How to Be Invisible

SECRET SPACES, HIDDEN PLACES

Don’t laugh when I tell you this, but after hiding it, be sure you can someday still remember wherever it was you hid the machine pistols/ammunition/jewelry and precious stones/chemical products/clippings/videos/photographs/silver dollars/gold bullion/negotiable securities/secret maps/compromising documents/forbidden books/red-hot love letters/500-euro bills/whatever.

From 1959 until Generalissimo Franco ordered Spain’s laws to be changed in 1970, my companions and I were hiding small boxes in all of Spain’s fifty provinces, and with the advent of legality, a plaintive cry was heard across the land: “I can’t remember all the places where I hid things!”

NEVER HIDE CASH IN THE MASTER BEDROOM

One of the essentials in maintaining your privacy is to pay cash at the gas station, the supermarket, and when you go shopping at the mall. Further, you need a cash reserve to prepare for the day when banks may close, or you are forced to flee, or if a government agency froze your bank accounts without warning. To do this, you must keep a fair amount of cash on hand that is easily accessible and yet invisible to burglars. But where should you keep it?

There is no such thing as a burglar-proof home that cannot be entered, nor a security system that cannot be bypassed. However, the average burglar will be inside your home for less than ten minutes. Your goal, therefore, is to keep your cash hidden for more than that length of time.

The burglar will head straight for your master bedroom. He’ll check your underwear drawer, then your other drawers, and he’ll look under your mattress. If he can find some cash in any of these places, he may just grab that and run. If you can afford it, therefore, leave a few hundred dollars under the mattress. Otherwise, the burglar will next check your refrigerator and your freezer so don’t keep any “cold” cash in either place.

Instead, if you have a file cabinet, use one or more of the file folders for holding the cash. Title them with dull names such as “Old Tax Receipts” or “Travel Brochures.” Or, if you have a library, use a box cutter to cut the center out of some book you no longer want. (Outdated computer books or AAA travel books are ideal for this.) Put your money inside and then mix the book with others in your bookcase. My favorite method, however, is to use one or more “can safes” that are available on the Internet. One of our friends from the Canary Islands keeps half a dozen such cans. She scatters them under her sink, in her pantry, and among a box of bug-spray cans in her garage.

WHERE TO HIDE OTHER ITEMS OF VARIOUS SIZES

Sadly, burglars are not the only ones to worry about. Add to the list Level Three PIs, local police, U.S. marshals, and special agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF).

Here are a few suggestions for hiding small items in your home and yard:

• Inside hollow doors.

• In water hoses.

• Inside fuse boxes.

• In doghouses.

• Under attic insulation.

• Inside or under a furnace.

• Under fence-post tops.

• Behind wall phones.

• Under an ironing-board cover.

• In the bottom of a dog food bag.

• Behind plumbing inspection doors.

• Inside a plastic rolling pin.

• Above acoustic tile ceilings.

• In salt and pepper shakers.

• Within a sanitary napkins box.

• Above false ceilings.

• Inside zippered cushions.

• Inside the handle of a vacuum cleaner.

In any of our various homes, it would seem to be no problem to leave cash and other valuables out in plain view. After all, the addresses are secret, and if the bad guys can’t find the house, they can’t raid it! However, I do keep valuables well hidden and so should you. Can you guess why?

If a burglar is attracted to your home, it doesn’t matter what arrangements have been made for privacy because it’s not you he’s after, it’s the house. On the other hand, since the burglar has (hopefully) never attended a DEA seminar, nor will he have the time for that kind of a search, many of the hiding places on the DEA list are worth considering. Here are some of the ways to hide small, medium, and large items in your home.

SMALL

Save old junk-mail envelopes and put a few $50 or $100 bills in each one. Hide the envelopes in such places as:

• Sheet music in a piano bench.

• In the box of old tax receipts in a storage unit.

• In the hollowed-out section of an out-of-date software manual

• In one of the hanging files in a file cabinet

• Rolled up and inserted into a “foot powder” spray can with a removable bottom.

When my car was stolen from the airport parking building at SeaTac, the thieves broke open the glove compartment searching, I assume, for a gun. All they found were stacks of what appeared to be junk mail, so they tossed all those envelopes on the floor and the envelopes were still there when the police recovered the car. The police didn’t notice, either, that two of those so-called junk-mail envelopes each had five $50 bills in them.

When I travel, I use a slim dress belt with two sections, each of which will hold three bills folded lengthwise four times. At one time I carried six Canadian $1,000 bills, but in 2001, the Canadian government pulled them off the market. However, about that time euro notes appeared, so I switched to 500 euro notes.

As for outdoor mildew and rustproof storage, nothing beats silver and gold. I am a fan of silver rounds, but since many of my readers prefer gold, $100,000 in gold coins will fit into a coffee can with room to spare.

MEDIUM

You may have books, records, pictures, cell-phone scanners, or other items that you need to keep for now. However, you do not want them found in case you die in an accident. It may be a nuisance, but consider keeping these off the premises in private storage. (In case of death, a trusted friend, whom you’ve instructed beforehand, will clean out the unit and dispose of the contents.

LARGE

A three-drawer fireproof file cabinet is best stored in a secret room that will hopefully be large enough to hold one or two persons as well. A room such as this will give you added security, especially if you are the wife of a traveling man who leaves you home alone.

I pass this idea on to you as worthy of consideration when you plan your next new home. The only hesitation I’d have would be that the secret room would be common knowledge among the architect, the contractor, and the workers. Also, the building plans would be on file with the city or county. Gone are the days when pirates buried treasures in deep holes, then murdered the men who’d done the work.

SPEAKING OF BURIED TREASURE …

The below is from the Associated Press:

“A worker preparing a forested site in DuPont (Washington) for a park-and-ride lot unearthed a plastic garbage can containing as much as $10,000 in coins and bills … Sound Transit bought the 4-acre property just weeks before the buried cash turned up,” said agency spokesman Lee Somerstein.… “It was a bulldozer operator … whose machine ripped the top off a 32-gallon Rubbermaid trash can, exposed the buried money and unearthed a mystery,” Somerstein said.

As this book goes to press, no one has yet come forward to claim the money.

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

We’d like to build a secret or “panic room” but aren’t such rooms horrendously expensive? (We just saw that old movie.)

After the film with Jodie Foster came out, there was an item on CNN’s Headline News about the increasing number of homes that have such rooms, with costs often running up to $75,000. Any home we ever build includes a panic room, but at a minimal cost. You don’t need steel walls if the room is invisible. If you are short of space, even a hall closet will do. The trick is that the door must not come down to the floor level. Enclose the bottom two feet and lower the top as well. Repaint or repaper the wall. Cover the opening with a mirror or a display case.

Leave a bucket in there, some bottled water, and a sleeping bag. A .12-gauge shotgun is optional.

We plan to build a low-profile safe house in the Pacific Northwest, with hidden spaces, a secret room, and perhaps even an escape tunnel. Can you help?

Schedule a consultation with me, and we’ll go over the plans. I can show you an “invisible” safe house that has all of those features and more. You can take notes and copy the ideas you like. Better yet, bring $795,000, with you, and you can buy the LLC that owns it.