FILE - This undated file photo provided by the Delaware County Sheriff's Office in Delaware, Ohio, shows Tommy Thompson. A federal judge has ordered former deep-sea treasure hunter Thompson to answer... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - This undated file photo provided by the Delaware County Sheriff's Office in Delaware, Ohio, shows Tommy Thompson. A federal judge has ordered former deep-sea treasure hunter Thompson to answer questions about the location of 500 missing gold coins. Judge Algenon Marbley in Columbus, Ohio on Monday,... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - This undated file photo provided by the Delaware County Sheriff's Office in Delaware, Ohio, shows Tommy Thompson. A federal judge has ordered former deep-sea treasure hunter Thompson to answer questions about the location of 500 missing gold coins. Judge Algenon Marbley in Columbus, Ohio on Monday,... (Associated Press) FILE - This undated file photo provided by the Delaware County Sheriff's Office in Delaware, Ohio, shows Tommy Thompson. A federal judge has ordered former deep-sea treasure hunter Thompson to answer... (Associated Press) 
 
 COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A federal judge on Monday ordered a former deep-sea treasure hunter to answer questions about the location of 500 missing gold coins. 
 
 Tommy Thompson has been held in contempt of court since last December, when Judge Algenon Marbley in Columbus found he violated a plea deal by refusing to respond. 
 
 Marbley on Monday told Thompson to answer the questions within 30 days. 
 
 The judge's order came after Thompson and his attorneys spent the past month at Marbley's direction reviewing documents that might hold clues about the location of the coins and other assets worth millions. 
 
 Thompson has said he told everything he knew during depositions last year. Todd Long, an attorney for Thompson, told Marbley on Monday that nothing has changed from Thompson's perspective. 
 
 "He has nothing further to say," Long said. 
 
 The coins were minted from gold taken from the S.S. Central America, a Gold Rush-era ship that sank off South Carolina in an 1857 hurricane with thousands of pounds of gold aboard, contributing to an economic panic. 
 
 The 161 investors who paid Thompson $12.7 million to find the ship never saw any proceeds. Two sued — a now-deceased investment firm president and the company that once published The Columbus Dispatch newspaper. 
 
 A fugitive from Ohio since 2012, Thompson was apprehended in January 2015 along with his longtime female companion at a hotel where he was living near Boca Raton, Florida. 
 
 The time that's passed since Thompson's last deposition might give him an opportunity to answer the questions, Marbley suggested. 
 
 "Who knows — he might have an epiphany," the judge said. "It is the season of miracles." 
 
 Marbley has also ordered Thompson to pay $1,000 a day until he answers questions. Currently, he owes more than $350,000, said Doug Squires, an assistant U.S. attorney. Squires said he hopes the government will see the money. 
 
 "The federal government always works very hard to recover all assets," he said. ||||| Tommy Thompson, a treasure hunter accused of cheating his investors out of their share of one of the richest hauls in U.S. history, was caught in West Boca Raton, Fla., after two years on the run. (AP) 
 
 Tommy G. Thompson was once one of the greatest treasure hunters of his time: A dark-bearded diver who hauled a trove of gold from the Atlantic Ocean in 1988 — dubbed the richest find in U.S. history. 
 
 Years later, accused of cheating his investors out of the fortune, Thompson led federal agents on a great manhunt — pursued from a Florida mansion to a mid-rent hotel room booked under a fake name. 
 
 Now Thompson’s beard has grayed, and he lives in an Ohio jail cell, held there until he gives up the location of the gold. 
 
 But for nearly two years, despite threats and fines and the best exertions of a federal judge, no one has managed to make Thompson reveal what he did with the treasure. 
 
 [How treasure hunter Tommy Thompson, ‘one of the smartest fugitives ever,’ was caught] 
 
 A undated drawing of the S.S. Central America, which sank after sailing into a hurricane in 1857. (Library of Congress/AP) 
 
 The wreck of the S.S. Central America waited 130 years for Thompson to come along. The steamer went down in a hurricane in 1857, taking 425 souls and at least three tons of California gold to the sea floor off South Carolina. 
 
 Many tried to find it, but none succeeded until a young, shipwreck-obsessed engineer from Columbus, Ohio, built an underwater robot called “Nemo” to pinpoint the Central America, then dive 8,000 feet under the sea and surface the loot. 
 
 “A man as personable as he was brilliant, Thompson recruited more than 160 investors to fund his expedition,” Columbus Monthly noted in a profile. He “spent years studying the ship’s fateful voyage … and developing the technology to plunge deeper in the ocean than anyone had before to retrieve its treasure.” 
 
 Thompson’s crew pulled up rare 19th-century coins, the ship’s bell and “gold bars . . . 15 times bigger than the largest California gold bar previously known to exist,” the Chicago Tribune reported in 1989. 
 
 And 95 percent of the wreck site was still unexplored — potentially worth $400 million in gold alone, The Washington Post reported a year later. “The treasure trove is the richest in American history and the deepwater salvage effort the most ambitious ever undertaken anywhere.” 
 
 The expedition’s loot captured the country’s attention, as did the peculiarities of its leader — a scientist-seafarer hybrid who worked on nuclear submarine systems before he hunted treasure. 
 
 “Thompson is not exactly the romantic, swashbuckling sort,” Forbes wrote during the years-long recovery of the ship’s treasure. “He is scientific and methodical, with none of the P.T. Barnum that infuses (and inflates) other salvors.” 
 
 
 
 Gold bars and coins from the S.S. Central America, first glimpsed in 1989. (Associated Press) 
 
 In his late 30s, during the height of his fame, Thompson said little in public and tended to play down his role in the discovery. 
 
 “This gold is part of the largest treasure trove in American history,” he told reporters in 1989. “But the history of the S.S. Central America is also a rich part of our nation’s cultural treasury.” 
 
 He added: “It’s a celebration of American ideals: free enterprise and hard work.” 
 
 But before long, some of Thompson’s bankrollers began painting a very different picture of the man. 
 
 Two of the expedition’s biggest investors took him to court in the 2000s, accusing him of selling nearly all the gold and keeping the profits to himself. 
 
 When a federal judge ordered Thompson to appear in 2012, he didn’t show. An arrest warrant was issued, but the man who found a long-lost shipwreck had disappeared. 
 
 [Treasure hunter vanishes while searching for $2 million gold stash in N.M. wilderness] 
 
 There followed a two-year manhunt for what a top U.S. Marshal called “perhaps one of the smartest fugitives” the agency had ever chased. 
 
 Thompson had “almost limitless resources and approximately a ten year head start” in the chase, U.S. Marshal for the Southern District of Ohio Peter Tobin said in a statement. 
 
 Thompson and his girlfriend had been living for years in a Florida mansion, paying rent with cash that was damp and moldy from the earth it had been buried in, The Post’s Abby Phillip reported last year. The couple had fled by the time authorities found the house. 
 
 Government records detailed what they’d left behind: disposable cellphones, money straps stamped “$10,000” and a guide on evading law enforcement titled “How to be Invisible.” 
 
 An undated photograph of Thompson made available by U.S. Marshals in January 2015. 
 
 Thompson was finally caught in January 2015, after agents tracked his girlfriend to a $200-a-night hotel near West Palm Beach, The Post reported at the time. 
 
 In a celebratory statement, Tobin said the U.S. Marshals had used “all of our resources and ingenuity” to find the treasure hunter. 
 
 But they didn’t find the treasure. 
 
 Thompson’s investors, who originally expected to make tens of millions of dollars from the venture, said that they believe he had hundreds of gold coins secreted in a trust account for his children. At first, their search for the coins looked promising. Thompson pleaded guilty to contempt of court in April 2015, according to the Columbus Dispatch. He said the coins were in Belize and agreed to reveal their exact location. 
 
 But that didn’t happen. 
 
 Thompson’s attorney said last month that his client couldn’t remember who he gave the gold to, even after poring over thousands of pages of documents related to the treasure, according to the Dispatch. 
 
 A federal judge ruled that Thompson was faking memory problems, the newspaper reported, and has held him in an Ohio jail cell for a year. 
 
 Thompson could remain behind bars until he talks, the Associated Press reported, and is being fined $1,000 a day in the meantime. 
 
 “Who knows — he might have an epiphany,” U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley remarked Monday when he ordered Thompson to answer questions about the gold’s location. 
 
 But so far, the S.S. Central America’s treasure remains missing for the second time in two centuries. 
 
 And perhaps the only man able to find it remains as silent as the lost sailors of that old wreck. ||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
– Tommy Thompson is a shipwreck explorer believed to know the location of a fortune in gold coins—but he can't spend them in Ohio's Delaware County jail, and he's not getting out until he reveals where they are. The treasure hunter has been held on a contempt charge since December last year and on Monday, a federal judge ordered another round of depositions in which Thompson could divulge the location of 500 gold coins worth up to $4 million from an 1857 shipwreck discovered in the '80s, the Columbus Dispatch reports. "I hope that in this season of giving, Mr. Thompson will find it within himself to give," Judge Algenon Marbley said, predicting that Thompson, who claims memory loss, might experience an "epiphany," the Washington Post reports. "It is the season of miracles," Marbley added, per the AP. Thompson went on the run in 2012 after investors who funded his search for the wreck of the SS Central America accused him of selling $50 million in gold and keeping the profits for himself. He said the coins were in Belize and agreed to reveal their location in a plea deal months after he was recaptured in 2015, but he later said he'd forgotten whom he'd given them to, the Post reports. The judge ordered the fresh depositions after Thompson and his lawyers had more than a month to review 12,500 pages of documents on the treasure in the hope of jogging his memory. A defense attorney told Marbley that Thompson still "has nothing further to say." (When he was recaptured, Thompson was carrying more than $400,000 in cash, and more.)