Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (26 page)

Already John had paid treasure hunters three hundred thousand dollars to look for the sidewheel steamer in shallow water off Cape Hatteras. Over the phone, Tommy told John, “Don’t spend any more money at Hatteras.” Anyone could read a few articles in old New York newspapers at any library in the country and determine that the ship foundered over the Blake Plateau one hundred miles out and probably sank on the Blake Ridge, as far as two hundred miles out. In October 1983, Tommy flew to Milwaukee and had lunch with John and about ten monks, all sitting cross-legged on the floor, everyone eating a bowl of grains, John at the head of the ceremonial rug dressed in a robe and skullcap.

“Well, how can we find it?” John opened the conversation.

Tommy said, “You need to do an analysis of the whole problem. You need a computer and you need to figure out the physics and develop a probability map. It isn’t like X-marks-the-spot. You need to do more in-depth research.”

Before he said any more, he had a nondisclosure agreement for John to sign, but John dismissed it with, “Well, I’ll have somebody look at this.”

Tommy proceeded but even more cautiously than he had intended. He told John that the first thing he would need was a new generation of side-scan sonar. “Columbia University has the first one built, the SeaMARC I. It’s prototypical, but with the right adjustments it might work.” He showed John a chart with enough information on it to prove that the
Central America
lay in deep water. They talked a while longer, then Tommy got up to use the bathroom, and when he returned, the monks had his briefcase open and the copy machine running. Harry John said, “We just thought we would xerox this stuff, and we didn’t really want to bother you with it.”

Tommy grabbed the papers and stuffed them back into his briefcase, muttering something about their relationship having to develop a little further before he could give them that information. He had left all of the revealing information, the important coordinates, back in Columbus, anyhow.

After the meeting, John remained interested, and although Tommy felt he could not trust the man, he refused to close the door because of one bad experience. It was one half of his philosophy: Always keep your options open. If watched and brought along properly, John could provide the cash to create the technology Tommy foresaw he would need to find and recover the
Central America
, and that included helping Mike Williamson build the SeaMARC IA.

Tommy arranged to meet with John and Williamson in Seattle to discuss the new sonar. There, Williamson explained to John how the SeaMARC evolved and how he thought it could be modified and improved to do the sort of survey Tommy wanted to do; then he introduced them both to the engineers who had built the other SeaMARC. By the end of the visit, John was talking to Williamson’s accountant. “Things looked fairly encouraging at that point,” remembered Williamson.

After they left Seattle, Tommy talked more with John by phone, John pumping him for more information about the SeaMARC and how it could help them find the
Central America
. Why did they have to build a new one, he wanted to know, when one already existed? Tommy explained that the other SeaMARC was owned by a university, and by law all sonar data recorded by them became public information after one year.

Three months later, Tommy heard through Williamson and the deep-ocean grapevine that Harry John had contracted with Columbia University to use its SeaMARC I for a search in the Atlantic Bight off the Carolinas. When Tommy got the story sorted out, he realized that John had pumped him for information all fall and into the winter, right up to the day John left the dock. John then had rushed to sea in February, a time of year no one, given a choice, would work in the Atlantic. The weather was predictably bad, and when the ocean was rough, the SeaMARC jerked, and John was out for ten days trying to sweep huge areas in rough seas, and getting data that Tommy was certain would tell him nothing. John had left the dock apparently hell-bent for a single coordinate, a set of numbers that had puzzled Tommy almost two years earlier: 31° 25′ latitude, 77° 10′ longitude. That was the
El Dorado
coordinate included in the official report of the disaster issued in 1857 by the New York Board of Underwriters. The
El Dorado
coordinate was
the one sixty miles from the other two coordinates Tommy had discovered, and he and Bob had yet to reconcile the discrepancy. Tommy had told Harry John he had to approach the search systematically, to use computers, create probability maps, generate search grids, cover a wide area and gradually narrow the field, not to look for an X marking the spot. Why was that coordinate so far from the other three? John hadn’t taken the time to find out, but Tommy wouldn’t sail until he did.

With John no longer a possible backer, Tommy continued his conversations with Williamson, encouraging him to get the SeaMARC IA built any way he could. Tommy wouldn’t lease the other SeaMARC even if the frequencies could be modified, because he wanted everything confidential, so he needed a private sonar operator with his own Sea-MARC. He couldn’t commit to a contract yet, but he told Williamson that as soon as he got financing for the
Central America
project, he would be Williamson’s first client.

THE PARTNERSHIP

1984

I
F ONE HALF
of Tommy’s philosophy was Always keep your options open, the other half was Acquire as many options as you can. Before he had talked to the Scientologists or the billionaire, before he had met with Harry John, Tommy had already discussed financing with his old mentor Dean Glower.

Glower was now dean of Ohio State’s College of Engineering, and since Tommy had returned to Columbus to work for Battelle, he had talked periodically with the dean about the progress of his ideas for working on the bottom of the deep ocean. As Tommy refined his ideas, he had become more and more convinced that finding and recovering a deep-water shipwreck was the ideal project to try them on, and he had told Glower about some of the possible targets. Then one day in early 1984, he called Glower and said, “I think I found our ship.”

Tommy made an appointment to meet with Glower at the dean’s office. There he told Glower the story of the
Central America
and how the new SeaMARC technology might enable him to find it, and how he would design a vehicle that could go to the bottom and document and carefully dismantle the ship and recover the gold. But who can I get to fund the project? he asked Glower. He had enough ideas; now he needed backers.

Glower listened, then called the office of Herb Lape, fifty feet down the hall. “Herb,” he said, “come up here a second. I want you to hear a story.”

The person in charge of fund-raising for the College of Engineering, Herb Lape was an old crony of Glower’s who had connections Glower didn’t have. He had grown up in a Columbus suburb called Bexley, home to the community’s ultra wealthy. “I’m the dean of engineering, which is a credible job,” said Glower later, “but Herb is their buddy. That’s why I got Herb with Tommy.”

Glower told Lape that what he was about to hear might sound crazy, but that he, Glower, knew enough about engineering and about the ocean to realize that the theories were sound, that someday before long someone would be doing exactly what this young man was talking about doing now. “It’s a very exciting idea,” said Glower, “and Tommy is the kind of guy who can maybe pull it off. Maybe not.”

Then Tommy told Lape about deep-water historic shipwrecks and why they were preferable to shallow-water shipwrecks, and how he thought the technology was available if someone would just pull it all together. Lape, who had to exude a certain amount of enthusiasm in the fund-raising business anyhow, listened with growing disbelief, and when Tommy had finished explaining his idea, thought, “My God, I’ve got to get some friends of mine to listen to this! This is the biggest crap shoot I’ve ever heard of!”

Glower suggested that Lape set up a luncheon, get some of the Bexley people to come, and he would host it out of his own pocket. Lape started calling his friends, most of whom groaned. “Hey, it’s a free lunch,” said Lape. “You gotta hear this!” He told them that the idea might be wild, but that the young man with the idea was an engineer at Battelle who came highly recommended by Don Glower, who also would be at the luncheon.

Lape reserved a small conference room at the university’s Fawcett Center for Tomorrow. Prior to the luncheon, he told Tommy that for two reasons the key person there would be a CPA named Wayne Ashby: One, Ashby knew how to put the whole thing together, how to structure the offering; two, he had all kinds of contacts.

The room held twelve people, and it was full: Glower, Lape, and Tommy, plus nine potential investors. By Glower’s estimate, the nine investors had a combined wealth of more than a billion dollars. He introduced Tommy, giving a brief testimonial: He had known Tommy for years, and he knew Tommy wasn’t going to disappear. “You guys may not know that, but one thing you do know is that I’m not going to disappear. Tommy’s honest, he’s smart, and he’ll give his damnedest. We just want you to hear the story, and you can take it from there. We guarantee nothing.”

Then Tommy got up and talked about the history of treasure hunting, how the vast majority of shipwrecks had occurred in shallow water, and how the recovery of these shipwrecks presented many problems. He showed slides he had taken when he worked for Mel Fisher in Key West, and he noted the primitive methods Fisher used in his search. Fisher had been searching for the
Atocha
for fourteen years and still had found only pieces scattered across miles of ocean. In deeper water, the environment was far more stable, adulteration of a wreck far less likely to occur, and you could be certain that no one else had recovered the wreck. The only thing preventing someone from recovering these deep-water wrecks was technology, and even that finally appeared possible.

As Tommy was talking, one of the men excused himself early and said on his way out, “It’s all very interesting, but Wayne’s our accountant. Before we do anything, we would want his blessing.”

As Lape had told Tommy, Wayne Ashby would be the key man there. He was the managing partner of 150 CPAs in the Columbus office of the national accounting firm of Deloitte, Haskins & Sells. He or his firm did the books and the tax work for just about everybody in the room and a whole lot of other people in the Columbus area whose net worth was figured perhaps not in the hundreds of millions, but certainly in the millions. He knew virtually everybody who might be interested in a deal like the one Tommy proposed. But Ashby sat
through the whole presentation, which lasted an hour, and left less than intrigued.

“My impression was just a nice young man, and I didn’t think much more about it beyond that. Everybody was pretty busy, and we rushed out of the meeting, and I’m sure we all thought that was interesting and informative and that was the end of it.”

Tommy waited for two weeks before he called Ashby. When he reminded Ashby’s secretary about the luncheon and who he was, Ashby picked up, and they talked for a short while, Tommy asking some questions about business and financing and giving Ashby an update on the progress he had made since the luncheon. “I figured if I could just keep the idea in front of him until he could see the logic of it the way I could,” said Tommy, “then he might help turn it into a ‘proper business’.” Tommy had thought through the conversation as carefully as possible, considering every reaction Ashby could have to each approach he could take, and he knew he had to be brief and professional. He kept the conversation informative and slightly inquisitive, but his approach, no matter how professional, could not change one thing: “I just didn’t have much time for him,” said Ashby. Tommy closed by saying he would call again in two weeks to give Ashby another update. And he did.

In that conversation, Tommy asked Ashby two specific questions about financing, and at the end of the call he said he would be in touch again in a few weeks. Whenever they spoke, Tommy closed the conversation by saying he would call back in a week or two weeks or a month, and, as busy as he was, back in New York about half the time, Ashby always said that would be fine.

Though he had little time to think about it, what Ashby had locked on back at the investors’ luncheon, and the tiny spark he just could not extinguish, was the ratio of risk to reward inherent in what Tommy proposed. It was a long shot; the odds were great; it would probably never happen. But if it did, look at the payoff. You could realize your investment a hundred times, a 10,000 percent return. That thought kept rewinding and playing itself out again in his head.

“It was a bet you could not ordinarily make anywhere,” said Ashby. “And it was an investment that just doesn’t come along in Columbus, Ohio.” That was the other intriguing thought: Tommy was not proposing
another strip mall northwest of town or an apartment complex or a pharmaceutical start-up; he was offering an opportunity to be part of an adventure to a new frontier.

Each time Tommy called, Ashby found himself thinking about the possibilities, and then those thoughts gradually would subside, and he would have just about forgotten the last conversation when Tommy would call again. After several phone calls, Tommy met Ashby for lunch; after that, Tommy continued to call every week or two, and occasionally they met, and Tommy gradually slipped into a comfortable rhythm of calling Ashby with updates on his progress, and how he was proceeding with some of his ideas for financing the project.

The more Tommy talked, the more Ashby began to appreciate his intelligence. Tommy just seemed to know what he was talking about, and he was talking about doing something no one had ever done before. Ashby would have dismissed the whole idea as a fantasy, a shot far too long, a return on investment too good to be true, if the greatest of his intrigues had not been with Tommy.