A Golden Opportunity to Experience Magic

A full 60 years before the Titanic sank, a three-masted, 272-foot side-wheel steamship with 476 passengers and 102 crewmen aboard left the Panamanian port of Aspinwall--now called Colon--at the northern entry to the Panama Canal, bound for New York.

It was carrying more than 3 tons of gold.

Originally launched in 1852, the S.S. Central America had already made 43 round trips between Panama and New York when it set out on Sept. 3, 1857, with its precious cargo. Among the riches being transported was an ingot weighing 80 pounds--the largest brick of gold known to man.

Eight days into the voyage, 160 miles off the coast of North Carolina, the vessel encountered a hurricane. Crew and passengers bailed water together, but it was no use. On the storm’s second day, Sept. 12, at approximately 8 p.m., the steamship sank. A total of 426 people drowned, including the captain.

With them, the gold was gone.

Thousands of new $20 Double Eagle coins, produced that very year by the San Francisco mint, disappeared toward the ocean’s floor near Cape Hatteras. As did that amazing gold bar.

Imagine picking up that bar, how incredibly heavy it would be.

“It is,” 33-year-old Dwight Manley says, from his Orange County office. “I almost broke my pinky when I tried.”

Why would he try?

Because it’s his gold now.

*

Getting your hands on gold isn’t easy. You can read about it in a history book, about the exact day (Jan. 24, 1848) miners in Coloma discovered that mother lode at Sutter’s Mill, or you see a picture of prospectors panning for it, even if it’s just Humphrey Bogart in an action-packed tale told 100 years later.

Handling gold, though--touching it, lifting it, caressing it--is a different story. You can call a state golden on its license plates and name pro football teams after men who dug the stuff up, but not everyone gets to become acquainted with its actual feel, to fall under its spell. And not mere gold but old gold, ingots and nuggets and freshly minted Double Eagles from days of yore and ore.

“It’s true, gold really does have magic,” Manley says.

He is a collector of rare coins--as well as rare personalities, having been a successful agent to athletes ranging from Karl Malone to Dennis Rodman--who is part of a group that has just purchased more than $100 million worth of recovered sunken treasure from the S.S. Central America.

“When you come into contact with it, it overwhelms you. We were showing the gold to some TV celebrities who routinely talk with people making deals worth millions of dollars, and everyone just became mesmerized. Everybody kept coming by wanting to look at it and touch it.

“Gold is what we read about as kids, adventure stories about finding gold in caves, or hunting for buried treasure. It’s not just something worth a lot of money. It’s something magical.”

So how does a Newport Beach sports agent end up having an adventure worthy of Harry Potter?

One summer’s day in 1998, Manley was playing golf with Larry Goldberg, a friend and Beverly Hills coin dealer. Out of the blue, Goldberg mentioned having heard of an Ohio organization that in the late 1980s had retrieved the cache of gold from the shipwreck in an elaborate recovery operation.

After 10 years of ugly legal hassles, the Ohio group was putting the treasure trove up for sale.

When he isn’t negotiating a $70-million contract for Malone or representing other NBA clients, Manley is managing partner of California Gold Group, a numismatic firm in Newport. He jumped at Goldberg’s offer to literally go for the gold.

‘The deal died 25 times,” Manley says, telling of two years of exhausting negotiations that at times became so outrageous, a banker asked to drill into the gold to confirm that it was real.

*

Finally, though, in December, the deal was closed. It was fate’s reward for Manley, who began collecting coins in his Brea home at age 6 and dreamed of making $50,000 a year by his 25th birthday.

He and his partners now own treasure “possibly worth something north of $150 million,” a portion of which--including the 80-pound gold brick--will be on display Thursday through Sunday at the Long Beach Convention Center, along with a 30-foot replica of the ship’s hull.

Manley once let Dennis Rodman share his home in Orange County for two years. He thought that was a rare experience.

This one has a greater net value.

Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com