With the legal kind of creditor, you may be able to get away with a few basic adjustments: changing your name, home address, and social security number might do the trick. Unfortunately, lenders can leverage the courts to send the law after you by filing suits that require you to appear in court. Some state laws are more aggressive than others. No show at court? A warrant goes out, and blammo! You’re wanted. That said—they aren’t high-priority warrants, unless you incurred a seriously huge debt and handled things in a suspicious way. On the flip side, there are illegal debts, which are another subject entirely. That leads me to…
• Bad guys want to get you. You’ve heard tell of federal witness protection. There’s many a true-crime miniseries about getting away from the tentacles of the cartel or the mob or the mystery book of the month club. Within all that drama and glamour is a rare but bare necessity.…
All too often, the tortoise-toed government might not be in a rush to whisk you away from that guy with a teardrop tattoo who’s expressed an uncontrollable desire to fry you up in a nice butter sauce. You and the bureaucrats may not feel the same sense of urgency about the matter. Even if the feds are patrolling the block on your behalf, there are simply times when the wolves are way too close to the door and an extralegal extraction must be performed. Those times certainly do include the collection of deadly debts for drugs, for illegal services, for legal services. Sometimes, you just know too much and there’s a guy who simply can’t afford your existence anymore. My friend, I support your existence. If you have to vanish because a wolf in human form is at the door with a cleaver and a smile, then get thee gone with my blessing.
I hate to be the guy to bring the comedown. It’s not my thing to pass judgment. If it had been, I might have wound up on the other side of the big oak bench. I might have been a less successful attorney-at-law and a more successful judge-at-large. But as it stood, my clients didn’t pay me to judge. Evaluate, sure. Counsel, yes. Level with them when necessary, if needed? Of course.
And yet… in the interest of covering as many bases as one man can (and I want to hit a homerun here!), even I have to admit that there are perfectly terrible reasons to disappear.
• Dead-beating the rap. In my legal practice, I was happy to be Albuquerque’s very own inflatable Statue of Liberty. I’ll take in those tired, poor, huddled masses. Even wretched refuse needs an attorney at some point. Still, I did sometimes get a little twinge of conscience if it seemed a client was trying to get out of paying for childcare or another dependent-related obligation. But still, it takes funds to pull this kind of thing off. My two cents is worth a lot more than advertised, and I’d like to offer that unless you have been breeding like a lecherous rabbit, the price of disappearing is going to be much greater than the price of child support.
• Fraud gone bad. Even in my unusual circumstances, I don’t mind declaring that fraud is mostly unpropitious. Though, let’s face it, some forms of fraud are slightly understandable. Hypothetically, let’s say you laundered money for drug dealers and made it a habit to skim a bit. You’re a modern-day Robin Hood, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. The poor, in this case, being yourself. Who could blame you? One day, a contact seems more suspicious than usual. You get the feeling that it’s time to take your stash and run, and more power to you.
Or, perhaps you’re “in the game,” but you’re not the type to play at the high-stakes table. There are low-yield frauds that take from the rich insurance companies and give to the poor slip-and-fall artists, though those situations rarely rise to the level of slipping out of life as you know it.
Don’t read me wrong—little seeds of fraud can grow into giant, uncontrollable beanstalks. I read about a guy—we’ll just call him John Woe—who teamed with his wife in a doozy of a life insurance fraud. They took some clothes out of John’s closet and played dress-up with a corpse they’d acquired, stowing John Woe’s deceased doppelganger inside a soon-to-be-burned-out car. When ole Johnny came up “missing,” Mrs. Woe received an impressive payday from her hubby’s life insurance company. Unfortunately for the Woe-ful duo, the insurers tested the corpse’s DNA and discovered the deception. As the icing on this morbid cake, the grieving Mrs. Woe promptly got a new boyfriend who was a not-so-dead ringer for her recently deceased husband, and the jig was up. Look, if you’re going to try to fake your own death so that someone else can collect the insurance money, you’ve got to be okay with never, ever touching a penny of that sweet payout yourself. Your fake death only works if it operates on the same prevailing characteristic of your real death: it’s permanent. So unless you were looking to get separated and you’re feeling especially charitable toward your soon-to-be ex, don’t try this one at home.
• In a word, murder. If sending a guy or gal a one-way ticket to Belize seems like the most direct solution to some very thorny problems, you’d better be geared up to weather the subsequent shitstorm. There was a Foreign Service officer in the ’70s who had killer language skills and a boatload of degrees. A regular Man from U.N.C.L.E. Oh, and he offed his entire family with a hammer and then disappeared from the face of the earth. He had the skill set and the lead time on the cops to get the hell out of the United States and begin a new life elsewhere, speaking any one of the five dialects he knew as fluent as a native would. If you have a talented tongue and a ride out of town, by all means—you do you. But why not just disappear, and skip the gruesome part?
Now, my friend, is the time to grab another cup of coffee or your choice of energy concoction. We’re getting off the stick. Like the old Morning Zoo Deejays used to scream, we’re locking into this channel now and breaking the knob off.
Imagine that I’m about to upend a big old tub of Lincoln Logs and we’re going to take a look at each one. By the time we’re done, we’ll have a built you a sturdy new life, your old self left behind. That shiny, newly named you will go striding off into the future.
Ha. No, seriously: best-case scenario is you get to the other side alive. You will be one lucky son of a gun or daughter of fortune if that wobbly toy house doesn’t fall apart in the first breeze. But see, that’s part of the fun—figuring out how we get to the end, so we can begin again.
Lawyering took an eye for details. I had to be able to spot a misplaced decimal on a shady accountant’s spreadsheet the way a keen ’49-er could see a fleck of gold in ten pounds of sand.
I can guarantee that if someone disappears, a focused acumen as sharp as mine will come knocking on your door. Thorough and patient peepers will absolutely find that one detail that you glossed over in your hurry to trip the light fantastic out of town before the villagers arrived with their torches.
Here’s some tough love: you are going to forget something. Doesn’t matter if you’re an astrophysicist or actress—particulars necessary to getting off the grid will fly right through your nervous brain.
Let’s start by ticking off a number of things that might help anyone find you if you up and run tomorrow. I’m talking about seemingly everyday items you probably don’t think too hard about as you glance at them in your wallet: credit cards, driver’s license or state-issued ID, passport if you ever had one, and your good old social security number.
The short list of documents that validate your existence as a semi-functioning adult? They offer a formidable set of obstacles on the journey into a new life. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. And if you’re starting over? These papers are the tip of a digital iceberg of interconnected information. You definitely can’t use them to set up your new life. You’ve got to start from scratch.
I’ll assume by this point that you’re totally clear on why you’re doing this in the first place. That’s settled business. Moving on to plan proper.
Feels kinda exciting, doesn’t it? Woo-hoo! A new you! But before you dive into the deep end and start swimming to shores unknown, take a very hard look at the life you have right now, as you sit here. We’ve got to examine what we’re leaving so we can understand how to get gone.
Those everyday marks, the hoi polloi in the streets drinking bubble tea and taking selfies with their dogs, don’t realize they are happy little flies caught in a black widow’s web.
Ever seen a black widow’s web? The most deadly spider to ever ruin a rural trip to the outhouse makes this nasty-looking, haphazard death net in the most surreptitious nooks and crannies. None of that pretty Charlotte’s Web–looking spiral art: just a cloud of silk. Lot of dead bugs wrapped up in there, though. Life’s like that web, and whatever it is that has you ready to skedaddle is the black widow. And she’s always hungry.
The only way to understand what you’re doing is to take stock of all the threads that have you trapped in that predator’s nest. That’ll include our happy little list of flammable papers, like those pesky birth certificates.
And then: there are the digital threads. Go ahead. Park your name between a set of quotation marks in your favorite online search engine. Unless you’ve got a common name like “Bill Smith” or “Jane Jones,” chances are any number of the results kicked back to you will, in fact, be you. If you have social media, like Facebook or Twitter or Twitface—whatever—there are friend and family connections weaving you tighter into the Web. Your quotidian interactions with these folks leave behind a bread-crumb trail to be gobbled up by the powers-that-be.
Already getting the picture, I hope. To truly separate from that old life, you are going to have to get out your proverbial machete and chop right through that jungle of connections. More of them spring up to block your path every day! It’s not going to be easy, but you’ve got to face up to just how many cords need to be cut.
If you have additional licenses—law, business, marriage, guns, weed, scuba, etc.—those are all sets of silken threads vibrating under that imaginary spider’s feet.
Records for all these things are often readily searchable. It’s a lead-pipe cinch to look up a business license in a state database. A committed investigator with any agency—private or public—can study those records and suss out all sorts of salient details, like what your actual signature looks like. That’s in there if you signed the documents the kindly clerks at the state business registry thingy saw fit to turn into easily downloadable PDF documents. And hey, what about that marriage license? Or licenses? That’s a document and even better (or worse, for our purposes), another person who has plenty of information they might be willing to part with should one of the reasons you’re seeking a new name and life come a-knocking at their door.
Then there’s family. This is a crazy wrinkle, because if you are without blood relations, well hey, perhaps that’s a choice and good for you. If that’s the case, your situation would make our job here easier, because when you’re trying to escape an old life for a new, family ties may be some of the toughest to untangle.
Most folks have a tendency to talk to family with reckless abandon. You go away suddenly one day with no notice to Mom or Pop or even your brother, one of them might remember the time you openly fantasized about doing just that—leaving this crapfest rat race of a life behind with dreams of glory.
Getting off the grid requires you to be on your guard, all the time. Don’t get too comfortable. You’ve got to stay three steps ahead. Before you can even consider cutting loose and stepping off, you have to know where you’re escaping to. You’ve got to go set up your new home, in whatever form that may take.
Before I grab my hammer and start whacking the brass tacks of your new digs into place for you, it’s only fair I impart some of my own experience, give you some idea of how it works if you decide to involve another freelance contractor in this hootenanny. I’ll be really real with you: it’s sticky, spooky, and ’spensive… but an intermediary can help guide you on the yellow brick road to your very own Oz.
Let’s say you’re in a tough position. You’ve gotten yourself into a tangle with some unsavory characters working on a dangerous project, and man, can you ever see the electrified piss lightning bolts on the horizon. You don’t have to be psychic to know how many things are falling apart. So what’s to do?
The solution is to get away, to get anywhere. Maybe you could find a job working fast food at a mall in a snowy Midwestern city—because who the hell would think to look for a fugitive there, right?
Maybe in this situation you simply don’t have time to sit down with a book like this, or noodle around on the Dark Web. Remember when you were in high school and you had the sneaking suspicion that all the cool kids were hanging out and brewing moonshine without you? Well, if they weren’t then—they are now, virtually and anonymously on the shady digital alleys of the Dark Web. Prepubescent moonshine is probably the tamest thing you could acquire there.
If you don’t have time to wander the maze-like cesspool of the secret Internet to find an escape hatch from your life: that’s when you will probably want to start hunting for someone local who already has his or her own nefarious sources and some practice providing others with vetted, authentic papers that the happy folks at border patrol wouldn’t blink twice at if you wanted to go on a little jaunt to Canada to stock up on maple syrup or maple whiskey or maple lima beans, whatever it is you’re in the mood to eat.
We can call these friendly and helpful merchants “identity brokers,” though that’s a confusing term because it might also refer to the scum of the earth services that harvest the e-mail address from your “Coffee Cake Digest” subscriptions and shop it around to a million other mailing lists that you’re probably not interested in (unless you like your spam with a side of “GROW TEN INCHES IN TEN HOURS TO PLEASE YOUR MAN!”)—sometimes those services are called identity brokers, too.
Our brand of identity brokers are a little bit like drug dealers, except instead of hallucinogenic lollipops, they’re doling out passports and IDs. They frequently do their work for nice people born out of town who seek to grab that brass ring of American citizenship. Colombians anxious to try Seattle’s Best Coffee, Russians looking to ditch the fur boots for a pair of white Nikes, English folks who discover they’re Anglophobes—the usual suspects. Here’s how that might play out…