Dwarf-tossing, 'Duck Dynasty,' and Al Capone's vault: Inside the strange company that effectively controls access to the Titanic

• RMS Titanic Inc. was founded by an unlikely cohort of adventurers in the late 1980s.
• The beleaguered company has the exclusive right to salvage artifacts from the wreck of the Titanic.

The days-long saga of the search for the submersible that went missing en route to the Titanic wreck site has focused international attention on a cottage industry dedicated to exploiting the remains of the RMS Titanic for profit.

The Titan submersible, operated by OceanGate Expeditions, lost contact with the surface last Sunday morning en route to the wreck site nearly 13,000 feet below the surface of the North Atlantic. After a massive search effort, the Coast Guard announced Thursday that it had found a debris field indicating Titan had imploded. The vessel's five passengers are presumed to be dead, according to a statement from OceanGate Expeditions.

The Everett, Washington-headquartered company charged thrill-seeking tourists $250,000 a head for the chance to visit the wreck.

"You can follow in Jacques Cousteau's footsteps and become an underwater explorer," OceanGate promised customers. "This is your chance to step outside of everyday life and discover something truly extraordinary."

As the 111-year-old wreck of Titanic morphed into a lucrative cultural touchstone, accelerated by the 1997 James Cameron blockbuster, OceanGate was far from the first company to try cashing in.

That title belongs to a company little-known outside the close-knit community of amateur Titanic historians and enthusiasts: RMS Titanic Inc.

One company effectively controls access to the Titanic

Like OceanGate, which appears to have inflated its ties with research institutions and disregarded repeated safety warnings, RMS Titanic Inc. has a checkered past and a vested interest in profiting from the famous disaster.

Led in its early days by an unlikely group that included a producer of "People's Court," an agent for a dwarf-tossing act in Southern comedy clubs, and a man who wanted to pierce the hull of the Titanic to look for diamonds within, RMS Titanic Inc. is near the center of the now-concluded human drama on the North Atlantic.

The company occupies a unique position: It is the only entity legally allowed to salvage items from the wreckage. OceanGate was required to certify to a federal judge that its expeditions would not infringe on that right. OceanGate also has links with two people who have deep ties to RMS Titanic Inc.

On board OceanGate's submersible was French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who has made dozens of dives to the wreck, including at least four as a pilot of OceanGate's submersible, called Titan. Nargeolet was also RMS Titanic Inc.'s director of underwater research, according to the company website, as well as a former board member. And OceanGate employs an attorney, David Concannon, who has twice represented RMS Titanic Inc. in federal court.

RMS Titanic Inc. did not respond to questions about its ties to OceanGate, but Concannon told a federal judge last year that the companies are distinct entities with "no relationship." Nargeolet participated in OceanGate dives as a "guest of OceanGate," Concannon added, not as an RMS Titanic Inc. employee.

The odd origins of RMS Titanic Inc.

After oceanographer Robert Ballard discovered the wreck of the Titanic in 1985, an improbable crew of businessmen came together to attempt to salvage artifacts from the wreck with profit in mind.

The group, which would eventually incorporate as RMS Titanic Inc., included former "dwarf-tossing" agent G. Michael Harris, a smack-talking undersea adventurer who says he's been called a pirate so many times he tattooed the Jolly Roger on his shoulder, according to a 2019 interview.

"People's Court" producer John Joslyn, Nargeolet, Ohio concert promoter Joe Marsh and Arnie Geller, who contemplated sawing through the hull of the Titanic to look for a reputed $300 million in diamonds presumed to be in the ship's safe, were also key members of the partnership. (Joslyn, along with his "People's Court" colleague Doug Llewelyn, was one of the minds behind the greatest duds in the history of TV hype: Geraldo Rivera's opening of Al Capone's vault.)

Through the 1990s, the group brought thousands of artifacts to the surface, to the consternation of some, including Ballard, who believed the wreck should remain untouched as a memorial to the more than 1,500 people who perished after the Titanic struck an iceberg in 1912.

Meanwhile, some members of the partnership, notably Marsh, were vocal about their desire to capitalize on the wreck.

''We all know there are billions of dollars down there under the water,'' Marsh told the New York Times in 1999. ''It's like sitting on a gold mine.''

Precedent supported the idea that shipwreck loot was fair game to salvage and sell. But in the eyes of some, the people behind RMS Titanic Inc. were high-tech grave robbers.

A federal judge largely agreed, ruling that the company was not allowed to sell any artifacts it had salvaged except as a complete collection open to public exhibition — severely limiting one potential moneymaking avenue.

Inside the partnership, tensions mounted. In 1999, Geller, Harris, Marsh, and Joslyn spearheaded a hostile takeover that replaced then-CEO George Tulloch, a BMW dealer who had raised a 20-ton section of the Titanic's hull to the surface. The next year, Harris was forced out over allegations of embezzling company funds; he was later embroiled in a legal dispute with the company after he used four artifacts raised from the Titanic to collateralize a loan to fund a "Duck Dynasty" traveling exhibit.

The SEC fined Joslyn, Marsh, and four other investors $405,000 in 2004 for making "materially false and misleading statements" during the takeover. The agency also sanctioned Harris, but declined to fine him "based on his sworn representations and other documents and information submitted to the Commission concerning his financial condition."

Geller and Tulloch have since died. In a text message, Harris said that "after this week," he was "too fucking tired" to respond to a request for comment. "Obviously you're speaking with someone who doesn't like me very much," he added.

In an interview, Marsh said he disagreed with the outcome of the SEC investigation.

Joslyn, who sold his shares in RMS Titanic, Inc. in the early 2000s and now operates two Titanic museums, said he does not reflect fondly on his experience with the company.

"I worked with a lot of movie and TV people, and I have never seen so much underhandedness going on in my life," he said. "Nobody had any scruples."

RMS Titanic Inc. takes its show on the road

Throughout the 2000s, RMS Titanic Inc. devoted itself to establishing traveling exhibits of the artifacts it recovered from the wreck. It founded two permanent displays, in Las Vegas and Orlando, and branched out into other immersive traveling exhibits — including a controversial "Bodies Revealed" exhibit featuring plasticized human remains — that skirt the line between museums and entertainment.

The success of Bodies Revealed was a temporary shot in the arm for the company, then operating as publicly-traded Premier Exhibitions. But starting in 2007, its share price plummeted from $18.62 to a low of $0.56. In 2008, the company's largest shareholder executed a boardroom coup that successfully forced out then-CEO Geller and replaced him with hedge fund manager Mark Sellers.

But revenues never recovered, and after a failed "Saturday Night Live: The Experience" exhibit in New York, the company declared bankruptcy in 2016. The pandemic further hammered ticket sales to RMS Titanic, Inc.'s permanent exhibits of Titanic artifacts. The company, which was taken private in 2018 by a consortium of private equity firms including Apollo Global Management, last year unveiled a Titanic NFT to commemorate the 110th anniversary of the ship's sinking.

In a Tuesday letter, RMS Titanic Inc. notified the federal court overseeing its access to the wreck site that OceanGate's submersible had gone missing.

"With regret, I write to advise the Court of disturbing news from the wreck site of the TITANIC," president Jessica Sanders wrote. "A submersible, owned and operated by OceanGate Expeditions, and carrying five persons on board, has gone missing while diving off the wreck."

In addition to Nargeolet, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, British billionaire Hamish Harding, Pakistani-British billionaire Shazada Dawood, and Dawood's 19 year-old son, Suleman were on the sub.

In an interview with the New York Times last year, Rush defended trying to make money from the Titanic ruins.

"The folks who don't like anybody making money sort of miss the fact that that's the only way anything gets done in this world is if there is profit or military need," he said.