Life time of treasure hunting may soon pay off for Peoria man

PEORIA — Scott Heimdal of Peoria has spent decades searching for sunken treasure. He was on the hunt 22 years ago when a militant gang kidnapped him in the jungles of Ecuador and ransomed him for the $60,000 his hometown folk helped collect in bills and coins.

Ten years ago he formed a company that found but lost riches when a South American government broke a contract. When big overseas investments grew scarce, the hopes Heimdal had raised with his core of Peoria-based partners and investors began to sink.

Eighty pounds of raw emeralds now safe in U.S. storage, however, have a way of refloating hopes.

A federal judge in Florida will rule as soon as June 18 on a claim to the gems. Without commenting on details, Heimdal's group thinks its case is strong. If they're right, they can expect roughly $30 million as their share.

The strides and stumbles that Heimdal, 49, and his partners have taken are “a Peoria story,” said Terry Towery, spokesman for Heimdal's company, Oceanic Research and Recovery Inc. Heimdal said he heard advice more than once “to call the investors and say it's over.”

Now, said Towery, “it's about to pay off if the judge rules the way most people think he will.”

The emeralds' discovery two years ago was the subject of an April feature on CBS' “60 Minutes.” The role Heimdal's company played in it came to public light only after the feature aired.

While Heimdal didn't find the gems, over the past eight years he's earned a reputation of experience and trust in the murky business of seeking immense riches left in Spanish galleons wrecked four centuries ago. He's dealt with foreign governments and courts, U.S. bureaucracies and rival treasure companies. In his business, “there are pirates on both land and sea,” he said.

That experience became an asset that Jay Miscovich — an amateur hunter equipped only with scuba gear, a boat, a map he bought cheap and a metal detector — decided he needed.

Miscovich didn't know what to do after he dived in January 2010 on a faint alert from his detector off the Florida Keys — it was a discarded beer can — and found the first of about $600 million worth of emeralds strewed across the sandy ocean floor.

“He needed help and went to people he trusted,” Heimdal said.

Now Heimdal and ORRV await the ruling by U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King on whether any or all of the jewels drifted some 40 miles over the centuries from a famously discovered wreck, the Atocha, to Miscovich's site.

Evidence showing that happened — or that some of the emeralds may have been stolen from the Atocha wreck area — must convince King there is merit to further litigate the claims filed by the Atocha's discoverers. If the judge finds it doesn't, no further claims block Miscovich's company from courting buyers for the gems that experts have concluded came from 16th century Colombian mines.

ORRV would collect about 5 percent of the profits from the sales.

That will be the return for what Heimdal estimated was $25,000 worth of “expenses, travel, an advisory role” that his company provided Miscovich, who invested in Heimdal's first company, RSOPS Inc., in 2004. Heimdal's group would continue profiting on “whatever else comes up” from Miscovich's site, Towery said.

For now, however, $30 million is a nice start as payoff for a lifetime devoted to the dreams Heimdal admits became an obsession, and the help he received from the several dozen original RSOPS investors.

Many area residents will recall Heimdal as the young adventurer who was kidnapped by Colombian guerrillas in 1990 while he worked for a gold-mining venture. The gunmen killed the teenage boy guiding his canoe on a river just inside the Ecuadorean border and held him for 60 days.

Schoolchildren in Peoria collected coins to help his parents raise the funds that set him free. Heimdal donated the $40,000 remaining after the ransom was paid to the Peoria Area Community Foundation. When he founded RSOPS, he said he planned to donate more from the riches he hoped to reap to the community that returned him home.

His efforts since then have marked a trail of determination, if not profit. Heimdal didn't quit when, in 2009, a newly elected government in Ecuador confiscated the buckets of Spanish silver coins his divers were pulling from a wreck off the country's coast and tossed out the contract he'd entered to split the treasure found.

The history of RSOPS was one of ventures “delayed or not viable anymore” in Panama and the Philippines as well as Ecuador, he said. The company had to sell most of its ownership in a 90-foot vessel, the RV Beacon, to stay afloat. In 2009, it merged with ORRV.

Even without the Florida Keys windfall, ORRV is in position to launch new wreck searches as soon as this summer, he said. The company is now dealing with two nations — in Europe and again in South America — on projects that he said could provide finds as rich as Miscovich's emeralds.

Heimdal has spent a third of the past decade on foreign soil chasing his dream — researching potential wreck targets, seeking investors, negotiating with host nations. He and his wife also have household bills like anyone else. Last month he returned to a regular job in computer technology for the first time in seven years.

“It's been a hell of an adventure,” he said. “The stories I could tell, oh my God.”

He and his partners should know soon whether the latest one ends happily.