KEY WEST, Fla. (CN) - A federal judge refused to sanction an attorney connected to treasure hunters who planted fake emeralds in the Gulf of Mexico and then tried to sell the purported treasure to investors.
As recounted in court documents, divers Jay Miscovich and Steve Elschlepp claimed to have discovered a lost treasure from an 18th century Spanish galleon off the Florida coast, and sought the exclusive rights to survey the site of the purported treasure in Federal Court.
Miscovich testified that, while diving in 2010 with Elschlepp in the Gulf of Mexico, 30 miles north of Key West, he noticed some "shiny objects" at the bottom of the ocean. Miscovich first mistook them for broken glass, but soon realized that the objects were green gems, most likely emeralds, according to his testimony in court. The divers said they had paid $500 for a treasure map and a shard of pottery that had led them to the site.
Miscovich claimed that he and his dive partner filled their empty lunch bags with emeralds and took them to Elschlepp's home to be cleaned and stored. The divers went back over the following months and retrieved more of what they believed to be lost Colombian emeralds, according to Miscovich, who said picking the emeralds felt "like picking cherries on a cherry tree."
However, Elschlepp's testimony and a report an archeologist drafted about the discovery differed from Miscovich's account, the court noted.
The court later discovered that the treasure hunters' claims were false and that they had planted thousands of junk emeralds on the ocean floor. By getting title to the emeralds as well as a court order preserving future rights to the imaginary treasure site, Miscovich and Elschlepp hoped to persuade prospective investors and buyers that the discovery was genuine, according to U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King's most recent ruling in the case.
The treasure hunters took the purported gems to New York and Washington, D.C. to attract investors and asked experts in France, Switzerland and Colombia to evaluate them. Some of the stones were used to make jewelry and others were planted back into the ocean to be used in a promotional video, according to the ruling.
"Although the future victims of the conspirators would have been the purchasers of the fake gems and the investors who were expected to invest in the continued salvage operations of the fake discovery, the immediate victim was the United States District Court and the American system of justice," King wrote in the March 16 opinion. "The entry of a final decree as sought by plaintiff would have lended credence to the conspirators' outrageously false claims of a new discovery."
Miscovich and Elschlepp managed to get support from various investors, business associates and law firms. Additionally, national media outlets, the Smithsonian Institute and Colombian government officials unwittingly helped the divers sell the story, according to the court's 58-page opinion.
Miscovich told a crew from the CBS "60 Minutes" program that the emeralds were worth millions of dollars, according to the ruling. An emerald expert later testified in court that the combined value of the stones could not exceed $50,000 and that maybe one or two percent of them had commercial value. Experts also testified that at least some of the stones were coated with epoxy, a modern material that did not exist before the 19th century.
