Best-Selling US Author to Stand Trial in France Over Gold From 1746 Shipwreck
A best-selling American author will stand trial in France over the resale of gold taken from an 18th-century shipwreck. Eleanor "Gay" Courter, 82, is one of five people charged with conspiracy, an agreement between people to commit a crime. The case will go before a criminal court in Brest, a port city in north-west France, on May 27, 2027, according to ARTnews.
Courter writes fiction, nonfiction and memoir, and has published best-selling books in all three forms. The charges against her do not involve her writing. They concern gold that investigators say came from a ship that sank long before she was born.
The ship was Le Prince de Conty, a French trading vessel that went down off the coast of Brittany in 1746. Its wreck was found in 1974, roughly 9 to 15 metres (30 to 50 feet) underwater near Belle-Île-en-Mer, an island off the Breton coast.
The trail started in 2018. Michel L'Hour reported a suspicious sale of five gold ingots, which are bars of metal cast in a mould, on the website of a US auction house. The five ingots were seized and returned to France in 2022. Investigators identified Gay Courter as the seller.
Her husband, Philip Courter, 84, is a film director. The other defendants are Yves Gladu, 79, a professional underwater photographer; his wife, Brigitte Gladu, 76; and Annette May Pesty, 80, Yves Gladu's sister-in-law. All five have been charged with conspiracy. Some of them also face charges of money laundering, which means disguising money from illegal activity so it looks legitimate, and of receiving stolen goods.
The Courters were detained in 2022 and placed under house arrest, meaning they had to stay at home. Investigators found they had held at least 23 gold bars, and had sold 18 of them for nearly US$200,000, according to ARTnews.
In 2022, while in custody, he confessed to taking 16 gold bars from Le Prince de Conty over 40 dives between 1976 and 1999. Investigators also found that he had known the Courters since the 1980s and had vacationed with them three times.
Annette May Pesty's name is tied to a 1999 appearance on Antiques Roadshow, the long-running television show in which members of the public bring objects to be valued by experts. She showed the gold on the programme and said she had found it while diving near Cape Verde, an island nation off West Africa.
Every person named here has been charged, and none has been tried. The charges are allegations that a court will examine in 2027. For now, the case rests on a sale that began with a report from one man, a seizure, and a trail that runs from a US auction website to a wreck on the Breton coast nearly 300 years ago.
