After years on the lam, a treasure hunter accused of cheating investors after recovering fortune in gold from a shipwreck was scheduled to appear in Florida federal court on Thursday.
Tommy Thompson was apprehended by authorities earlier this week at a Hilton hotel in Palm Beach County, where he apparently had been living for two years with a woman, Alison Antekeier, who was also detained, according to the U.S. Marshals Service.
Thompson's initial court appearance, originally scheduled for Wednesday, was continued to Thursday morning.
He is expected to be extradited soon to Ohio, where a warrant for his arrest was issued in 2012 when he failed to appear in federal court for a civil case to disclose the location of the tens of millions of dollars' worth of gold recovered from his treasure hunt.
Using sonar and robotic technology, Thompson discovered the shipwrecked SS Central America, which carried as much as 19 tonnes of gold from the California mines when it sank in 1857 off the coast of South Carolina.
More than 400 people drowned, and the lost fortune helped to trigger a U.S. banking panic.
Thompson faces multiple federal and state civil lawsuits that accuse him of cheating investors who helped to fund his 1988 expedition, according to a court records in the U.S. Southern District of Ohio that were unsealed on Wednesday.
Federal agents in 2012 found a multi-million dollar mansion in Vero Beach, Florida, where Thompson and Antekeier had lived under false names and led a cash-only existence.
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