How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found Page 5

  Now that I've discussed getting into Mexico, I'll add that for most Americans, Canadians or other foreigners, Mexico is a lousy haven. For one thing, it is difficult if not impossible for a foreigner to get work there. Mexico is an extremely xenophobic country, which is to say they believe in "Mexico for the Mexicans," and don't want U.S. citizens or Costa Ricans or Salvadorans or anyone else coming to their country and making it tough for the locals to get work. The fact that they sometimes act otherwise is because of the necessity of cultivating tourism, which is one of the leading generators of foreign exchange. In all honesty, from the Mexican government's point of view the ideal arrangement would be for foreigners to mail their contributions rather than bringing them along in person.

  This is not to deny that many a disappearee from this country has wound up drinking Dos Equis and enjoying the balmy weather back in the Mexican highlands. But most gringos seem to lack the facility to adapt themselves to local customs and mores. The differences between Mexico and the English-speaking world run much deeper than language or etiquette. Living in Mexico is the answer for only a very, very small minority of Yankee disappearees.

  WHO'S LOOKING FOR YOU

  When preparing a disappearance and identity change, it is best to consider who might be looking for you and the means they are likely to employ trying to find you. One of the best ways to learn this information is to read a book like How to Find Missing Persons (see reference chapter) "backwards;" that is, if you know how people will look for you, you'll know what to do and what to avoid doing. I'll give a brief summary here of some of the more likely pursuers.

  Missing Persons Bureaus

  The person who makes a planned, deliberate disappearance has little to fear in the way of apprehension by the local police department's Missing Persons Bureau (MPB). For starters, the MPB in most police departments is sort of an afterthought, mostly designed to keep anxious relatives out of the desk sergeant's hair and to track down runaway juveniles. The cops aren't likely to put their crack detectives on this beat, to say the least. And because disappearing in and of itself is not a crime, the local police are unlikely to mount an expensive and usually fruitless search. The MPB will do the routine paperwork, however, and it's surprising just how many people are uncovered through the simplest of investigations. Most of the people the MPB find did not change their names, much less their identities, and did not leave the local vicinity. Many more are picked up through their automobiles, either from being pulled over for a traffic violation and run through the computer or by having their license and registration traced. Still others are apprehended in flop houses and shelters, the first place the MPB looks--if it looks at all--or are caught for minor crimes like shoplifting or breaking and entering.

  The MPB's will almost never find a serious disappearee or identity changer, unless by accident. The U.S. does not have a national police department per se, although it does have the FBI, which will be discussed below. The MPB's will not pursue a disappearee across state lines even if they do share information with other MPB's. You have a good chance of staying undetected as long as you follow the simplest of identity-changing procedures, or unless there is money or crime involved in your disappearance, in which case it won't be the MPB's you have to worry about.

  The Feds

  Disappearing on your wife is one thing, but fleeing prosecution or taking "French leave" with your employer's money are a different matter altogether. These are cases for the "hard" divisions of the police, including the FBI. These detectives are fairly competent at this kind of work. Some of them are experts. And while the FBI doesn't always get their man, they never give up trying. You will have to be very quick and very careful if you disappear to keep out of the clutches of the law. Larry Lavin knows how persistent and thorough the FBI can be. Reared in Haverhill, Massachusetts, Lavin put himself through the University of Pennsylvania dental school with proceeds from his growing drug distribution business. By the time he graduated he was a millionaire. The police first made contact with Lavin in February of 1983 when a related investigation revealed the size of his unreported income and the FBI suspected it had come from drugs.

  Lawrence W. Lavin was indicted in September of 1984, charged with masterminding a cocaine syndicate the FBI agents described as the largest in Philadelphia's history. Before discovering Lavin in 1982, federal authorities suspected that organized crime moved 26 pounds of cocaine into the Philadelphia area every month. Through a taped telephone conversation in 1983, the FBI learned that Lavin's organization was handling 44 pounds of cocaine a week. What the feds didn't know was the lengths Lavin would go to avoid prison, or that he began preparing his flight after his initial contact with the FBI in 1983, a full year-and-a-half prior to his indictment. When the FBI moved in on Lavin two days before Halloween in 1984, suspecting that he would jump bail, they found his mansion empty. It would be 18 months before the FBI would get another crack at Lavin.

  Once the FBI tipped him off in 1983, Larry Lavin began to prepare for the inevitable. He started working out with weights because he felt a small man like himself would be victimized in prison. He bought a couple books on fake ID and began collecting birth certificates, Social Security cards, drivers licenses and other identification to support himself and his wife, Marcia. As soon as he was indicted in September of 1984, Larry fleshed-out the final elements of his plan to disappear.

  Lavin prepared his new identity in keeping with his Irish Catholic background. He became James O'Neil, his wife Susan O'Neil, and his two-year-old son Christopher O'Neil. He inquired at embassies about extradition treaties with various foreign countries knowing that this information would get back to the FBI and they would suspect he intended to flee the country. On the day he and his family packed up a rented car and drove off, a number of his friends flew out of Philadelphia to various locations throughout the country with tickets bought in the Lavins' names. But Lavin had no intention of giving up the comfortable lifestyle he had grown accustomed to.

  The Lavins drove the car they had rented under an assumed name to Virginia Beach, an affluent resort community outside of Norfolk that is popular with retired, high-ranking federal employees. Within a few months the "O'Neils" purchased an expensive house in a new waterfront development. His wife gave birth to a baby daughter named Tara O'Neil. Lavin bought a yacht and took up fishing and scuba diving. Popular with the neighbors, he told them he had made a fortune selling a computer company he had founded. He invested the money he brought with him through a variety of channels using several identities he had been able to document. By April of 1985, Lavin was so confident of his successful disappearance that he felt safe making limited contact with his former life.

  Larry Lavin agreed to let his wife Marcia write a letter to her mother. He instructed her, however, to describe their new-born daughter as a boy, just in case the letter got into the wrong hands. The letter was mailed through a series of mail drops to disguise their real location. Lavin knew the FBI wanted him badly. He was right.

  The FBI prosecutes a thousand drug dealers for every one ringleader they catch. Lavin had put the Philadelphia cocaine organization together himself, and the authorities wanted to put him away very badly. FBI agents seized Marcia's letter after getting a warrant to search her mother's house. But Lavin was clever. There was nothing in the letter to give him away. Except...

  Marcia had described in the letter Christopher's third birthday party, held at one of those family pizza parlors where "the bear brought out his birthday cake & sang him a song." Both the agents on the case were family men who had been to such places, but never saw a bear. They contacted Chuck E. Cheese, the national chain of pizza/entertainment parlors. While Chuck E. Cheese never used a bear, they knew of a chain called Showbiz Pizza operated primarily in the South that employed a cuddly mascot named Billy-Bob the Bear.

  The FBI agents also learned that Lavin was going to make a prearranged phone call to his close friend, Ken Weidler. Weidler himself was prosecuted for his
part in the cocaine ring and had agreed to cooperate with the feds for a lighter sentence. He didn't like helping them, but he knew Larry had studied wiretapping and surveillance techniques and was not likely to stay on the phone long enough to give the police time to trace it. He was wrong.

  While they couldn't trace the exact number, the FBI was able to nail down the 804 area code. Within that area code there were only two Showbiz Pizza outlets--one in Lynchburg and one in Virginia Beach. The FBI knew that hundreds of retired agents lived in the Virginia Beach area, so they mailed out letters to all of them, enclosing color photos of Larry and his wife. The letters paid off. One of the retired agents was a neighbor of Lavin's who had been out fishing on Lavin's boat, only he knew him as Brian James O'Neil.

  On May 15, 1985, Larry Lavin, alias James O'Neil, was arrested on a Virginia Beach dock as he climbed off a friend's boat after a day of fishing. Lavin was surprised but unemotional. He agreed to cooperate with the police in exchange for freedom for his wife and kids. Larry Lavin has not been sentenced at this writing. Authorities predict it will be at least 20 years before he is a free man again.

  Private Eyes & Skip Tracers

  You can see that the life of the identity changer is much more difficult when someone has the resources to back up their compulsion to find him. Corporations and wealthy individuals may not turn to the police because they don't want to publicize your disappearance. Whether they inform the authorities or not, they will often hire private detectives to hunt you down. Where I went to college there was an exceptionally bright student who just vanished one day. He was one of those "boy geniuses" who entered the university in his young teens and had a difficult time adjusting socially. He was very much into the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons to the extent that he used to act it out in the drainage tunnels that criss-crossed beneath the campus. At first it was thought that his disappearance was related to the game.

  This is the sort of story that makes for great newspaper copy, of course. The boy's parents were very wealthy. While they notified the police, they also hired a private detective to search for their son. The media played out the drama for weeks with each new effort made by the police. But it was the private eye that finally found the kid in a hospital in Houston and brought him back home. Nothing much came out in the way of his motive for disappearing except that foul play was not involved.

  Not too long ago there was a locally celebrated case in San Francisco where a man who was not a U.S. citizen fled with his children to Mexico. There was important money involved on the mother's side, but none on the father's. The man was promptly located by San Francisco's most prominent private eye and the children were returned to San Francisco within a week.

  The more money and/or publicity involved in a disappearance, the more intensive and prolonged the search will be. If it's big money, chances are a good detective agency will be after you, or even the federal government. But for the debtor who leaves his creditors in the lurch, the companies involved will probably write off the money or turn the case over to skip tracers.

  Professional tracing agencies are usually after people who have not changed their names and they have difficulty finding a person who undergoes a disappearance-with-identity-change. They are relatively systematic in their search for missing heirs, stockholders, alumni and the like and boast in their advertising of "85% success rates." I strongly suspect that most of the remaining 15% are deliberate, systematic disappearees.

  All tracers constantly and persistently go through phone books, directories, newspapers and so on. Chances are they will find a man with an unusual last name or a high profile. Those who change their identities, shun publicity and keep their noses clean should have no difficulty evading this kind of low-level search.

  The Salvation Army

  A little known facet of the search for missing persons is that there are a number of social agencies who undertake to find disappearees. The Salvation Army is the best known of these, and far and away the most efficient. They mostly find missing sons and daughters, relatives who emigrated from the old country and with whom contact has been lost, missing heirs, etc. They are so involved with this work that they even have a periodical devoted to it. However, the Salvation Army will not undertake an adverse search. That is, they will only act on behalf of a missing person's immediate family or in instances where it would be to the person's benefit to be located. They are comparatively thorough and far-ranging because of their international facilities. But like most tracing organizations, they are primarily concerned with people who are not deliberately concealing their identity and whereabouts.

  Insurance Companies

  Another example of where big money is involved, thorough searches are more likely, is the life insurance company. All insurance companies as a rule dislike to pay out money under any circumstances. But they dislike paying out big money more than small claims. As most life insurance policies are for $100,000 and up, any death warrants investigation before they will pay up. And this is particularly true where there is no corpse. Without a cold body you must have the disappearee declared legally dead to collect the life insurance. The life insurance companies do not have to find the person to withhold payment. All they must do is prove that he is alive and healthy somewhere. With the kind of financial incentives involved, insurance companies are likely to mount a much more intensive search than the local Missing Persons Bureau.

  * * *

  CREATING A BULLET-PROOF IDENTITY

  * * *

  "The whole system of identification for people in the United States and most foreign countries is a house of cards. And it's erected on soft, dry sand."

  --Gray, in a conversation with the author.

  I was in the San Francisco International Airport waiting to catch a plane to Texas when I met the man who provided most of the information for this chapter. He was a smallish man with a neatly-trimmed gray beard, wore an expensive gray suit and carried an aluminum Halliburton attache case which was quite the worse for wear and was also gray in hue. I never learned his name, but I've come to think of him as "Gray."

  I struck up a conversation with him because he was such a contrast to the good ol' boy types who filled the waiting area. We chatted in the aimless way of strangers until I casually mentioned I was researching a book on deliberate disappearances and identity changes, at which point he became electrified. I've thought back on the incident many times since and I do not believe he was a disappearee, although the information he gave me about documenting an identity has checked out 100%. Most of what follows is based on my conversations with Gray, which lasted until I deplaned in El Paso.

  LOCATING AN IDENTITY

  The first step in creating an identity is locating a good one to use. The word "locate" is the key here. While it is possible to fabricate an identity from scratch, and many people have done it successfully, it is an extremely difficult way to go about solving a simple problem. And the manufactured identity almost never withstands investigation as well as a genuine identity used by an imposter. Almost everybody is investigated at one time or another to a greater or lesser degree. It may be the personnel department where you've applied for a job, a bonding company investigating your past before they agree to guarantee your performance, or a prospective father-in-law checking up on his daughter's suitor. Although most of these investigations are not very rigorous, it is fairly easy to turn up enough information (or the lack thereof) to spot a completely fictitious identity. On the other hand, the person who adopts a genuine identity should be able to document it thoroughly enough to avoid discovery.

  Assuming a Living Identity

  While it is important to build your documentation on a genuine identity, it is a mistake to assume the identity of another living person. Many small time criminals have made this mistake and it has cost them a trip back to jail. They lift a guy's wallet or find some credit cards while engaged in a robbery and go on a coast-to-coast spending spree. Maybe they just use the guy's ID and don't try to sp
end his money. But what they seem to forget is someone out there has an interest in locating them and putting a halt to their charade: the guy whose identity they copped. And if the theft is reported the police may be looking for someone using the victim's identity. Of course, there are imposters who have a definite need to appropriate a specific person's identity. Even then, it is very tricky to collect documentation to support the hoax. The imposter might find himself explaining to the authorities how he managed to get a duplicate drivers license after the speeding ticket he received was traced to a man who wasn't even in town that day. The imposter's request for a copy of "his" birth certificate will leave a paper trail that's easy enough to follow. And a duplicate passport, if discovered, could lead to serious trouble.

  When the State Department realizes it has issued passports to two different people with the same exact name and vital statistics, the shit is going to hit the fan! One passport is going to be revoked, and there are lots of places in the world where being without that little blue book could literally be a fate worse than death. Of course, it would be difficult for the State Department to cause a traveler much trouble because there are no records kept of the exact whereabouts of U.S. passport holders. The real trouble would come when the imposter tried to enter the U.S. again or renew the passport.

  Then there is the danger of crossing trails with the rightful holder of your assumed identity. The chances of this are not as slight as they may seem when you include all the people who know the original person well and might take more than passing notice of the "coincidence" of names. We've all heard of the "doctor" who finds himself behind bars after the "real thing" discovers the impersonation and blows the whistle. While there may be persons who have a need to appropriate the identity of a living individual, it is decidedly a mistake for a disappearee.