: you know, So I saw that too, because I went to. Yeah, there was. They have one of the doors from the Arizona. There, like, an actual, like, door from the ship. And there's a weird hole that looks like aftermarket. Like, somebody put that there. And it says that, like, that's the hole that, like, divers drilled into, like, days after the thing went down to see if they could find anybody still alive in there. So scary.
>> Taylor: It's, like, dark and you just, like, they're going to die in there.
>> Farz: So scary.
>> Taylor: Did you watch the Poseidon Adventure? The old one?
>> Farz: Yeah. That was great. Yeah. See, I do know more about movies. If it's shipwreck, if it's boat movies, I know them. If they're not, I've never watched them.
>> Taylor: There's gotta be a cruise. Horror movie. Okay, we can cut this off, whatever. But anyone who has has boat movies.
>> Farz: Well, write to us@dumontlpodgmail.com, find us on the socials. We'd love to hear from you. And we're going to do a lot more fun stuff, so stay tuned and tell your friends.
>> Taylor: Tell your friends. Thank you. Thank you. Far sweet.