Hook, Line, and Sinker

Brooks holds coins that he claims came from a pirate wreck off Puerto Rico. / Photograph by Dana Smith

In 2004, as Brooks’s hunt for the Notre Dame petered out, he sailed to Haiti to search for the Oxford, Captain Henry Morgan’s ship (yes, the Captain Morgan of rum fame). And a little coup couldn’t stop him: Soon after Brooks signed a salvage contract with Haiti’s government, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown. Brooks decided to go anyway. “Until they send out their Navy, which they don’t have, or their Air Force, which they don’t have,” Brooks told the Associated Press, “I’m just going to do it.”

Brooks signed a fresh contract with the new government but came back from Haiti empty-handed. He says he gave up on treasure hunting in Haiti because government officials were corrupt and uncooperative. Maybe so: Brooks showed me the text of a letter written in French, in which a Haitian government employee complains that the official in charge of undersea research was dishonest, abusive, and liked to strut around naked on treasure hunters’ boats. Haiti halted all underwater exploration along its shores in December 2005.

Brooks’s activities in Haiti have provoked controversy among salvagers. Robert Marx, a Florida treasure hunter and the author of dozens of books about shipwrecks and maritime history, says Brooks once attempted to raise $5 million to salvage silver bars from a Haitian wreck. Marx says he visited the wreck on a scuba dive and believed that the bars were pig iron for ballast. “This is the biggest bullshit artist in the world,” Marx says of Brooks. “People make claims: the richest wreck ever lost, the richest wreck ever salvaged—that’s what we call doing a Greg Brooks.”

Brooks’s ship, the Sea Hunter, visited the Port Nicholson 11 times combined in 2009 and 2010 and brought up nothing. Investors who logged onto Sea Hunters’ website looking for promised updates saw only cloudy underwater videos of fish swimming past the wreck. Excuses were Brooks’s only haul until 2011, when the crew salvaged three items they found lying next to the wreck: the ship’s compass, a brass pump, and a brick. They got excited about some boxes that the one-armed robot sub couldn’t lift, telling themselves they resembled the boxes of gold on the Edinburgh. Once, the crew thought they saw an ingot-shaped object near the wreck—but their boat drifted off the spot and they couldn’t find it again.

Brooks’ remote-controlled sub spent most of its time trolling the debris field near the wreck. It went inside the ship itself only once, where it glimpsed a cargo hold filled with collapsed beams and truck tires. Brooks worried that if the vehicle went too far into the wreck, its umbilical cord would get caught on something. With a $3 billion treasure seemingly in reach, the audacious Brooks suddenly turned cautious: He wouldn’t risk losing the $400,000 vehicle to find it. Instead, he decided he needed a bigger, better ROV and more money. That’s when he put out his January 2012 press release, which spun the comical bumbling around the supposed lost ingot and the wild guess about the mystery boxes into tantalizing tales of treasure just beyond reach.

In 2012 Brooks snagged $2 million in fresh investor money from the heads of a Duxbury hedge fund called Bay Hill Capital Management, bringing the mission’s total funding to $10 million. The Sea Hunter crew returned to the wreck six times and dug around some more in the debris field. Hoping for riches, they pulled up one box, opened it, and found some rusty hatchets. They raised another heavy box, only to lose grip within 15 feet of the surface. Brooks told Gary Auger about the near miss over lunch at a Portland brewery. Auger was appalled.

“You’re telling me you had a crate that was worth close to $1 million, and you did nothing to make sure you didn’t lose it?” Auger asked Brooks. “That’s the stupidest story I’ve ever heard in my life.” Fishermen use nets to catch fish close to the surface, Auger thought, so why couldn’t these guys snag a box? (Brooks confirmed the box was lost and blamed crew error.)

Brooks ultimately hired a company, Deep Down, with better equipment. But the joint mission failed, and Brooks’s company refused to pay the bill, saying Deep Down’s men had botched the job. Deep Down sued, claiming the Sea Hunter’s captain couldn’t keep the ship stable over the wreck.

In March 2013, Brooks’s partner, John Hardy Sr., died at 77 of brain cancer. Without his benefactor, Brooks was in trouble. He’d burned through $10 million, which he blamed on unexpected repairs, rising fuel costs, crew salaries, and weather delays. He told investors he needed more.

Modern treasure hunters don’t lay claim to their plunder with swords and cannon, but with petitions in federal court. Brooks kicked off his search for the Port Nicholson in 2008 by convincing a federal magistrate in Portland to grant him salvage rights. British officials, who later learned about Brooks’s latest treasure claim from London’s Daily Telegraph, hired American lawyers Timothy Shusta and Michael Kaplan to make the case that the Port Nicholson and its cargo were British government property.

Shusta and Kaplan thought Brooks’s whole story seemed strange. Several British and American historical records showed no precious metals on the Port Nicholson when it sank, just an ordinary cargo of military supplies and auto parts. The Allied governments did ship precious metals overseas during World War II—but usually by air or on warships that could outrun U-boats, not on a slow, 23-year-old tramp steamer. What’s more, Brooks claimed that the ship secretly carried 71 tons of platinum, but Shusta and Kaplan’s research suggested that would have been roughly the world’s entire supply of platinum in 1942.

In June 2012 attorneys for Brooks filed three court documents that seemed to show the Port Nicholson was carrying precious metals. All of the documents were fuzzy and low resolution. Kaplan looked at the redacted document Brooks had shown CBS News five months earlier and immediately recognized that it looked a lot like the Port Nicholson’s entry in the reference book Lloyd’s War Losses: Same typeface, same reference to “1,600 tons automobile parts & 4,000 tons military stores” in the cargo—but the book entry didn’t include “1,707,000 oz.” or “platinum.”

The other two documents were just as odd. A cargo list ended with the word “BULLION”—but the word was in the wrong column, under “port of discharge.” And the third document, a Treasury Department form with shipping instructions for 741 platinum bars and 4,889 gold bars, was dated June 17, 1942, two days after the ship was torpedoed.

Skeptical, Kaplan and Shusta said Brooks had to find more convincing evidence. Ed Michaud, the researcher who’d produced the documents for Brooks, went to the National Archives in Maryland in June 2013 to get the Treasury Department document certified—but Archives staff could not locate an original copy.

That August the Sea Hunter returned to the Port Nicholson, and again failed to salvage anything. Brooks held a memorial service for John Hardy Sr. and scattered his ashes into the ocean over the Port Nicholson. After two power outages and a fire on the ship, Brooks returned to port. It was the Sea Hunter’s last trip to the wreck.

Soon, Brooks’s project fell apart. David Paul Horan, a veteran attorney for treasure hunters who was representing Brooks, quit. Horan’s son had found evidence that convinced him the supposed Treasury Department shipping document was forged: It showed the same tears, folds, and markings as a blank Treasury form found among Michaud’s files.

Brooks then asked a crew member, Kevin Lachance, to look at the key documents Michaud had produced. Lachance told Brooks he thought one was faked, another possibly so. Brooks appeared “shocked,” Lachance said later. The hedge-fund investors, also questioning the documents, canceled a plan to give Brooks more money. Shusta, the lawyer for Britain, says he contacted the FBI.

Deep Down, the spurned undersea equipment company, kept pursuing its lawsuit, trying to get paid. Its lawyer called Lachance to a deposition and asked if Brooks had ever misled investors.

“In my opinion, yes,” Lachance said under oath. The crewman, who had recently been laid off by Sea Hunters, described the suspected forgeries. He also testified that Brooks had told him he wanted to plant a fake gold bar on a wreck and film its recovery. “I saw and held the fake gold bar,” Lachance testified.

Brooks’s fortunes were unraveling. In January 2014 Michaud appeared at a deposition to answer the British government’s questions. Michaud, who had the easily winded physique of a guy who spent a lot of time reading papers and computer screens, came in carrying a notebook crammed with more than 500 pages of documents. Kaplan paged through it while Shusta grilled Michaud. Kaplan found another version of the cargo list in the notebook—one that didn’t include the word “bullion.” He tipped off Shusta, who asked Michaud during the deposition why there were two versions. Incredibly, Michaud claimed that almost the same day a hired researcher sent him the document from the National Archives, a World War II veteran named Jack McCann had sent him the same document, but with the word “bullion” on it. “It seemed to me, by the end of that day, that Michaud fit the profile of a pathological liar,” Shusta says. “He could instantly, without any noticeable difference, make up an answer that was an absolute lie that made no sense.”

A month later, Brooks’s remaining lawyer acknowledged in a court filing that the Treasury document couldn’t be found at the Archives, that the source of the document claiming the ship carried 1,707,000 ounces of platinum couldn’t be verified, and that the “bullion” document was from 1941, not 1942. The facts were in: Brooks had no authentic documents to justify the $10 million treasure hunt.

In April 2014 the Maine Office of Securities announced it was seeking information from Maine residents who invested in Greg Brooks’s and Sea Hunters’ “treasure hunting activities,” were “approached about investing,” or “attended a presentation outlining his undersea recovery efforts.”

Lachance and the lawyers for the British shared their information with federal investigators, the Maine Office of Securities, and one another. Brooks was collecting enemies, and they were beginning to work together.

On a sunny day in June, I went to see Greg Brooks in Gorham. His split-level home was decorated with nautical knickknacks: seven marine hourglasses on a windowsill, a mermaid centerpiece on his dining room table, a many-masted tall-ship model by his front door. Brooks’s sunburned chest, revealed by three undone shirt buttons, hinted of shadeless days at sea. His face’s wrinkles and folds gave him the weathered, squinty look of an old-salt storyteller, marinated in maritime lore.

“All I want is the truth of this whole thing out there,” he said with a thick Maine drawl, his there catching an extra syllable. “Because the facts are the facts.”

In November, Brooks said, Michaud came up from Framingham to see him in Maine. They met in Brooks’s truck in a Home Depot parking lot. Michaud, he said, looked nervous, squirrely. “I knew he was wired,” Brooks said. “He got in my truck and he started talking, saying that shit about the documents. He says, ‘You knew they was forged.’

“I says, ‘What? I know they’re forged now, ’cause you just friggin’ told me.’” Brooks stated in an affidavit that Michaud also admitted making up “Jack McCann,” the vet who supposedly gave him the documents.