Frank Ahearn never thought he’d wind up helping people disappear. From the beginning, he’d always worked the other side. It was thrilling, sometimes dangerous work, finding people. Challenging, too. Usually, all Frank got was an old phone number or an abandoned address. Sometimes it was just a name and a city, an exceptionally tough request, but one that he could almost do with his eyes closed.
To find someone, you had to fool people. Frank had an instinctive talent for “gagging” - devising elaborate, phony stories designed to elicit information out of individuals or companies that weren’t supposed to give it to him. “Professional lying,” he dubbed it. For instance, he’d call a utilities company, like Con Edison, and, posing as a collection agency, he’d ask for his victim’s forwarding address. Or he’d call a relative, tell them he was FedEx trying to deliver a package and extract the victim’s address that way. Sometimes the work was mind-numbingly rote - toiling through miles of data, scouring records, flipping through the White Pages. If the person who disappeared knew what he was doing, it made Frank’s work even harder.
But Frank was first-rate. “Frank has helped me track down hundreds of individuals, all of whom did not want to be located,” says Robert Jerlow, a private investigator from Orange, California, who specializes in fraud and organized crime. “He finds my guys and gals hiding under rocks all over the world.”
He was so damned good that clients occasionally wondered if he’d been a New York City detective – or an FBI agent. Which made him chuckle a bit. Years ago, he was accepted to the NYC police academy, but, at the last minute, he decided not to go. “I guess I didn’t like the uniformity of that sort of thing,” he says. “And the money wasn’t very good.”
In the early 1990s, Frank was hired by a private investigator (who was working for an insurance company) to hunt down Robert Scarletta and his wife who owned the national armored truck company Revere Armored. As Frank remembers it, Scarletta and his wife went on the run after authorities started asking questions about missing millions. Before leaving, they’d stuffed their private plane with cash, according to Frank. By gagging small airports, Frank tracked that plane all over the country. He then lied to casinos to get win loss statements, which showed that Scarletta was a heavy gambler, spending millions of dollars he didn’t have. And after four months or so of hunting, after compiling miles of incriminating data, the Scarlettas must have felt the pressure of the situation because, as Frank says, they finally negotiated their surrender to authorities.
Sometimes Frank’s assignments were glitzy. When the Oscars statues were stolen in 2000, Frank hunted down one of the key players. He says he found Monica Lewinsky before anyone else. (“I got her phone record framed on my wall,” he boasts.) Earlier this year, he was hired to locate the hotel clerk whom Russell Crowe cracked over the head with a phone. That one was child’s play says Frank. He turned the guy up in fifteen minutes flat.
Were all of Frank’s techniques lawful? “A gray area,” he tells me, which is his coy way of confessing to the slipperiness of the job. He then cites the “Gram Leach Biley Act,” a federal law, which forbids people from lying about anything regarding a financial institution. In other words, Frank can’t call up someone and pretend he’s a bank. “I follow this strictly,” he declares.
Over the years Frank has worked for everyone – insurance companies, government agencies, private eyes, attorneys, tabloids. He did thousands of cases. Which, when he thought of it, meant that he also had thousands of enemies. He began to lose sleep, worried about hang-up phone calls he got and jumped when he heard noises in the night. “Did the crazy biker who got his MC repo’d figure out it was me?” he’d ask himself. “Did the husband that got caught cheating know I was the one that pulled his phone records? Did we leave a trail?”
He became fanatical about his privacy – still is today. Phone directories have no listing for him. He has a P.O. box, but no official home address. Almost everything is paid for in cash. His sleek black Cadillac? Registered to an old address. When he travels, he switches hotels nightly – which is also a symptom of his interminable restlessness. Call one of the five world numbers listed on his website and you go straight to a voice mail. When I talked to him the first time, he said he had an office in Manhattan. Later, I learned he didn’t. Some private dick’s joke that Frank might not even exist. “I talk to guys a lot of guys on the phone, other PIs, and they’re like ‘you’ve met this guy Frank, you know him?’” says Jerry Palace, a former NYPD detective and now running his own investigative outfit in Westchester. “Frankie Boy is a legend. And it’s funny, I’m probably one of the only freakin’ guys who’ve met him.”
One sweaty morning in late June I meet him on a grimy highway overpass in nowhere, New Jersey, not far from the George Washington Bridge. We meet there because it’s an anonymous place, and Frank appreciates anonymous places. Frank, 41, with his brown heavy metal hair and sizeable frame, is sometimes mistaken for the professional wrestler Kevin Nash, who also played “The Russian” in the movie “The Punisher.” Today, he sports faded jean shorts, leather boat shoes and an oversized white wife beater with a picture of Bob Marley. “I’m a huge Bob Marley fan,” he hollers over ninety-mile per hour traffic, as we walk towards his just-washed black Cadillac. “He was always singing about freedom.”
When Frank talks – and he’s always talking - his head and arms move rapidly as if to punctuate his points. “You can’t keep me still,” he says as he points the car south on the highway, his thumbs drumming the steering wheel to the radio. “I have to be constantly going.”
By the late 90’s, Frank was making it big in the skip tracing business. He says he was raking in $40,000, $50,000 a month, employed eight people, and owned a speedboat, a zippy crotch rocket, and a 924 Porsche. He ate at expensive restaurants and drank expensive wine. “A gluttonous time,” he calls it.
But trouble followed. In 2000, the IRS told Frank he owed over $100,000 in back taxes, money he didn’t have. He claimed bankruptcy. He got divorced. In 2002, he shuttered the office and let his staff go. “There was a lot gained and a lot was lost,” he recalls. At that time, he started missing life in New York City, after having moved away to a distant shady suburb of New Jersey to be with his now ex-wife. He wrote some poetry about his troubles. One night he ended up at a poetry slam in Greenwich Village, where he took the microphone. Everything concerning these tumultuous times poured out in one flowing, if not unusual, poetic song (“I do a lot of weird things like that,” he says about slamming that night. “It occupies me.”).
It took him two years to get his life back on track and his business above water. Not long after, Frank met Ken.
A few days after Ken’s phone call, Frank met him again at Borders and laid out what needed to be done. For starters, they would never meet again in person in the States. They’d speak only by telephone, and only using prepaid phone cards bought with cash. Frank ordered Ken to cancel all his credit cards and get rid of his cell phone, too. He instructed him to change the spelling of his name - not a total name change, just add a few wrong letters here and there - on all his utility bills and have everything forwarded to an address Frank had set up in Salt Lake City. A month later, Ken moved his mail from Salt Lake to Boise. A month after that, he moved it to Los Angeles. He kept all his balances current and paid in full.
Next Frank sent Ken to middling town in Colorado, where he had him apply for an apartment rental and run a credit check. That would be one of the first of what Frank called Ken’s “false leads.” The credit check would enter Ken’s name in a national database, so if someone started looking for him, they’d see the Colorado inquiry and head there. But they’d find nothing since Ken hadn’t rented an apartment in that state, of course. Frank also told Ken to deposit $300 in an ATM account. Then Frank took Ken’s ATM card and moved it around the globe - asking trusted colleagues to use it and take out money in places like Florida, California and England.
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