Writer Christopher S. Stewart writes about Frank M. Ahearn who teaches people how to disappear.

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The Disappearing Man

A look into the secret world of a man whose job it is to help people leave their lives behind – forever.

By Christopher S. Stewart

GQ

July 2006

The first person Frank Ahearn ever disappeared was Ken. He spotted him at a Borders in north Jersey about three years ago - a pale, geeky-looking guy in a golf shirt and khakis, thumbing through a pile of books about Central America and offshore banking. It took Frank about a half second to figure him out: Ken was skipping town.

“I betcha you’re going to buy a condo in Costa Rica,” Frank said to the man, his voice low, so no one else could hear. “And bank in Belize.”

Ken’s slackened mouth curled into a big dumb O that almost made Frank laugh. He looked at Frank - a tall, longhaired guy dressed in black with a cartoonish goatee, thick tattooed arms and a twisted and discolored front tooth - and fumbled for a response. But now Frank was talking again, running his mouth in his thick New York accent.

“The problem is, if you’re running from someone,” he rattled on, “they’re going to find you.”

Ken looked like he might faint right there in the café part of Borders. So Frank decided to explain himself. He was a “skip tracer,” he told Ken - a slippery sort of business that specialized in finding people. Mobsters, drug lords, wife beaters, rock stars - Frank found guys for a living. He’d hunted as far as Bali to bring them back. He knew all the tricks, and he couldn’t help but notice that Ken was already fucking up.

“You bought your books with a credit card and discount card,” Frank told Ken. It was a rookie mistake - both were easily traceable. A couple of well-placed phone calls, and any respectable private eye could find Ken in the time it took to microwave popcorn.

Ken shifted uncomfortably in his sandals, still not believing this guy, wondering if he was for real - or if Frank, in fact, had been sent to hunt him down. But then Frank offered him a business card - depicting a De Chirico-esque mannequin standing alone on a white beach, staring out at a big blue ocean and a headline that asked simply “Are you looking for someone?” - and walked away, just like that.

Two weeks later, Ken emailed. Frank was right: Ken was trying to run away. He was in trouble. Not long ago the government had paid him big money to testify in a fraud case against his former employer, a mid-sized supplies company with government contracts. Ken had been one of the company’s accountants. Somehow his name had leaked, and he was targeted as a rat. He got mysterious phone calls. Threats were made. A man approached him on the street and announced, cryptically, your “life will be made uncomfortable.” An ex-colleague warned “I’m gonna get you.”

Ken told Frank he feared for his life. He’d thought about calling the police – but worried the police would never be able to fully protect him. He didn’t have any big attachments - no wife, no children. He felt there was only one option. But Ken had no idea how to do it.

Finally Ken summoned the nerve to ask Frank a question that changed both of their lives.

“Can you help me disappear?”

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.

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 asshole 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.”

Between Ada and her mother, she had $3,000. But after showing Frank police records, hospital pictures, and divorce and custody papers, he took on the case pro bono. Ada’s bills were altered. But because of the small budget, she couldn’t fly anywhere to fake an apartment search. Instead, for the misinformation stage, Frank had her mother make a phone call every Thursday night at around 6 to a random home in a northern Plains state. For 10 minutes, the mother talked with the same stranger about how weird it was that she got the wrong number again and how sorry she was about it. Later she joked with the stranger about the repeat misdial, maybe mentioned the weather. This act would help distract anyone looking for Ada. Finally, Frank set up a shelf corporation for the girl and linked it to a fake Mail Box Etc address. Frank told Ada to move and take a job that mostly paid cash. He told her that when her son enrolled in school to use a different last name.

Like many of Frank’s clients, Ada was conflicted, even melancholy when the process was finally over. She was free, but “she would never see her family again,” Frank says. “And when her mother dies, she is going to have to make a very hard decision of whether or not to go back. If she goes back, it could be very bad.”

Not all of Frank’s clients are as sympathetic as Ada. From time to time, he has helped people who probably didn’t deserve it. He once disappeared a man who was amid a divorce case, and wanted to hide money that could be taken in a settlement. Frank claims he checked to see if the man had a criminal record of any kind, including incidents of spousal abuse, but found nothing. These are not the cases that make Frank the proudest. But that doesn’t mean he sweats the ethics too much. “Nothing in life is black and white,” he says. “Starting over is having the ability to recognize that life is filled with grey.”

Recently, an evangelical Christian woman contacted Frank and told him that what he did “was horrible that everybody should face their problems and not hide,” he recalls. “She ran her whole Jesus Christ rant on me.” Frank was nonplussed. “I told her Peter himself ran and denied who he was in the garden.”

Frank says he’s ready to pull off a disappearing act himself. “We’re leaving this place, just as soon as it sells,” he tells me as we drive to a pale yellow prefab that Frank shares the house with his fiancée and skip tracing partner, Eileen. Inside, it is sparkling, the wall-to-wall carpets just washed, but full of boxes with very little on any of the white walls. The only room not boxed up is the one-window office, where they sometimes work.

“We’ve been living like this, in boxes, for a little while now,” Eileen says to me. She is pretty in a biker chick kind of way – tough, thin as a chopstick, white blond, with a bunch of tattoos, including a butterfly on her chest, a large wizard on her back and a thorny vine that winds up one arm. “I’m not used to it. But it doesn’t bother Frank. That’s the way he is. Always in motion.” I ask Frank where he’s headed. Before he answers, he takes a swig of black coffee, his fifth cup of the day. “Let’s just say it’s gonna be a nice place on the ocean and not a trailer park.”

Frank never sees the people he disappears once their gone. That’s his policy. The less he knows the better. Have any of them ever been caught? He doesn’t know. The fact is, he can help erase the things that identified a person, hide their tracks, and get them moved away safely -- once they’re gone it’s another story. They’re on their own.

Staying disappeared isn’t easy. Loneliness hits hard, makes you start thinking about what you left behind - the old friends, the family, a meal at a particular restaurant, the friendly wave of a neighbor. As a disappeared person, you are stripped of your history, even your personality. “Disappearing is a lifestyle,” says Frank. “Mr. Miami can’t be Mr. Miami anymore. He’s gotta be Mr. Des Moines.” Sometimes there are failures. Frank cites the case of Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, the Mafia turncoat who moved to Arizona under the Federal Witness Relocation program, only to chafe at the quiet life. He wrote an autobiography, jetting around the world and signing autographs like a superstar, and eventually returned to crime. In 2000, he was arrested for distributing ecstasy pills and sentenced to 15 years.

“What I tell people in the end is ‘this is it,’” Frank says. “Don’t slack. The guy looking for you can make a million mistakes. If you make one mistake, it’s over.’”

Of course, one of the difficulties with Frank’s business is that it’s impossible to get client testimonials. You don’t see Ada’s face on a brochure saying, “Frank changed my life,” and when I ask Frank if there’s any way at all I could reach out to any of his disappeared clients, he just laughs. But I persist, and finally he tells me he’ll try to get a message out to one of them: Ken.

A few weeks later, Frank and I receive an email from an anonymous overseas e-mail account.

Sirs,

Frank has shown me freedom. Life is good at the beach.

Signed

under the sun

I do not, of course, have any way of knowing if the email is phony or for real. But I like happy endings, so I hope it is from Ken.

Submitter: Frank Ahearn

Submitters Website: www.disappear.info

Submitters Bio:
Once the leading source in skip tracing now working with clients seeking a private life.