An 80-year-old US novelist and her husband are among several people facing a possible trial in France over the illegal sale of gold bars plundered from an 18th-century shipwreck after French prosecutors requested that the case go to court.
Eleonor “Gay” Courter and her husband, Philip, 82, have been accused of helping to sell the bullion online for a French diver who stole it decades ago. They have denied knowledge of any wrongdoing.
Le Prince de Conty, a French ship trading with Asia, sank off the coast of Brittany during a stormy night in the winter of 1746. Its wreck was discovered more than two centuries later, in 1974, lying in 10 to 15 metres (32-49ft) of water near the island of Belle-Île-en-Mer.
The wreck was looted in 1975 after a gold ingot was discovered during a site survey.
In the 1980s, archaeologists discovered fine 18th-century Chinese porcelain, the remains of tea crates, and three Chinese gold bars in and around the shipwreck. But a violent storm in 1985 dispersed the ship’s remains, ending official excavations.
In 2018, the head of France’s underwater archaeology department, Michel L’Hour, spotted a suspicious sale of five gold ingots on a US auction house website. He told US authorities he believed they hailed from the Prince de Conty and they seized the treasure, returning it to France in 2022.
Investigators identified the seller as Gay Courter, an author and film producer living in Florida. Courter said she had been given the precious metal by a couple of French friends, Annette May Pesty, now 78, and her partner Gerard, now deceased.
Pesty had told the TV series Antiques Roadshow in 1999 that she discovered the gold while diving off the west African island of Cape Verde. But investigators found this to be unlikely and instead focused on her brother-in-law Yves Gladu, an underwater photographer.
A 1983 trial had found five people guilty of embezzlement and receiving stolen goods over the plundering of the Prince de Conty. Gladu was not among them.
Held in custody in 2022, Gladu confessed to having retrieved 16 gold bars from the ship during about 40 dives on the site between 1976 and 1999. He said he had sold them all in 2006 to a retired member of the military living in Switzerland. He denied ever having given any to the Courters.
He had known the author and her husband since the 1980s and they had joined him on holiday on his catamaran in Greece in 2011, in the Caribbean in 2014 and in French Polynesia in 2015, investigators found.
The Courters were detained in the UK in 2022 and then put under house arrest. French investigators concluded that they had been in possession of at least 23 gold bars in total. They found they had sold 18 ingots for more than $192,000 (£140,000), including some via eBay.
The Courters claimed the arrangement had always been for the money to go to Gladu.
A prosecutor in the western French city of Brest has requested that the Courters, Gladu, 77, and Pesty be tried, according to a document obtained by AFP on Tuesday.
An investigating magistrate still has to decide whether or not to order a trial, but prosecutors said a trial was likely in the autumn of 2026.
The US couple’s lawyer, Gregory Levy, said they had had no idea what they had been getting into. “The Courters accepted because they are profoundly nice people. They didn’t see the harm as in the United States regulations for gold are completely different from those in France,” he said, adding that the couple had not profited from the sales.
Lawyers for the other suspects did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment.
Gay Courter has written several fiction and nonfiction books, some nautical-themed, according to her website. One is a thriller set on a cruise ship and another is her real-life account of being trapped on an ocean liner off the Japanese coast during a Covid quarantine in 2020.
