Playing Dead 1 HOW TO DISAPPEAR When Sam Israel III woke up on a hot Monday in June 2008, he had already decided it was a good day to die. He''d lost everything. He had lost his job as founder and CEO of the Bayou Hedge Fund Group, his reputation as a guy who could double your money, and his family in an ugly divorce. And more than $450 million of his investors'' dollars. That day, Sam was supposed to be reporting to Devens Prison in Massachusetts. At his sentencing hearing a few months earlier, he''d been handed twenty-two years for financial malfeasance and fraud--one of the harshest punishments a white-collar criminal had ever received. His Ponzi scheme was one of the largest to date, until Bernie Madoff''s crimes surfaced eight months later. Sam thought he''d do three to five, but the judge surprised him with seventeen more than he had expected.
Something about Sam Israel rubbed people the wrong way. He always seemed to be smirking. He refused to mimic the narrative of regret and atonement so many scammers adopt, at least after they get busted. Even the feds in court that day were stunned by the severity of Judge Colleen McMahon''s decision. As he was being led out of the courtroom, an FBI agent leaned in and whispered to Sam, "I have two words for you: Costa Rica." Going on the run hadn''t crossed Sam''s mind, but the agent''s words stuck with him. And since an officer of the court had presented him with the idea, though jokingly, he thought he''d been given the green light. By now, Sam understood that things were often not what they seemed.
In his mind, his crime had not been typical Wall Street greed or a pyramid scheme. As he understood it, he''d been tapped by the Octopus, an international conglomerate that dictated all financial markets. He had entered a world where he believed that a shadow market secretly controlled the Federal Reserve and that he had survived attempts on his life. While others thought he''d been a pawn in a long con, Sam now saw the world''s power structures as deeply connected and profoundly duplicitous. Messages could be anywhere, and an FBI agent was not the most outlandish emissary. After his sentencing in April 2008, a limousine dropped off Sam with his mother and his girlfriend in the driveway of the house he''d been renting since his divorce. They were all in shock. Twenty-two years.
He was forty-nine; he might as well have been handed a life sentence. Bright yellow pollen from budding trees blanketed the GMC Envoy truck that he rarely drove--it was simply one among his fleet of a half dozen cars. His mother asked Sam what he was going to do. In the neon scrim of pollen dust, he traced the message "suicide is painless" onto the hood. She told him the joke (which also happens to be the theme song from M*A*S*H), if it was one, was not in any way funny. Costa Rica. Of course! The country was a metaphor for escape. It meant save yourself; don''t go down without a fight.
And he would heed the advice. But he wouldn''t defect south of the border. Inspired by the Robin Williams comedy RV that Sam happened to catch on late-night TV one night around the time of his sentencing, he realized that he''d already seen the world, but not much of his own country. Why not hide in plain sight, in a mobile home? In just a few short weeks between his sentencing and surrender date, he cobbled together an exit plan. Disguised in a hat and sunglasses, he bought a laptop at Best Buy in the Palisades Mall. He found an RV for sale on Craigslist, just like the one Williams commandeered in the film, and purchased it from an elderly Long Island couple for $55,000 cash. He told them he was a professional poker player. Sam tapped the former CIA and Mossad connections he had established through the Octopus.
They helped him score IDs and a Social Security number in the name of David Klapp, an Iowa man who had died in 2001. He got a parking permit for all five boroughs of New York, a gun permit, a library card, and signed up as a night school student at a local community college. In three days, he had a new identity and the authenticating documents to prove it. He told a friend he had business to take care of at West Point, and needed a ride. He wanted to check out the Bear Mountain Bridge as a place to stage his suicide but knew he needed to avoid photos of his own car being taken at the tollbooth. Sam didn''t spot any cameras on the bridge itself, and he noticed that the southern lane was cordoned off, with construction nets hanging beneath. If he could swing it, he could step out over the ledge and fall into the net. He''d look like just another disgraced Wall Streeter who would as soon take his own life before paying his debt to society and his investors.
No one would miss the man who had lost millions, whose constant smirk reporters'' cameras had plastered on the nightly news. On that Monday in June, Sam parked the RV at a truck stop off Route 684 in Brewster. He paid Hassan, the twentysomething nephew of one of his Mossad associates, a wad of hundreds to help him stage his death. Hassan would tail the convicted man''s truck and wait for him on the other side. Sam had several cars he could''ve driven that day, but he took the Envoy because the family rarely used it. It got such little mileage that he''d forgotten the prescient suicide note he''d written on the hood weeks prior. He parked the truck at a vista point overlooking the Hudson River and then got into Hassan''s Nissan. They drove back over the bridge at fifteen miles per hour to make sure that repairmen weren''t working on the construction site that day.
Sam thought back to the FBI agent''s Costa Rica suggestion. He''d been given the green light, right? There would be sacrifices. He wouldn''t have contact with his family, and he''d have to go underground for a few years. The thought of not seeing his kids--a boy in junior high and a girl in high school--was distressing. Even in the throes of his divorce and legal troubles, they''d never spent more than a week apart. But anything was better than rotting in prison. When Hassan dropped him back off at the Envoy, Sam started to obsess over the things he''d be leaving behind for the cops to find. His own wallet, IDs, and credit cards were on the passenger seat.
He considered writing a real suicide note but decided against it. That''d be too cute. Let them figure the fucking thing out, he thought. He opened up the back tailgate and smoked a cigarette. He walked over to Hassan''s car. They were both jumpy with nerves. "I have to be out of my mind," Sam told Hassan. "Look, man," Hassan said, "either way, you are dead.
So at least now you''ll choose your own end. This is crazy, but you may live and be free. You know you''re crazy," he added. "So just do the fucking thing!" In that loaded moment, Sam received Hassan''s wisdom--that he was fucking crazy and to just do the fucking thing--as from a divine oracle. He would do it. But he''d given Hassan''s uncle a contingency plan. Late the night before, they''d been drinking Scotch, and Sam said that if things went south--if he missed the narrow construction net and plummeted to the Hudson River below--Hassan should give $200,000 to Sam''s girlfriend and the rest to his son. Sell the RV, but wipe it of any evidence and fingerprints first.
He paused, as if waiting for some act of God to intervene, something that would prevent him from slamming the truck door shut and doubling back across the bridge. But nothing happened. So Sam climbed in, alone, and turned on the engine. He reflected on his life as he drove. What had brought him to this point? How the fuck did it come to this, man? He''d believed he was a good person, but in the last few years, he''d gotten away from himself. He''d lied to his investors when he didn''t have to. He''d gotten divorced, and he had never considered himself the type to end a marriage. He''d joined an underworld where secrets ran deep.
Nothing was what it seemed. But as he circled the rotary back across the bridge, he smiled. No matter what, he was free already. It didn''t matter how much work lay ahead of him, or if he lived another fifty years or fifteen minutes. The decision had been made. Today was a good day to die. He drove up and paid the toll. "HIS WHOLE ''SUICIDE IS painless'' thing?" Frank Ahearn says.
"What, did he think the feds were going to show up and say, ''Hmmmm, he wrote a suicide note on his truck, he must have jumped off the bridge! All right, fellas, let''s go home!''" Frank shakes his head wearily. "He conforms to a category of a thief with no walk-away plan." I''m talking to Frank Ahearn to get an expert opinion on faking death in general and on Sam Israel in particular. We are sitting in his garment district office in New York City: a converted factory ensconced between a modeling agency and a drag queen costumer. Frank is the coauthor of How to Disappear: Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails, and Vanish Without a Trace, a manual for those who want to do just that, and he took a special interest in Sam''s case, one of the higher-profile instances of pseudocide in recent years. Sam is one of Frank''s favorite "morons and idiots." He fits a certain death fraud trend that''s all too familiar. "None of these white-collar criminals plan their exit.
They just keep going until it all falls down. If he''d thought about his exit plan as smartly as he''d thought about his crime, he''d be in a lovely locale right now, enjoying his money." Frank k.