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Nothing made Gay Courter happier than being on a boat. She and her husband, Phil, had traveled around the world by seaplane or hot air balloon, but anything involving sea air and the swaying motion of water gave her an unprecedented sense of well-being. -ser. In late January 2020, the Courters embarked together on their 20th cruise: a two-week excursion through Southeast Asia aboard a ship called Diamond Princess. They began their adventure in Tokyo, where they dined on fugu, the fatal puffer fish. . Gay had the culture of naming each and every trip. This one she called Seventy-Five and Still Living. They thought they had already survived the most painful period.
The Courters live on the waterfront in Crystal River, Florida. They have 3 children and 8 grandchildren. They are semi-retired and own a production company that makes documentary and educational films. Phil builds things and plays the banjo. Gay writes. She is the author of 11 e-books, ranging from “The Beansprout Book,” which, according to her Wikipedia page, “introduced bean sprouts to American supermarkets and the general public,” to “The Midwife,” a 1982 bestseller. The most recent novel, published in 2019, takes place on a cruise ship. According to its promotional material, the book juxtaposes “the lavishness of a dream vacation with the horrors that lurk around the corner. “
The Courters have a story for everything. The first time they met, when Phil was interviewed at the company where Gay worked. (“He moved here before he even started his job, and we never went on a date. “) The time they took a small plane to their son’s graduation and crashed in a field, triggering a revelation that led them to adopt their daughter. at the age of twelve. The moment they were invited to the White House. The time they were on vacation with a long-time serial killer. Gay’s young people call her mom without a filter. Ask him to tell you about her formative years (she lived in Japan when she was six) and he will mention that her father once bought an aircraft carrier. “Easy to locate under “Leonard Weisman” and “U. S. S. ” Attu’”, she told me. One of the first things that pops up when you Google those terms is an article that identifies Weisman as likely a member of the Sonneborn Institute, an arms trafficking group. If Forrest Gump, who appears on the sidelines of various ancient events, were a family, it could be the Courtiers. Except the Brokers’ stories, no matter how far-fetched, tend to be true.
February 2, 2020 was intended to be his penultimate day aboard the Diamond Princess. For breakfast, Gay ordered the “famous James Beard French toast,” which he expected throughout the holidays. He later failed the quiz, leading his team to victory by answering that the largest Japanese population outside of Japan is in Brazil. I had not yet had the courage to ask for a souvenir photo with Gennaro Arma, the “devilishly handsome” captain of the ship, who looked like “a stupid old woman”. Still, the couple thought it was good luck before heading out to see “Bravo!” “, widely identified as the cruise ship’s most productive exhibit.
That night, as the Brokers were packing, the shipping intercom crackled, filling their cabin with Captain Arma’s voice. He said the Hong Kong government had informed him that a passenger on the shipment had tested positive for COVID-19. One of the Brokers’ friends had sent them articles about this new illness, but this was the first clue that something was wrong aboard the Diamond Princess. The Japanese government, Arma said, will conduct an examination of the shipment when it docks in Yokohama. “I will keep you informed of the evolution of the situation,” he promised in a worried tone.
The Diamond Princess was the site of a primary COVID outbreak and the first cruise ship to be quarantined during the pandemic. More than 3,700 passengers and their crew were stranded on board for two weeks as the government struggled to figure out what to do. The courtiers tried to be cheerful. Gay has taken out his emergency snacks, adding a small salt shaker that he carries everywhere, because you never know. But temporarily things got scary. At one point, the World Health Organization announced that more than half of the COVID cases shown outside of China were aboard the Diamond Princess.
As the virus invaded the decks, the Courters became minor celebrities, pushing for evacuation in newspaper editorials and on cable news. “I don’t think we’re safe on this boat,” Gay told ABC. “Frankly, it’s scary. It’s terrifying. like a criminal camp. Eventually, more than seven hundred passengers contracted the virus and at least fourteen other people died. The Courters eventually returned home on a cargo plane chartered through the State Department and were forced to quarantine at a military base for another fortnight. . Finally back in Florida, Gay began writing a quarantine memoir. He wrote of the surprise of being “for a moment a carefree cruise ship and then taken hostage by a foreign government. “
To make up for this ordeal, Princess Cruises gave each guest credits to use on some other Array. Some had had enough and refused. But two years later, in early June 2022, the Courters flew to England, where they boarded the Island Princess for a two-week excursion around Norway. It was a relatively quiet excursion: glaciers, a fishing museum. Gay named Pining for the Fjords, after a Monty Python comic.
On 29 June, Island Princess returned to port in England. That morning, the courtiers told me, they learned that the ship’s officers wanted to talk to them. They asked them to surrender their passports and escorted them off the ship. On land, they are told that they have been arrested on the basis of European arrest warrants, in connection with money laundering, concerted crime and trafficking in cultural property: gold bars from the frigate Príncipe de Conty that crashed off the coast of Brittany in 1746. .
Gold is known as “the king of metals” for its rarity, durability and dazzling beauty. Although it is no longer the highest value of local metals from a purely monetary point of view (rhodium now obtains this honor thanks to the catalyst), gold retains an unprecedented primacy in the human psyche. Alchemists believed they would discover the secret of eternal life if they could turn lead into gold; The imperialists have massacred millions of people in search of this substance. The golden calf, the golden fleece, the golden ratio, the golden hour, the golden goose: everything made of gold is deeply desirable, leading those who seek it to ruin or madness.
Freud believed that gold brought out all that was greedy in human nature, comparing man’s fetish to that of a baby clinging to his excrement. During excavations and dives, a kind of gold rush can appear. “Gold makes others uncontrollable,” an archaeologist recently explained to me. The wreck of the Prince of Conty likely sparked turmoil in the gold: a persistent rumor has it that the ship and its treasure were cursed from the start. The strength of the legend only deepened with the tribulations of a varied organization of sailors, speculators, divers, looters, and researchers who became obsessed with the treasure of shipping before the Brokers’ bullion or finally dragged them under their influence.
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The Prince of Conty first sailed from Lorient on April 2, 1745. Her owner was the French East India Company, created under Louis XIV. The ship was designed to carry six hundred tons of shipping while remaining fast and maneuverable. Her team Of two hundred and twenty-three men there were fourteen carpenters, five pilots, a butcher, a baker, a sailmaker, an editor and a chaplain. Many were teenagers. The youngest of them was twelve years old. The chief surgeon carried a trepanation kit, in case it was necessary to drain blood from a person’s brain after a blow to the head or a trip.
From Lorient, the Prince traveled south, along the western coast of Africa, passing between the Canary Islands and Cape Verde, then rounding the Cape of Good Hope before arriving, despite everything, six months later, in the Chinese town from Guangzhou, now called Guangzhou. Coming out of the season a little late, the shipment ran into monstrous storms and lost several men. But an announcement was a long-term bet. A shipment like the Prince was the equivalent of an Amazon truck in the 18th century, with delivery times calculated in years rather than days or hours. In Canton, stevedores loaded shipments with luxury items: ivory fans, painted silks, wallpaper, porcelain. , shellac, tea, rhubarb, sappan wood and sarsaparilla root, appreciated for its effectiveness in the treatment of syphilis.
By the mid-18th century, it was possible for gold to be purchased more profitably in China than in Europe. Sailors were discouraged from entering into secondary agreements with foreign destinations, but the practice was widely tolerated, especially among the officer class, as a benefit for accepting paintings that involved mortal risk. “Everyone who set out on one of those ships did so with the goal of making a fortune,” Brigitte Nicolas, director of the French East India Company museum near Lorient, told me. She said gold is “the secret product” of the company’s missions in China, which weighs heavily on minds and pockets. For smugglers, the most practical format is ingot. Some were shaped like shoes, others were rectangles reminiscent of chocolate bars. Another type known as “pain”, because of its resemblance to a wand. They were all small enough to fit in the palm of your hand and heavy, weighing about 13 ounces, a little more than a can of soup. One expert estimates that around a hundred ingots were on board the Prince de Conty when he undertook his adventure back to France.
The return was catastrophic. Scurvy appeared; The English pirates attacked; The ship’s captain, Charles Bréart de Boisanger, was seriously wounded in action. When they were taken closer to France, they were “very, very beaten people,” Nicolas said. On December 2, 1746, after twenty months at sea, the Prince and her crew were several nautical miles off the Breton coast, just a few hours away from completing their project and returning to land.
Then, in the middle of the afternoon, the wind picked up. The fog lifted and the sea rose, shaking the Prince violently as the rain lashed his threadbare sails. At around four in the morning, the boat crashed on the rocky coast of Belle-Île. -en-Mer, an island in Brittany. The impact was so violent that the ship’s hull broke in two. “It was a hellish night,” said Nicolas. Fewer than seventy of the one hundred and ninety men who had managed to get to this point survived the sinking.
The French East India Company rushed to recover its losses by sending a rescue party. “We are cutting wood and collecting it in the most sensitive part of the cliff, but this wood is so damaged that most of it will only be used as firewood. ” an architect named Guillois, who is in charge of leading the efforts, wrote to the company. Villagers piled up shipwrecks and dried soaked silks on rocks. Guillois warned that the inhabitants, “accustomed to looting,” might simply “go down the road. ” night without being detected”, so the company has installed guards in a cabin on the cliff to monitor the wreckage day and night.
The government sent a ship to dredge the area, but the operation yielded few results. Undeterred, they ordered a diving bell, the latest generation from Paris. Divers recovered copper vessels, among other items, but the most valuable consignment remained elusive, as it appears to have been a small cache of gold discovered by a twelve-year-old boy, who temporarily disappeared from the site.
During a sea voyage, gold, even if it was illicit, was regularly stored in boxes like any other commodity. But Captain de Boisanger, taking advantage of a maritime tradition that exempted officials from searches for marks, was to bring his ingots to their user and make a kind of belt. Other officials likely followed suit, complicating their own escape from the rubble and the company’s search efforts. “The total amount of gold that was on board this shipment suggests that, even if we don’t locate everything, we deserve to at least have hope of recovering some of it,” Guillois wrote. Did he sink to the bottom of the ocean with the corpses of De Boisanger and his men, or did someone discreetly flee with him the day after the shipwreck?
In the spring of 1974, Patrick Lizé had a toothache. He went to see a dentist not far from the small Norman village where he lived. As he is being stung, Lizé, a swimming teacher, tells him about her fondness for marine archaeology, especially the shipwrecks of the eighteenth century. The dentist told him to contact his neighbor, who had just plunged into the Mediterranean in search of Greek and Roman relics.
The neighbor was an architect named Jean-Claude Lescure, and the two men became friends with an unusual interest. Lizé said he had rummaged through the dusty archives of the National Archives, looking for imaginable shipwrecks. He had discovered a promising candidate: the Prince de Conty, who, if he was right, had been forgotten and untouched for two centuries, off the coast of Belle-Île. Lizé had unearthed the Guillois report, which took stock of the Prince’s generosity. A map of the place, “a true treasure map, in short,” he would later write in his memoirs. He and Lescure made the decision that they and their families would spend their holidays in Belle-Île that summer.
As the call suggests, Belle-Île is charming and secluded. The largest of the islands of Brittany, it is only about ten miles long and five miles wide. Time, in the Breton way, changes infinitely, the emerald seas and the sapphire The skies of one minute give way, in the next, to a gray darkness without a horizon. The island is said to have “two faces”: a north coast with sandy beaches and a much more rugged south coast, with steep cliffs and wild, rugged coastlines. Seas. The wind has reshaped the island’s rocks into surreal shapes. Even in summer, the wind can blow so hard that moss spreads over the cliff tops, making it look like it’s snowing. Claude Monet was so enchanted by Belle-Île that he painted some 40 paintings there. He wrote that he felt “powerless to represent the intensity” of the ocean.
Lizé and Lescure arrived on the island in August and made their way to the domain indicated in archival documents, an inconspicuous cove known as Port Lost-Kah. (The call means “cat’s tail” in Breton. ) “We put on our wetsuits with indescribable impatience, put on our devices and jumped into the water full of history,” Lizé later wrote. They dived for twenty-eight days and discovered nothing of interest. But Lizé made up her mind, searching, she wrote, “each and every one and every one and every hole, each and every one and every defect, each and every one and every crack, each and every one and every one and every fissure, lifting each and every one and every one and every stone. “Finally, after almost a month of failure, they cleaned up some algae and felt a lump on the ocean floor: a cannonball!The discovery of fragments of porcelain and sappan wood proved that they were on the trail of the Prince.
Back home, they planned a return to the island, this time with heavy machinery. During a dinner by the pool, they presented the commission to Guy Lépinay, a local notary, who agreed to take care of the logistics. ” At first, “I do it just for fun,” Lépinay recalls in her own book. “But I thought: why not?” They have pledged to divide the spoils in three ways. ” The preference for adventure hung in the air,” writes Lépinay.
The organization returned to Belle-Île with thermal compressors and a suction dredger. One afternoon, as Lizé approached the shore to stop for the day, she saw a U-shaped steel object on the ocean floor. black bark, but at last he saw “a small necklace of gold, the presence and nature of which he may not be able to explain. “He pulled out his knife and cut off a piece of fragment. On land, he showed it to Lescure. They agreed: wrought gold. The men bought a canvas suitcase at the port, packed the object inside and took it back to Normandy.
French law requires anyone who discovers “any deposit, shipwreck, vestige or object of prehistoric, archaeological or ancient interest” in French waters to claim it from the government within forty-eight hours. This regulation aims to ensure that cultural property remains intact and accessible, that it is hoarded or sold through speculators. As Olivia Hulot, head of the Department of Underwater and Underwater Archaeological Research (DRASSM), recently explained, “You can’t walk into the Louvre and take a painting off the wall because I love it. “
The embedded object obviously qualified as cultural property, even more so when treasure hunters cleaned it, revealing that the shiny piece was actually an ingot stamped with Chinese ideograms. Later, Lizé and Lescure would say that they reported the shipwreck of the Prince to a local fisherman, who intended to constitute the maritime authority of Belle-Île. Lépinay affirms that his members had agreed to take care of the procedures and he took them at their word. In any case, no member of the organization notified the relevant DRASSM officials until more than two months later. The men argue over who was in favor of the declaration from the beginning and who resisted the idea; in fact, they disagree on almost everything about this entire issue. Lépinay told me that Lizé was “an excellent liar and criminal. ” Lizé insisted that it was he who had been tricked and said that she had noticed that Lescure put bullion in his suit on a dive. “He was very, very naive,” Emmanuelle, Lizé’s daughter, told me. “It’s a global shark and my father didn’t protect himself. “
When Lizé, despite everything, declared to the Prince, behind the backs of his partners, he did not mean that he had discovered gold, mentioning only “five completely corroded cannons. ” The DRASSM granted him permission to assemble the guns and, in the summer of 1975, he returned to Belle-Île with a new team. According to witnesses, the place temporarily degenerated into chaos. People came and went like modern children at the end of a birthday party, invading the insides of a piñata. One diver, recalling In a “bleak” atmosphere, claimed to have seen Lizé emerge from the water with bullion on a previous dive. Journalist Nicolas Jacquard recently wrote in Le Parisien that Lizé and his acolytes “were skinning the Conty’s remains like a bunch of piranhas. ” leave a corpse blank. “
Meanwhile, the Lescure family, also on holiday in Belle-Île, watched what Lizé and her new team were doing. Based on Lescure’s data, DRASSM raided the site and virtually detected the dive. François, Lescure’s son, then fifteen years old, was already an old man, observing the government’s technique with binoculars from the top of a cliff. “They had four black Zodiacs,” he recalls. It was like a James Bond movie. “As he watched, he felt a hand on his back. ” All of a sudden, this thug came up to us,” he said. “He took me by the shoulders and said, ‘I’d like to throw you off this cliff. “
Composite correspondence circulated across the country as opposing sides tried to convince the government that they were law-abiding citizens caught up in someone else’s shady plot. “I now put myself in the position of a villain, while those who point out “I cannot move the same finger to provide evidence with the same vigor,” Lizé wrote in a letter to the French president’s wife, Madame Giscard d’Or. Estaing. He has become a famous treasure hunter and has found dozens of other shipwrecks, but a shadow hangs over his reputation. “You perceive that this scenario is unbearable for the marine archeology enthusiast that I am,” he wrote to an official. “Who hasn’t made a mistake in their life?
The arguments revived the old concept that the Prince could simply be cursed. Connoisseurs of nautical mysteries knew that, before the frigate crashed on the rocks of Belle-Île, the French East India Company owned another ship of the same name, lost off the coast of Louisiana, and that in 1753, the company had introduced a 3rd Prince, which fell into the hands of English pirates. Proponents of the curse theory spoke of centuries of death, wounds, ruin, struggles, and dreams damaged in the rocks. Lépinay, reflecting on her own tragedies related to shipping, wondered if she “suffered from a macabre predestination. “When Lescure died in a car accident in 1980, some of her relatives insisted that her closeness to the Prince was to blame.
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While rumors circulated (gold locked in briefcases, gold hidden in attics and car trunks, gold entrusted to elderly mothers), the French prosecutor’s office opened an investigation. They confiscated all loot from the three subsidiaries and their various subsidiaries after a series of searches. , however, they were only able to recover two ingots. Dozens of names were discussed during the investigation, but the government nevertheless brought charges against only five people, including Lizé and Lépinay. After a trial in 1983, Lizé was sentenced to a fine of 40,000 francs for receiving stolen goods, while Lépinay and the others obtained lesser sentences.
Lizé was devastated by the trial and its implication that he was more of a thief than a brilliant scholar. “He was humiliated by a small administrative error,” her daughter explained. Lépinay, on the other hand, did not give it much of an idea and called it “starling pee. ” Both men thought the case was closed.
In early 1981, excitement spread across West Florida. “French boating family visits Crystal River,” the Suncoast Sentinel announced, featuring Gérard and Annette Pesty and their children, Sylthrune (four years old) and Eric (eight months). They had just arrived in their fifty-foot trimaran, the Architeuthis. Gérard was a pharmacist by training and Annette was a laboratory studies assistant. The couple had to “let loose,” the article explains, traveling the world and recording their experience in books and documentaries. They were now traveling across North America, having come from Canada to Florida, across the Mississippi, “to see the manatees, which they pronounce ‘man-atty’. ” »
Gay recalls: “Once we saw the story of this French couple with similar interests and young people about the same age as our children, we thought, ‘Well, we go over and meet these people. ‘” One day, the Courters were handed over to their motorboat and headed to the center of the bay, where the Architeuthis was anchored. There they were: Annette with the baby on her back, weighing anchor; Sylviane doing gymnastics on the rigging; Gérard, stained with oil and grease, fiddles with the engine compartment. To courtiers the family seemed to embody the kind of life they strove to create: rich in information and self-sufficient, but open to the world. “Annette was washing diapers and they were tied to a rope,” Gay said. “She impressed me. “
The friendship temporarily deepened. In 1984, the families were vacationing together near Great Inagua, an island in the Bahamas known for its flamingos. The Pestys spent their summers in France, running their pharmacy, so they could travel the rest of the year. the Architeuthis at Crystal River, where courtiers looked after the ship and dealt with various practical matters on its behalf. “It was all very relaxed and trust-based,” Gay told me.
The Courters speak fondly of this time of “young families doing pretty crazy things”: swimming with humpback whales, flying single-engine planes, “sharing our dreams, our problems, our young people. “A photograph from the time shows two with their torso naked. , sun-drenched young men perched on the crossbars of an imposing mast, with some other child climbing to the top. When the Brokers’ cat had kittens, they gave one to Pesty. ” We’ve become his American family, and vice versa,” Gay said. The deeper bond that Phil or I have with our brothers. “
One day in 1986, Gérard Pesty made an impromptu appearance in Crystal River. “Come in, open this briefcase full of gold, and we’re like, ‘Oh my God,'” Phil recalls. According to the courtiers, Pesty owned about twenty ingots. He says that they came from a French shipwreck and that, later, his sister and brother-in-law, Brigitte and Yves Gladu, a famous underwater photographer, had found them on a dive in Brittany. Pesty’s account was a bit vague, but Gay and Phil had more fun than anything else. “Gerard was a madman with so many irons in the fire,” Gay said. Pesty took the bars out of the briefcase and showed them to the children. “They played with them like Legos,” Gay told me. Honestly, we thought it was great. “
It’s the right time to unload a stash of gold. A few months earlier, Christie’s had auctioned off the treasures recovered from the Geldermalsen, a Dutch ship sunk off the coast of Indonesia in 1752. The so-called Nanking Cargo had fetched record prices: about forty-three thousand dollars for a “fish dish. “Eighty thousand for the rare kind of shoe-shaped ingot that sank with the prince. Pesty told the courtiers that the good fortune of the sale motivated the Gladus to sell their gold. . He had gone to Miami, he said, to meet a broker of rare coins; before that, he had gone to London, where he had sold three bars to the British Museum. He asked the courtiers if they would be willing to keep the gold while he was in France, as he hoped to find an American buyer.
If it wasn’t a typical day in the Courter household, it wasn’t absolutely abnormal either. (Ashley Rhodes-Courter, the Courters’ second daughter, remembers spending her first family vacation with a dozen Chinese railroad engineers that Phil and Gay had invited for Thanksgiving. ) “We asked some questions,” Phil said. The brokers spoke to a customs official, who showed them that antique gold was not subject to import duties. On her way to New York to meet his literary agent, Gay packed a bar in his bag and went to see an expert from the American Numismatic Society, who vouched for his authenticity. “We thought, wow, it’s the British Museum who’s buying it, so it’s going to have to be legit,” Phil said.
The Brokers unscrewed a soft device and, for a moment, hid the ingots in the ceiling. Finally, they were transferred to a safe. When Gérard Pesty and Yves Gladu opened bank accounts in the United States, Phil was a signatory. Every year, he says, he made sure his friends completed their tax paperwork and filed it with the IRS.
In 1997, the Courters’ youngest son joined the Pestys to travel to Île-à-Vache, an island off the coast of Haiti. Towards the end of the journey, Gerard suddenly fell very ill. He was at an airport, looking to catch a flight to a post with greater medical services, when he collapsed on his son’s lap and died. Annette had a high fever and her skin was turning yellow. Someone called the courtiers and told them what was going on.
“Palaria falciparum!” exclaimed Gay, the deadliest form of the parasite in humans. The courtiers arranged for Annette to be flown to Gainesville. “When they took us to the hospital, I was obsessed, hysterical and screaming, but they heard me,” Gay said. After Gérard’s death, the families remained united. The Courtiers traveled around the world with Annette and the Gladus, who now owned their own giant ship. Annette began to tell other people that she was alive only because of the courtiers.
When Michel L’Hour saw the Prince of Conty, he had been thinking about shipping for several years. In 1983, as a new recruit of the DRASSM, he testified in the trial of Lizé and Lépinay, proving that the shipments were shipwrecks. “essential witnesses of the history of humanity, pages of our collective history that deserve to be studied”. The experience left him frustrated. The trial was very strange,” he recalls. “Nobody seemed to care. ” Then, in the summer of 1985, L’Hour was asked to lead one of his first primary dives, at the Prince’s site.
At the time, DRASSM was a young organization with few resources. L’Hour and a colleague camped on the side of the Lost-Kah cliff, sharing a tent. They didn’t have the budget for heavy machinery, but L’Hour was so determined to get it that he invited Lizé to dive, believing that, despite his conviction, “at the end of the day, he was the one who knew the most productive place. “(Emmanuelle Lizé calls L’Hour a “venal and pretentious” hypocrite, who called her father a con man while he was profiting from his work. ) For two weeks, it rained every day. The water was so unforgiving that the L’Hour crew might as well have dipped into a washing machine. It was highly unlikely to anchor a ship, so when their dive tanks ran out of air, they climbed the slippery cliff with their diving boots, reloaded. the tanks and went back down.
The site had already been explored (via Guillois, in the 1740s, and via Lizé, in the 1970s), but L’Hour and his team managed to recover some items of ancient value. He was moved in particular through a modest crucifix which, he wrote, “can only remind us of the extent to which the maritime sector was exposed to risks that many perhaps only face through faith. “The team discovered three ingots: not nothing, but not the breakup they had dreamed of. Despite his distaste for the “frantic search for gold,” even L’Hour, taking the bars in his hands for the first time, felt a sure magic. He recalls: “It’s crazy, it seems as if nothing had happened, as if no time had passed, between the guy who played them in Canton in 1745 and me, who held them NOW. During the third week, a violent typhoon hit the team, crashing the team’s Zodiac into the rocks and breaking its propeller, thus ending the operation.
L’Hour was already one of the world’s leading experts on the Prince, but shipping has now become a personal obsession. He maintained contacts in the treasure hunting community, gaining a reputation as someone who can be trusted with sensitive information. Born in Tunisia, where his father built roads for the French colonial government, he was an intelligent and taciturn child. “Either you are a communicator and a confident person,” his mother would tell him on rare occasions. The Hour exploited this dual nature in the service of the Prince, transforming itself into “a kind of computer”, provoking gossip and hypotheses in a probably informal way, and then filing them away without saying a word. “I had the Prince in mind, but I didn’t communicate it, even if I went back there every now and then to dive in and keep an eye on things,” L’Hour told me. He followed each and every lead, no matter how far-fetched.
At one point, he received an anonymous phone call asking him for an appointment in Paris. La Hora arrived at the appointed time at a giant café, where it greeted through a guy who claimed to possess several gold bars bought from someone who had looted El Príncipe. L’Hour considered himself a pragmatist and hoped to be able to negotiate some kind of agreement. But when he informed his superiors about the availability of gold, he was told that a negotiation for the bullion was out of the question. “Okay, we didn’t negotiate with the terrorists, but the hostage is dead,” L’Hour said recently, still annoyed by the “crazy Parisian” agents. The guy came out of the café and L’Hour never saw him. Again.
One day, a source gave L’Hour an intriguing photograph. It showed a score of gold bars scattered on the ocean floor, some hidden between the legs of rust-colored starfish. “This photo gave me evidence of something I’ve known for a long time, that at least one user who looted the site in the ’70s wasn’t caught red-handed. “‘Time remembered. At the moment, you may simply not use photography without revealing your source. “But I knew that one day it would be convenient,” he said. He kept it in a safe and made sure to lock the door to his workplace every day when he went to lunch.
Over the course of his forty-year career, L’Hour has become a vital figure in marine archaeology: “Indiana Jones in a wetsuit,” as one nickname goes. In 2006 he became director of DRASSM. He travels the planet, searching for wrecks from Gabon to the Philippines, but has never stopped following the Prince. One day in 2017, he won an email from an old contact with a link to a California auction space called Stephen Album Rare Coins. In addition to Transylvanian ducats and Tibetan srangs, the space featured five gold bars, four baguettes and a chocolate bar, valued between twenty-two and thirty thousand dollars each. “Almost the same to the ingots from the remains of the French East India Company send to the Prince of Conty and to the Dutch East India Company Geldermalsen,” says the copy of the catalog.
L’Hour could not understand what he saw. “It was kind of a Christmas present,” she said. The directory even included a link to a 1999 episode of “Antiques Roadshow,” which featured a sublime woman in a gold cardigan. She had come with old china and a couple of gold ingots which she claimed she had discovered near the Cape Verde Islands, about thirty meters underwater. The show was filmed in Florida. L’Hour detected an accent. “She spoke English very well, but I thought, ‘She’s French,'” she told me. The woman seemed a little uncomfortable and she shook her head as she spoke, but it was very unlikely to know whether her discomfort was due to anxiety about appearing on television, speaking in a certain language, or something deeper.
The woman had a photograph to illustrate her presentation. There it was, leaning against a small easel: a printed copy of twenty gold bars and a rust-colored starfish, just like the photograph L’Hour had hidden in a safe place years before. “I thought, Fuck, this is it!” L’Hour called again. He had a feeling that the woman was lying about the origin of the gold, so he went to see if a biologist could identify the starfish. Word spread: the species is found in shallow waters, such as those at the Prince of Conty site, but not in waters as deep as those described by the woman.
L’Hour was sure that the ingots had been received illegally, but he did not recognize the woman. He began to review his old lists of suspects. During the investigation in the 1980s, police confiscated several objects, as well as photographs, belonging to Gladu. He had joined Lisé’s dive team as an underwater photographer, and his call had appeared several times in L’Hour’s investigations over the years, but no one had ever been able to definitively link him to the sacking of the Prince. The Hour checked the Gladu family’s Facebook profiles and discovered that the woman in the TV clip Annette Pesty, the widow of Brigitte Glau’s brother and the expensive friend of the runners.
L’Hour had been chasing bullion for thirty-five years. A kind of Javert of the Prince of Conty, he had dedicated his life to bringing the gold bars out of oblivion and protecting the wreck. In 2009, he had warned a The admiral said that the place, “once the victim of systematic looting,” is seriously damaged “by clandestine acts that, it seems to me, have never ceased. “He called a colleague at the Ministry of Culture and suggested that he alert the United States Department of Homeland Security.
After their arrest in England, the Courters were brought to London for an initial hearing. When asked if they would accept extradition to France, they refused. They were each granted bail of a thousand pounds, but they did not have the money on hand nor were they allowed to go to an ATM, so they were sent to criminals: Gay in Bronzefield and Phil in Wandsworth. Gay, diabetic, he spent hours without food or medication. Phil was strip searched.
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In their cells, they tried to master the contours of their plight. They knew that French authorities were investigating the provenance of the gold bars and had won questions from the French government through a U. S. prosecutor. But their longtime lawyers confided in them that they had not done anything illegal. They were pleaded with only answering questions in exchange for immunity, as the gold did not belong to them, and France may not do much about it anyway. They were unaware that a French judgment had issued arrest and extradition warrants in the context of trafficking in “national treasures belonging to France”. Gay’s warrant called her “owner of a King Charles Spaniel” and described her, cruelly, as “of giant build. “
Gay had volunteered as a mother ad litem in Florida courts for twenty-five years and was terrified at the prospect of extradition to France, fearing that she and Phil would never be able to protect themselves in an unfamiliar legal formula in a single language. Do not speak. “I think suicide was the most productive option if it came down to it,” she told me. “I think it’s the only secret I’ve kept from Phil. ” Once they were released on bail, they were cleared of criminal charges and took an Uber to Cambridge.
The Brokers arrived at a space that belonged to Suzanne and John Curran. “We had met twenty years before a home exchange,” Suzanne recalls. “Then we kept in touch vaguely, like you do: Christmas cards and all. “Before their cruise to Norway, the Courters had stopped in Cambridge for afternoon tea with the Currans. Suzanne said: “We fired them and I personally thought it would probably be the last time we would see them. “,” had become his unwitting visitors for the indefinite future.
For months, the Courts remained in the dark. They racked up lawyers, eventually racking up more than six hundred thousand dollars in legal fees and living expenses, even though they had not yet been charged with a crime. “The injustices of European arrest warrant formulas are notorious,” extradition lawyer Edward Fitzgerald, who accuses Julian Assange and worked briefly on the Courters case, told me, explaining that France is not obliged to provide evidence to requesting extradition from the country. The rate of criminal activity would probably be enough. “The decision by the French to consider an arrest warrant is unfair in their case,” he added. (The French government declined to comment on the case. ) Courters exhausted their savings and had to borrow money from friends. In August of that year, they missed the birth of their new grandson in October, they had been stranded in England for almost a hundred days. , his daughter told me.
One day, in an attempt to distract themselves, Gay and Phil visited the Fitzwilliam Museum. Pretty much the first thing they saw when they entered the gallery was Monet’s 1886 portrait of a lion-shaped rock at Belle-Île. The Brokers had never been to the island, but now it seemed inevitable. It was as if the Prince of Conty’s curse taunted them from a golden frame. They wondered if Monet had ever felt the ship’s intense aura. “We like to think of the gold under the sea while Monet painted without knowing the wreck. Array Array, or maybe it is,” Gay once wrote to me.
In spring 2021, French police searched the homes of Annette Pesty and Brigitte and Yves Gladu. According to Le Parisien, when the police entered, Brigitte and Annette stood aside. “They discovered water for the mill,” she whispers, not knowing that the government has tapped her phone. The searches turned up a multitude of evidence: photographs, bank statements, letters from brokers detailing the sale of bullion. Next, the Government confiscated the twelve-meter-long Gladus catamaran, purchased in 2010 for one hundred and eighty-five thousand euros.
During a hearing, Yves Gladu admitted to having made about 40 dives at the Prince de Conty site in the 1970s and up to 1999. He and his spouse kept their bullion in a blue steel box in their attic, a kind of clandestinity. He says that they have been able to use all their lives, magically recovering cash under the sea. L’Hur told me that he had become suspicious of the way Gladu, whom he knew quite well after years of running in the same milieu, kept quiet whenever the subject of the Prince came up. L’Hour said he believed Gladu “put his hands in the hold of the ship,” which he called “the Mona Lisa of underwater archaeology. “
Gladu admitted to having promoted around twenty bars in Switzerland. “My fingers were burning,” he told the court. Brigitte added that locating the gold “was unexpected, fabulous. ” However, they denied any link to the treasure the Pestys entrusted to the Brokers. (Through their attorneys, the Gladu’s declined to comment; Annette Pesty’s attorney responded to a request for comment. ) A trial is expected in 2025.
Since his arrest, the Courts had attempted to locate a French lawyer. Finally, after three months of confinement, Grégory Lévy and Aurélie Boulbin joined his team. The new lawyers were able to explain some key differences between the American legal formula and the French legal formula: the former operates according to an adversarial model, for example, while the latter uses an investigative model, granting broader powers to make judgments in the collection of tests. phase. Array “They had no information,” Lévy said of the Courters. Furthermore, it seemed that his arrest could have been avoided altogether: it turned out that the French issued arrest warrants only after an offer of immunity, misplaced or misunderstood by Florida Courters’ lawyers. he gave no answer. (The company did not respond to a request for comment. ) The Courters say they only found out about the immunity they will offer after hiring French lawyers. Lévy and Boulbin immediately contacted the judge, who agreed to depose in court via Zoom. She officially charged them with receiving stolen goods and money laundering, but withdrew her extradition request. Gay and Phil collected their passports and, a few days later, returned home.
The brokers, who are now linked to the case as cooperating parties, acknowledge that they did not ask safe and applicable questions about the gold. “Now, hunting backwards, is that what we were thinking about?”Gay takes responsibility for what she calls the “‘Antiques Roaddisplay’ fiasco,” having encouraged Annette to attend the show following a call from a maker friend. “We had valuable netsukes and two matching ivory enthusiasts that had been given to my father through Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek,” he recalls. “Annette was living with us at the time and I talked about gold. “After the show aired, Gay sold 3 bars on eBay. “We were getting older and finishing our office,” he told me. We didn’t need to have to deal with it anymore. »
The Courters say they have told the truth about the origin of the passes, though the manager of the California auction space told the government that Gay “stated that she had owned those bars for about 15 years and that they were originally discovered in the Cape Verde Islands. The auction catalogue does not mention Cape Verde, but insists on the resemblance of the inpasts to those of the Geldermalsen and the Prince de Conty, without directly specifying that they come from the latter shipwreck. When I asked Alegre about this, he told me that the auction site had “manipulated” the catalog listing. The French lawyers for the Courters question the couple’s innocence. “We are going to check that there was no criminal intent,” Lévy told me. “They sold on eBay. When you need to sell something you don’t go to eBay, do you?
The National Security Decomposition made us decide that the auction house bullion rightfully belonged to France, despite competing claims from the Chinese government. (David Keller, a Homeland Security agent, told me the affair nearly gave him “an aneurysm. “) At a “repatriation ceremony” held at the French embassy in 2022, a Homeland Security official said the decomposition was “proud to have played a role in ensuring those artifacts remain part of French history for them to enjoy. ” future generations. ” However, the British government has remained silent about the three gold bars remaining in the British Museum’s collection. This despite the fact that, according to the museum’s website, they were acquired from “G Pesty” and arrived here from the remains of the Prince of Conty. (“P Courter” also appears in two listings, however, the Courters say this is an error arising from Phil’s prestige as a signatory on the Pesty bank account. ) He declined to answer questions about the ingots, saying only that the museum is “actively seeking a solution to this factor and has worked in cooperation with the relevant authorities. “
The Hour continues to search for the ship’s treasure and, in his retirement, has become a strong advocate for prosecuting the “morbidly greedy criminals” who looted the prince. He is the author of a new essay on the ship’s “broken fate,” published recently. published to accompany an exhibition at the French East India Company Museum. “In Port Lost-Kah, a frozen world wishes to come back to life to better tell the story of this humanity,” he wrote, urging French cities to finance a new expedition. For him, the Prince was “first a maritime tragedy, then a cultural one”, caused by “pathological greed”.
Whatever the explanation—thirst for gold, bad luck, curse—the Prince of Conty continues to sow bad luck among those around him, even two hundred and seventy-eight years after his death. The courtiers paid a high price for primero. de it all seemed like a fortuitous obligation. It is unlikely that they will set foot in Europe again; In fact, they have stopped traveling almost completely.
Phil discovers that it is difficult to communicate what happened. Gay talks about it all the time, spending hours on the internet, blogging about the intricacies of extradition law. “Was our scenario typical or unusual?” he asked recently. How many other people without our privileges or resources are detained abroad without charge?Both are facing physical and intellectual fitness disorders caused by this ordeal. “It’s no exaggeration to say that nothing in my life prepared me for this and I’m no longer the same user I used to be,” Gay told me. Due to pending legal issues, the courtiers have not spoken to Annette Pesty or the Gladus for several years. Brokers consider the loss of their old friends to be as vital an outcome as the blows to their reputation, well-being, and finances. Gay said: “Gold was a small fragment of our shared life, meaningless until it wasn’t. » ♦
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