I was jailed after a friend appeared on Antiques Roadshow – the gold he gave us was ‘cursed’
GRANDPARENTS who unwittingly held onto and tried to sell gold bars that had been previously stolen from an 18th-century shipwreck have shared the harrowing details of their ordeal.
Philip and Gay Courter were arrested on June 29, 2022, in connection with money laundering, organized crime, and the trafficking of cultural goods – but say they had no idea the bars were stolen.
Instead, the couple has claimed they were asked to hold onto the bars with a French couple they became friendly with and vacationed with in the 80s, they told The New Yorker.
Their link – and the French couple’s involvement with the stolen goods – was only first uncovered when the bars were recognized on an episode of Antiques Roadshow.
The Courters were arrested two years ago as they tried to disembark the Island Princess cruise ship on the south coast of England for a two-week tour of Norway.
The couple was only on the cruise after being granted it free for their experience on a cruise ship during the Covid pandemic.
The Courters said they were confused when they were asked for their passports and then jailed once they landed on shore.
While in jail Gay, a diabetic, went for hours without food or her medication while Philip was strip-searched.
The couple depleted their savings spending $300,000 on legal battles.
The couple’s daughter described her parents as “hollow shells of the people I knew,” she told the New Yorker.
“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,” Gay told the outlet.
They were released when their bail came through and had their arrest warrants dropped almost six months after they were issued.
The story that leads up to their arrest is one fit for a fairytale that fittingly first begins back in the 18th century.
The Prince de Conty was a warship that crashed off the coast of Brittany in 1746 after setting sail the previous year.
About six months into the ship voyage it stopped in the Chinese city Guangzhou.
The crew packed the ship with a variety of items including luxury goods, tea, ceramics, and around 100 gold bars.
Horror struck on December 2, 1746, after the Prince de Conty was shipwrecked due to a violent storm.
The warship was thrown onto the rocky coast of Belle-Île-en-Mer, an island in Brittany.
Over 70 of the 190 crew on board lost their lives after the crash.
The French East India Company who owned the warship sent out individuals to recover the gold bars but none were ever found.
Over 200 years later a team of divers visited the shipwreck site and recovered gold bars.
Anyone who discovers “any deposit, wreck, remnant, or item possessing prehistoric, archeological, or historical interest” in French waters hands it over to authorities within forty-eight hours, according to French law.
But gold bars that were discovered at the shipwreck were not handed over to French authorities.
Years later in 1985, Michel L’Hour who was a member of the Department of Underwater Archaeological Research (DRASSM) led a dive team to the Prince de Conty shipwreck.
L’Hour invited Emmanuelle Lizé who previously dived at the shipwrecked site in 1974.
After scouring the site for over a week L’Hour and his team managed to recover three gold bars.
“It’s crazy, you feel like nothing happened, like no time elapsed, between the guy who touched them in Canton in 1745 and me, holding them now,” L’Hour said.
A vicious storm derailed the dive but L’Hour began to grow a personal obsession with the Prince de Conty and its story.
L’Hour received a photograph from a source close to him of roughly twenty gold bars laid across the ocean floor with some in between starfish’s legs.
“That photo gave me proof of something that I’d known for a long time,” L’Hour said.
“Which was that at least one person who’d pillaged the site in the seventies hadn’t got caught with his hand in the bag.”
A FRIENDSHIP FORMS
Meanwhile, the Courters met sailing enthusiasts Gérard and Annette Pesty while on vacation in Crystal River, Florida, in 1981.
The couples grew closer to each other and began vacationing together.
As the couples grew closer they revealed to the New Yorker that Gérard had 20 gold bars.
He told Philip and Gay the gold bars had been recovered from a French shipwreck by Yves Gladu, a well-known underwater photographer.
Timeline of events
THE story of how Philip and Gay Courter were arrested began in 1746.
- 1746 – The warship Prince de Conty shipwrecks off the coast of Brittany carrying luxury goods and around 100 gold bars.
- 1974-1975 – An amateur team of French marine archeologists and divers locate Prince de Conty and recover gold bars without telling officials.
- 1981 – Gay and Philip Courter meet and become friends with Gérard and Annette Pesty in Crystal River, Florida
- 1985 – Michel L’Hour leads an official dive for French authorities at the site of the Prince’s shipwreck. Only three gold bars are recovered.
- 1986 – Gerard Pesty arrives at Philip and Gay’s home in Florida with a briefcase of around 20 gold bars. He asks them to keep hold of them while they look for an American buyer.
- 1999 – Annette Pesty appears on an episode of Antiques Roadshow with a couple of gold bars. She claims she discovered the treasures near the Cape Verde Islands.
- 2017 – L’Hour realizes Pesty also has gold bars from the shipwreck of the Prince de Conty following a tip-off from a source, which includes a link to the Antiques Roadshow episode and a recent listing at a California auction house.
- 2021 – French officials raid the homes of Annette Pesty and her relatives Brigitte and Yves Gladu. This came after the Pestys had revealed Yves, an underwater photographer, had recovered the gold during a dive in 1975.
- 2022 – Philip and Gay Courter are arrested on European warrants in connection with the stolen gold but charges are later dropped.
Gérard handed over the gold bars to Philip and Gay in 1986 and asked them to keep them for him while he looked for a buyer.
Annette also appeared on Antiques Roadshow years later in 1999 with more of the gold bars, claiming to have discovered them off the Cape Verde Islands.
She presented a photograph featuring roughly twenty gold bars and a rust-colored starfish.
It was revealed that the photograph was taken by Yves Gladu who was part of the dive team which recovered gold bars from the site years earlier.
Before Gérard handed the bars over to the Courters he sold three pieces to a British museum.
The Courters journeyed to see the gold bars and talked to the museum about them.
Once Gérard died in 1997 the Courters continued to sell the gold bars to help his family financially like he wanted.
Gay put five of the gold bars on sale through an auction in California in 2017, valued at $190,000, and they sold the following year.
But the Courters did not know France was previously investigating the missing gold bars since the 1980s filing charges against 12 people in 1983.
Within days of the sale, the gold was seized by U.S. Homeland Security.
“Homeland Security came to our house to ask about the gold and said it had been stolen from France, Gay Courter said.
After dealing with hardships after being involved in the gold ordeal the couple has had time to reminisce.
“Now, looking back, it’s, like, what were we thinking?” Philip said.