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Sunken treasure, poor governance, and the limits of decision models
What $12.7 million investment in 1988 yielded a vanishing $48 million in 1991, nothing again until this year, and yet may still have fabulous upside? As ESPN films explains in In Deep Water, a real-world “National Treasure.”
When a hurricane sank the SS Central America in 1857, over 400 lives and at least 3 tons of California Gold Rush fortune were lost. “At least” because the steamer was also rumored to carry in its hull an additional secret 15 tons of gold headed for NY banks. The loss contributed to The Panic of 1857, as the public came to doubt the government’s ability to back its paper currency with specie.
Gold bars and coins from the wreck of the S.S. Central America
131 years after the ship was lost, oceanic engineer Tommy Thompson and a team of “data nerds” used Bayesian modeling to find the ship and new deep-water robot technologies to recover items from the ocean floor. We caught the 30-for-30 movie this week and it captivated us on several levels: (a) it’s the greatest lost treasure in American history, (b) it includes important lessons about corporate governance, (c) it demonstrates the importance of intuition, and (d) the tale ends with a local twist – fugitive entrepreneur/treasure hunter Thompson was just recently captured in our backyard (Boca Raton).
The story has parallels to another favorite of ours – The Greatest Comeback Ever and the Limits of Decision Models – in which intuition augmented or even trumped the computer model. Following a hunch they discovered her on “the edge of the probability map,” ending one mystery but starting another.
Thompson – “a combination of Indiana Jones and Tesla” – used lack of transparency and poor corporate governance to keep his investors at bay for 16 (!) years.
The first seven years were consumed by a flurry of lawsuits from 19th century insurers and not directly his fault; his backers then patiently waited for the next nine years as Thompson told them the gold had to be marketed just so. He sold 532 gold bars and thousands of coins for $48 million in 2000, purportedly to pay loans and legal bills. In 2005 two investors sued, in 2006 some crew members sued, and Thompson became a recluse in a rented Vero Beach mansion which he paid for with “moldy smelling” $100 bills (they’d been buried underground). He missed a 2012 court appearance and was officially on the lam up until being caught earlier this year in Boca Raton, FL.
A new company (Tampa-based Odyssey Marine Exploration) re-started salvage efforts in April 2014 – only 5% of the wreck was excavated by 1991, and it’s been left un-touched since then. Recovery efforts will continue indefinitely (is it 3 or 18 tons of gold?) and be used in part to reimburse the original investors.
