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For 40 years, Carl Allen worked with trash. Trash bags, actually. But in 2017 Allen sold his North Texas company, Heritage Bags, for hundreds of millions of dollars and immediately set out on a new course. He started Allen Exploration in Irving so he could finally become something he had always wanted to be: a treasure hunter.
On Sunday, Allen was featured in a segment for the long-running, weekly CBS News magazine show Sunday Morning. As it turns out, having many millions of dollars and a lust for the salty sea life can be pretty fun. Who knew?
“I am a treasure hunter, I fully admit it,” Allen said in the beginning of his CBS interview.
The specific treasure the former North Texas trash bag kingpin spends his time and money hunting these days? That of the Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas, a Spanish galleon that sank after crashing with another ship in the Bermuda Triangle in 1656.
Artifacts from the storied shipwreck began turning up in 1972, although a massive amount of the boat’s bounty has remained in the sea. In the report, a curator from the Bahamas Maritime Museum estimates that $100 million worth of the Maravillas treasure is still waiting to be brought back to land. On a related note, Allen owns the Bahamas Maritime Museum, which he opened in 2022.
That came after his 2018 purchase of Walker’s Cay, the Bahamian island he has visited almost annually since he was a kid. The 100-acre island is again becoming a prime saltwater fishing destination after being ravaged by hurricanes in 2004. It’s also not far from where Allen now holds exclusive rights, granted to him by the Bahamian government, to search local waters for the Maravillas’ jewel-encrusted prizes.
CBS Sunday Morning reporter Lee Cowan says that Allen has found 10,000 artifacts from the wreck already, including “pendants, gold chains, silver bars, crucifixes, all seemingly no worse for the wear.”
One of the pricey treasure-hunting toys Allen has at his disposal is a “submersible,” a bubble-domed vessel that can send him and a couple guests to the sea floor. He’s not the only wealthy titan with North Texas ties to have owned a submarine for oceanic exploration. Local adventurer Victor Vescovo chronicled his underwater adventures for a Discovery+ series Expedition Deep Ocean in 2019. The series followed Vescovo’s quest to become the first person to dive to the deepest part of all five oceans.
In a 2018 interview with Boat International, Allen said, “I will never leave Texas,” but the CBS segment from the weekend notes that Allen and his wife are now living full-time in the Bahamas. “The pull of the sea is as strong now as it was when he was a boy,” Cowan the reporter said at the end of his segment. “And it’s anchored the Allens to the Bahamas in all the best of ways.”
