Antiques Roadshow episode sees Florida grandparents thrown in jail after unwittingly harboring stolen gold bars from cursed 18th Century shipwreck

When an old French sailor pal of Philip and Gay Courter popped open a briefcase full of gold at their Florida home in 1986, their jaws dropped to the floor.

But their flamboyant friend was always full of surprises - and the elderly couple could never have suspected the extraordinary tale that lay behind the loot.

On June 29, 2022, the Courters were arrested on European warrants in connection with money laundering, organized crime, and the trafficking of cultural goods stolen from an 18th century shipwreck.

Now, for the first time, best-selling author Gay, 79, and her husband, 81, have spoken at length of their ordeal, telling The New Yorker how their unwitting part in the journey of the 'cursed' gold had destroyed their lives.

And it is a story that may never have come to light if it wasn't for a 1999 episode of Antiques Roadshow.

The cruise curse

It is not the first time that the Courters have been in the public gaze.

In 2020, they became minor celebrities as de facto spokespeople for passengers stuck on the Diamond Princess, the first cruise ship to be quarantined during the pandemic.

The Courters lobbied for evacuation in newspaper editorials and on cable news.

More than seven hundred passengers contracted the virus, and at least fourteen people died.

Gay, who had already published a New York Times bestseller, 'The Midwife', in 1982, had eerily foreshadowed their predicament in her most recent novel, which is set on a cruise ship.

According to its promotional material, 'The Girl in the Box', published in 2019, juxtaposes 'the sumptuousness of a dream vacation with the horrors that lurk around the bend'.

After the Courters were finally released from the Diamond Princess, Gay set to work on a memoir.

She wrote of the shock of being 'a carefree cruiser one moment, then held hostage by a foreign government'.

Again, her writings proved prescient.

Diamond Princess passengers were offered a free cruise to compensate for their experience.

The Courters chose to take theirs in early June of 2022, boarding the Island Princess on the south coast of England for a two-week tour of Norway.

On June 29, the Island Princess returned to port in Southampton. But the Courters' cruise curse struck again.

Upon arrival, they were told by ship officials to hand over their passports before being escorted off the boat.

They were then informed that they were being arrested in connection to looted gold bars from the Prince de Conty, a frigate that crashed off the coast of Brittany in 1746.

The wreckage

The Prince de Conty, owned by the French East India Company, had first set sail from Lorient on April 2, 1745.

Six months into its voyage, it arrived in the Chinese city of Canton, now known as Guangzhou.

There, the crew loaded up with luxury goods, including tea, ceramics and roughly 100 gold ingots.

Some were shaped in rectangular bars. Others were known as 'pain' for their resemblance to baguettes.

On December 2, 1746, after twenty months at sea, the frigate was just 10 miles from the coast of Brittany, just hours away from completing its mission.

But, a violent storm erupted in the dead of night, tossing the Prince onto the rocky coast of Belle-Île-en-Mer, an island in Brittany.

Fewer than 70 of the 190 men who had made it that far survived.

The French East India Company sent a salvage coup to recover its cargo, but its precious gold could not be found.

It was one of several ill-fated missions for the company, which had already lost another ship of the same name off the coast of Louisiana, with a third Prince falling into the hands of English pirates in 1753.

Without even a case of third-time lucky, word began to spread of a curse upon the ships.

The looting

For more than 200 years, the Prince de Conty went untouched, and largely forgotten.

Then, in 1974, a Normandy men Patrick Lizé and Jean-Calude Lescure were introduced to each other by Lizé's dentist, owing to their shared passion for marine archeology.

Lizé told his new friend that he had been scoping out shipwrecks. Of particular interest was the Prince de Conty, for which he had found a contemporary report of the salvage mission, laying bare its lost treasures.

In August, the pair traveled to the site of the wreckage - a discreet cove known as Port Lost-Kah, meaning 'cat's tail' in Breton.

Lizé and Lescure enlisted the help of Guy Lépinay, a local notary, who was to handle logistics, and the three men agreed to split any spoils equally.

One afternoon, as he was preparing to call it quits for the day, Lizé struck gold, literally.

But instead of reporting their miraculous find to officials, as required under French law, they kept it quiet for two months.

When Lizé finally declared it - behind the backs of his partners - he didn't let on that he had discovered gold, mentioning only 'five entirely corroded cannons', The New Yorker reported.

France's Underwater Archaeology Research Department, DRASSM, granted him permission to bring up the cannons, and, in the summer of 1975, he returned to the site to recover its bounty.

But according to witnesses, the site quickly degenerated into chaos.

The journalist Nicolas Jacquard wrote recently, in Le Parisien, that Lizé and his associates 'skin[ned] the remains of the Conty like a band of piranhas would clean a carcass.'

Following a tip from Lescure, DRASSM raided the site and shut down the dive.

French investigators, however, were only ever able to recover two ingots. Charges were brought against just five people, including Lizé and Lépinay.

After a trial in 1983, Lizé was fined forty thousand francs for possession of stolen goods, while Lépinay and the others received smaller penalties.

The handover

The Courters first met fellow sailing enthusiasts Gérard and Annette Pesty when the French couple had been on holiday in Crystal River, Florida, in 1981.

Both families had children of roughly the same ages, and their friendships blossomed.

By 1984, they were vacationing together near Great Inagua, an island in the Bahamas known for its flamingos.

A video on Philip Courter's YouTube account shows him and his wife enjoying a boating holiday in the British Virgin Islands in 2014 with Annette Pesty and her sister and brother-in-law, Brigitte and Yves Gladu.

The Pestys spent their summers in France, running their pharmacy, allowing them to travel for the rest of the year.

Gay said that they were closer with the Pestys than he or Philip were with their own siblings.

She described Gérard as a 'crazy guy with so many irons in the fire'.

So when he made his impromptu appearance in Crystal River with his briefcase of gold, the Courters were shocked, but not disbelieving.

The couple told The New Yorker that Gérard had around twenty ingots, which he told them had been recovered from a French shipwreck by Yves Gladu, a renowned underwater photographer.

Gérard told the Courters that he had already sold three ingots to the British Museum and was looking to offload the rest of his collection to an American buyer.

He asked his friends if they would hold onto the gold while he was in France.

The Courters stashed the ingots in their ceiling, before moving it to a safe-deposit box.

The investigation

In 1985, a DRASSM team found three ingots at the site of the Prince.

It was not a breakthrough discovery, but it triggered a lifelong obsession in dive leader Michel L'Hour.

L'Hour, who was made DRASSM director in 2006, was already a leading expert on the Prince, but he spent much of the next few decades nurturing contacts in the hope that he could trace the rest of the loot.

In 1995, a source sent him a photograph of around twenty gold bars strewn across the ocean floor. Some were nestled between the legs of rust-colored starfish.

He stashed it away in a safe, knowing it may one day come in useful.

Then in 2017, he received an email from an old contact containing a link to the site of a California auction house called Stephen Album Rare Coins.

The house was offering five gold ingots - four baguettes and one bar - estimated to sell for between $22,000 and $30,000 each.

'Nearly identical to the bars from the wrecks of the French East India Company vessel Prince de Conty, and to the Dutch East-Indiaman Geldermalsen,' the catalog copy read.

The listing even included a link to a 1999 episode of 'Antiques Roadshow' shot in Tampa, Florida, featuring a French woman who had come with some old porcelain and a pair of gold bars.

The woman claimed to have found the gold near the Cape Verde Islands, some hundred feet underwater.

She had a photograph to illustrate her find: a print featuring roughly twenty gold bars and a rust-colored starfish.

'I was, like, Putain, there it is!' L'Hour recalled.

The photograph had been taken by Yves Gladu, who had joined Lizé's dive team as an underwater photographer.

L'Hour pulled up Gladu's Facebook profile and, after a little scouring, matched the woman from the Antiques Roadshow episode with one of the photographer's friends: Annette Pesty.

He called the Ministry of Culture in France and urged them to alert the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

In the spring of 2021, French police raided the homes of Annette Pesty and Brigitte and Yves Gladu. 

At a hearing, Yves Gladu admitted to having made some forty dives at the Prince de Conty site in the nineteen-seventies and as late as 1999. 

He and his wife kept their ingots in a blue metal box in their attic. 

Yves confessed to selling around twenty bars in Switzerland, but denied any connection to the hoard that the Pestys entrusted to the Courters.

The Gladus and Annette Pesty declined to comment to The New Yorker. A trial is expected in 2025. 

The curse continues?

On March 2, 2022, the five gold ingots that had been put up for sale at the California auction house by the Courters were returned to the French Embassy in Washington.

Each bar weighed about 13 ounces, collectively worth around $125,000 on the precious metals market.

But officials said they had increased the estimate of their value to $231,000 because collectors will often pay a premium for ingots recovered from a shipwreck.

The British government has thus far remained silent on the three gold bars that remain in the British Museum's collection.

A museum spokesman told The New Yorker that it 'is actively seeking a resolution to this matter, and has worked cooperatively with the relevant authorities.'

But the treasure hunt is still far from over.

L'Hour remains on the prowl for the rest of the booty, while the curse of the Prince looms large over those who touched it.

Lépinay, reflecting on his own part in the saga, wondered whether the ship 'suffered from a macabre predestiny'.

When Lescure died in a car accident in 1980, some of his friends insisted the Prince was somehow to blame.

Gérard Pesty, meanwhile, died of malaria during a trip with his wife and the Courters to an island off the coast of Haiti in 1997.

The Courters were thrown in jail after their arrests. Gay, a diabetic, went for hours without food or her medication. Phil was strip-searched.

They were released when their bail came through and had their arrest warrants dropped almost six months after they were issued.

But even these came with an unnecessarily cruel blow. Gay's warrant identified her as the 'owner of a King Charles Spaniel' and, rather cruelly, described her as of 'great corpulence.'

They racked up $330,000 in legal costs battling extradition, which depleted their savings.

In August 2022, while still in England, they missed the birth of their eight grandchild.

Their daughter told The New Yorker that they had become 'hollow shells of the people I knew'.

Both are dealing with physical and mental-health issues brought on by the ordeal. '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 magazine.

The couple, who are now attached to the case as cooperating parties, say they have always been truthful about the provenance of the gold.

But they acknowledge that they failed to ask some pertinent questions about the gold.

'Now, looking back, it's, like, what were we thinking?' Phil added.