An American novelist is among five set to stand trial over the sale of gold bars that were allegedly stolen from a shipwreck.
“Three French nationals in their 70s and 80s, and a Florida couple in their 80s (the author Eleonor (aka Gay) Courter and Philip Courter), are facing charges for criminal conspiracy in the 2018 online sale of gold ingots that are believed to have come from the shipwreck near an island off the coast of Brittany, the Île Belle-Île,” ARTnews reported on Thursday, Nov. 12. “Some of the suspects are also accused of laundering stolen goods.”
The Suspects Will Head to Court in France
The Courters and three other suspects are scheduled to head to court in Brest, western France in May, 2027, for a case involving “looted gold bars from the 18th-century Prince de Conty shipwreck,” ARTnews explains.
“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,” according to The Guardian. “They have denied knowledge of any wrongdoing.”
Gay Courter “is a freelance travel writer who travels the world,” according to her website. She is also the author of both fiction and nonfiction books.
The Guardian notes that some of her books are “nautical-themed,” including one that “is a thriller set on a cruise ship and another [that] is her real-life account of being trapped on an ocean liner off the Japanese coast during a Covid quarantine in 2020.”
She also spoke about the experience below:
The Shipwreck Was Looted in 1975 Before the Gold Made Its Way to the Courters
The shipwreck which was the source of the allegedly looted gold, the Prince de Conty, was a French vessel that was part of the East India Company that traded with Asia. It sank off the coast of Brittany during a winter storm that took place in 1746, and was found in 1974, before being “looted in 1975 after a gold ingot was discovered during a site survey,” per The Guardian.
It wasn’t until 2018, that Michel L’Hour, the head of France’s underwater archaeology department, noticed five of the gold ingots included on a US auction house’s website and informed US authorities, leading to it being seized, and in 2022, returned to France.
The seller of the ingots was found to be Gay Courter, who “had been given the precious metal by a couple of French friends, Annette May Pesty, now 78, and her partner Gerard, now deceased,” The Guardian noted. “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.”
“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,” per The Guardian. Although Gladu had known the Courters for decades — even vacationing with them multiple times in the past — he denied giving them any of the gold. However, when authorities looked into the couple, they found “that they had been in possession of at least 23 gold bars in total,” and “sold 18 ingots for more than $192,000 (£140,000), including some via eBay.”
The Courters claim that Gladu was always the one who was meant to receive the money from the sales, with their lawyer, Gregory Levy, saying, “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.”
American Novelist Set To Stand Trial Over Stolen Shipwreck Gold