In June 2022, Florida retirees Phil and Gay Courter were on a cruise ship at a port in England preparing for the trip home. Much to their surprise, ship officials summoned them, asked them to hand over their passports, and informed them they were being arrested on European warrants on charges of money laundering, organized crime, and trafficking cultural goods. Those cultural goods, explains Lauren Collins in the New Yorker, were gold bars salvaged in the 1970s from a French ship that sank in 1746. How all of the above unfolded is the subject of a lengthy story by Collins, one that involves an ill-advised appearance on Antiques Roadshow.
The Courters' trouble began when a French couple they knew asked them—in 1986—to hold onto gold bars recovered from a shipwreck while they hunted for an American buyer. "He walks in and pops open this briefcase full of gold, and we're, like, 'Oh, my God,'" Phil Courter recalls of the moment Gerard Pesty showed them the gold. The Courters did indeed hold onto the gold, eventually putting it into a safe-deposit box, and say they thought everything was above board. Gay even encouraged Gerard Pesty's wife, Annette, to appear on Antiques Roadshow in 1999 to display some of the bars.
Flash forward about two decades, when the Courters put some of the gold up for sale at a California auction house. A source tipped off a French investigator, who had been hunting gold that was illegally taken from the wreck of the ship Prince de Conty, and the info included a clip from that Antiques Roadshow appearance. The Courters, who say they never had any idea that they were holding gold being sought by France, spent more than $300,000 getting out of their legal jam and back to the US. "It is not an exaggeration to say that nothing in my life prepared me for this, and I am no longer the same person I was," says Gay Courter, who happens to be a best-selling author. (Read the full story.)
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