Finally, Frank migrated Ken’s money offshore (from Canada) and created three International Business Corporations, which could not be traced – not even by police or foreign governments. That’s because Frank smartly placed the money in countries that didn’t recognize the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty - meaning that the banks in these countries were the equivalent of Fort Knox. From then on, Ken would only use the corporations to buy things. Frank had successfully ended Ken’s life as a private individual; he was now a phantom corporation.
A little more than three months after their first encounter in the bookstore, Ken was ready to be disappeared. As his destination he’d picked a tropical island country, dreaming of lazy living and frozen margaritas. But at Frank’s instruction, he would travel a circuitous route. He took a plane to one country, before buying a ticket there with cash and heading to a second country, where he met Frank and purchased a ticket to his final destination. To this day, Frank remembers Ken - still geeked out in a golf shirt and khakis - beaming like the Cheshire cat as he entered a cab for the airport and to his new home. A few seconds later, he was gone. And Frank never saw him again.
According to the FBI, nearly 60,000 to 80,000 Americans disappear every month. Only a fraction of these are involuntary disappearances, like children who are abducted. Many people disappear because they want to. A lot of times these disappearances go unreported, because the individual doesn’t have strong ties to his or her community, like a family, or a prominent job, and doesn’t have someone looking out for them. To be harsh: nobody cares.
But one needn’t be on the run or anonymous to harbor a fantasy of disappearing. Who hasn’t once dreamed of fleeing his life - no matter how contented it is - just for the chance to start anew? Several years ago, Money magazine published a study that found that one in five Americans had considered leaving the United States. The same survey stated that three million Americans would leave immediately if they knew how.
“Lots of people have the feeling,” Frank tells me. “You want to shoot yourself or run. It’s called freedom. I’m teaching people how to be free.” That word freedom gets Frank jumping. In fact, he has the word tattooed in script across his back.
Of course, it’s harder than ever to disappear. People have never been more closely monitored. It may not yet have reached Orwellian proportions, but chances are someone is almost always watching you - from subway stations to airports to football games to Internet spyware checking in on the whereabouts of your computerized mouse. Credit cards, bank accounts and utility bills all leave a trail. Cell phones are even worse. If the average American tried to leave town tomorrow, they’d likely be found in 24 hours. “When you're looking for someone, the world is like a gigantic database,” says Frank. “Data is like a bad disease, it will never go away.”
After he disappeared Ken, Frank thought about how he could make it part of his business. It seemed so outlandish, so improbable - working the other side of the grid. He’d think about it on his ride to Starbucks in the morning, all through the afternoon as he tracked down crazies and deadbeats, and late at night in bed, as he watched the 11 PM news. He developed plans, obsessed – and obsessed some more. Talking about it today, he can sound like the blind oracle from the Matrix movies, speaking rhapsodically with his thick arms cutting the air and his goatee dancing off his face about giving people new lives, with new names, in new dimensions. “Disappearing,” says Frank, “is like peeling off all of those old layers that define you and putting up new ones.”
In time Frank developed a disappearance strategy that he broke into three stages. The first stage was misinformation - the total obliteration of personal information files, from phone bills to apartment leases to health club memberships. The second stage was disinformation - the creation of a Byzantine web of false data to lead someone’s pursuers astray while exhausting their personnel and financial resources. The final stage was reformation - the creation of dummy corporations to hold and spend money and then getting to where you want to go and making sure you don’t get traced there.
Finally, Frank felt ready to go public with his disappearing plan. He penned an article about his idea on the web site escapeartist.com – a site for living, banking and buying property offshore - spoke at some mystery writer’s conferences, and launched a website offering his services. The emails came in almost immediately. Many were from window-shopping customers that Frank calls “Dear Abbys.” “They’re fantasizing about disappearing,” he explains. “They want to feel it out and see if it’s possible. A lot go through all their problems and how life sucks. Then I won’t hear from them ever again.”
Some potential customers, naturally, turned out to be criminals. One admitted that he was facing a charge of violating the federal Racketeer Influenced And Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, and needed an exit. Dozens requested fake passports, how to change an identity or appropriate a dead cousin’s Social Security number. Asked if he takes on criminal cases, he says categorically no, adding, “I don’t like showering with men.” He got adulterers, too: a woman who wanted to know how to rent an apartment without her husband knowing. Once a sixteen-year-old boy wrote: “I hate my life, I have 27 bucks, can you help me get away?” Frank politely declined. “Your life will get better, I promise,” he wrote back. “It’s only the beginning.”
Roughly one in 100 of the initial inquirers were truly serious. Frank called the serious ones “The Disappearers.” He had three of them in his first year, and six the second, and charged them as much as $30,000 apiece, plus expenses, depending upon their situation.
Jennifer came along not long after Ken. She was a 40-something criminal defense attorney from New England (“the lesbian,” Frank calls her). For twenty years, she’d been arguing and winning cases. But then she lost a major one with her client getting hit with a hefty sentence. The client, whom she called “the a**hole who couldn't take what was coming his way,” blamed her for losing, and threatened her. When Jennifer contacted Frank, she was distraught. “I should have stuck to [real estate] closings,” she said to him.
Frank took her on. First he gave Jennifer the tools to wage informational warfare, deviating and canceling her accounts. Then, using an old friend’s name and a ghost address on the West Coast (a Mail Box Etc account), Jennifer set up a shelf corporation in a midwestern state to spend her money and hold assets. Known as corporate cloaking, she would use the corporation to pay for everything - from renting an apartment to opening a bank account, signing up for cable and buying new shoes. As a consumer, Jennifer would be just as good as dead.
But unlike Ken, Jennifer did not want to flee the country. She wanted to stay on the East Coast. Frank recommended she move to a medium-sized city, one that would be big enough to get lost in. Jennifer did, and stopped working as an attorney. But there was a wrinkle. She didn’t have Ken’s financial resources, and needed to work again, which presented Frank with a new hurdle. When Jennifer got a job, she would be required to pay taxes in the new state. That would send her name and address to the IRS and make her vulnerable to dirty investigators. To keep off the radar, she could – illegally – pay taxes in the state where her ghost address is located. Frank says he simply explained this to Jennifer, and doesn’t know what she decided to do.
Ada was next. A pretty grey-blond in her late twenties, she had a psychopath ex-husband with an epic history of drug and assault charges. Even though they were divorced, the man still came around – and beat her. She feared that one night her husband would kill her and her 5-year old son. She wanted to go, but she also trembled at the thought of completely leaving her life behind.
“She found the idea [of disappearing] extremely scary,” remembers Frank. “The idea of going someplace and not knowing people and also the isolation from her family and missing holidays. She talked about scenarios like missing weddings, and what if there is a death.”
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