An 80-year-old novelist and her husband could face trial in France over the alleged theft and illegal sale of gold bars taken from an 18th-century shipwreck.
Investigators say Florida resident Eleonor “Gay” Courter and her husband, Philip Courter, helped a French diver sell gold bars that he stole from a shipwreck decades ago. The couple denies any criminal wrongdoing.
Le Prince de Conty, a French ship trading with Asia, sank off the coast of Brittany in 1746. The shipwreck was first discovered in 1974. A year later, the wreckage was looted after a gold ingot was found there, AFP reports.
Michel L’Hour, head of France’s underwater archaeology agency, then spotted a suspicious sale of gold from a U.S. auction house in 2018. He contacted U.S. authorities, who then seized the five ingots and two other artifacts. The artifacts were repatriated to France in 2022.
Authorities went on to identify the seller as Eleonor Courter, who claims she was given the gold by her French friends Annette May Pesty and Gerard Pesty, who has since died.
Annette Pesty brought the gold ingots on the television show Antiques Roadshow in 1999, claiming she got them while diving off the African island of Cape Verde, AFP reports. But investigators didn’t believe that to be true and instead turned their focus to her brother-in-law, Yves Gladu, who worked as an underwater photographer.
In 2022, Gladu confessed to stealing 16 gold bars from the shipwreck between 1976 and 1999. He denied giving any to the Courters and said he instead sold them to a man in Switzerland. But investigators discovered Gladu had known the Courters for decades, AFP reports. The couple went on trips with him to Greece in 2011, the Caribbean in 2014 and French Polynesia in 2015, investigators say.
Investigators now believe the Courters possessed at least 23 gold bars and had sold 18 of them for more than $192,000, according to AFP. Some of these sales took place on eBay. The Courters say they had arranged for the money to go to Gladu, AFP reports.
Police arrested the Courters in the U.K. three years ago. The couple was placed on house arrest in London for six months and have since returned to the U.S., according to their attorney, Gregory Levy.
A French prosecutor has requested that the Courters, Gladu and Pesty all be tried in connection with the theft and sale of the gold ingots. The trial, if ordered by an investigating magistrate, will likely take place next year.
Levy said his clients “firmly deny any criminal wrongdoing.” He added that the couple “wanted to be of service to friends” and had “held on to their friends’ ingots while they traveled.”
“As for the sales, they took place on eBay, which shows how much the Courters wanted to hide from them,” Levy said in a statement to The Independent. “What's more, the British Museum bought the bullion, which could not have been unaware of its provenance, and deserves to be investigated by the French justice system, rather than two American octogenarians who knew nothing about French law.”
The Courters have two sons and a daughter, whom they adopted from foster care when she was 12, according to Eleonor’s website. The 80-year-old has published nearly a dozen books, five of which are bestsellers.
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