When you fake your own death to escape a life of crime—and its consequences—you should take a few things into consideration. They’re sort of self-evident, but you’d be surprised how many people ignore the basic safety measures that will keep the law and—most importantly—the mafia boss you double-crossed from finding you.
Rule number one: you must cut all connections with your past, no matter how important to you.
It’s painful, I know. I watched footage of my mother at my funeral that a relative had posted on Facebook, and it was heartbreaking. If I hadn’t been hiding in the Canadian wilderness at the time, with no transportation, I would have returned home right then.
I would have begged for her forgiveness. I still wanted to. She would’ve boxed my ears and then made me my favorite pasta.
The Feds would’ve arrested me before I finished the meal. For wasting their time with my death if for nothing else, although if my former boss were ever arrested, he’d take me down with him if I were around.
Fortunately, the forced delay had made me come to my senses and I was still a free man, if not entirely happy for hurting Mom. I was her only son.
Rule number two is more flexible, but you can’t ignore it either: you must have enough identities to burn, with top quality documentation and believable backstories to go with them. It takes money, connections, and time to arrange those, but I had all three.
I’d begun to plan my exit two years before I finally went through with it. Even then, I wasn’t nearly as prepared as I’d wanted to be.
Since my teens, I’d been a proud member of a New Jersey crime organization that imported and distributed drugs and ran a casino in Atlantic City to launder the gains of the drug business. I’d risen steadily from an enforcer to my boss’s right-hand man, helping him to spread our business to Brooklyn, and eventually ending up running a casino hotel for him there.
But when he wanted to expand our businesses to human trafficking, I’d openly disagreed with him. That’s a death sentence in a crime organization, no matter how trusted you are. He’d asked me to fall in line or put my affairs in order, and so I’d had to leave sooner than I’d anticipated.
I’d been ready.
Parents choosing the name of their firstborn couldn’t have spent more time on baby name sites than I did when I selected names that felt like me. I spent hours creating backstories for them with high school and college diplomas—neither of which I had—and credible CVs consisting mostly of white-collar desk jobs. I painstakingly built social media presences for each identity—and then a tech nerd I’d befriended did the same with an algorithm that made it appear like those people had been posting for years.
He also created genuine paper trails for each assumed CV and acquired the best IDs I’d ever seen, genuine government-issued documentation, for fake identities. I don’t know how he hacked into the various systems to create them, but there were government databases in many countries stating I was a natural or naturalized resident of that country. I even paid taxes in some of them.
Taxes are important. Many a mafia boss has been brought down by the taxman when no other charges have stuck.
If you don’t have a hacker genius among your friends—and hacker geniuses are difficult to come by—choose large schools and companies for your backstories. You can always claim they’ve lost your files if anyone goes to check, but in small towns everyone knows each other. It’ll be more suspicious when they don’t know you.
During the first seven months after my death, I went through three lesser identities—those without fake backstories—as I made my way to where I was today and settled on the current one: Eliot Reed. He was by far my favorite. I hoped I could be him for the rest of my life, but I was ready to leave him and my present life in the blink of an eye.
That’s rule number three: never get attached to what you have and who you’re with, because you never know when you might need to make a hasty exit. Just because I’d been lucky so far was no reason to get complacent and settle down too comfortably.
Which leads to rule number four: have several escape plans and contingency locations ready. I have safety deposit boxes around the world with hard currency and new identities, as well as perfectly legal bank accounts in some major countries, with automated regular activity that keep the authorities from flagging them. A shell company I own pays them “salary,” and then the accounts pay “bills” to other accounts of mine.
It had taken me years to establish those, some of them highly illegally, but since the crime boss I’d worked for had an efficient money laundering system in place, of which I’d been in charge towards the end, it hadn’t been too difficult to stash away clean money of my own on the side.
Some of it had been my boss’s money, one of the reasons I’d needed to leave.
If I lived a peaceful, inconspicuous life, that money would see me into my old age with ease, and I was only thirty-four. Well, Eliot Reed was thirty-two, as there was no need to stick with my biological age. And since the laundered money was now perfectly legal, if you weren’t too fussy about the origin, I could invest it and even live in luxury. Provided I didn’t draw attention to myself.
That’s rule number five: lay low.
I knew even before I left that I would have difficulties with this one. I’m a social creature. I like people. I like parties. I like luxury items. And I love women and good food.
I didn’t even consider living in some remote village in a South American jungle or a fishing community in Thailand. I’d go stir-crazy in a month. The two months I’d spent in Canadian forests as part of a logging crew while I waited for things to cool down after my explosive death were the longest of my life. The only way I was able to get through it without crying uncle was by taking it as a chance to finalize the changes in my appearance and counting the days to when I could leave.
I’d chosen large cities for my hideouts. You’d be surprised how alone and anonymous you can be in them. Transactions are handled through lawyers—always different, obviously—and in no time at all you’ll have a nice condo, or the equivalent in that country, in a good neighborhood. If you pretend to live a regular nine-to-five life and don’t bother your neighbors, you might as well not exist as far as they’re concerned.
I wasn’t a recluse. I’d established a couple of businesses to justify my lifestyle without inventing rich parents that I’d have to find a way to prove. They took off, to my surprise, which had led to business meetings and lunches. I dated a few times—a man can go only so long without the company of a woman—and I went to sport events and clubs where I could be a nameless face in the crowd. But I have no friends, coworkers, or permanent lovers. I don’t know my neighbors and they don’t know me.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I found myself invited to a rooftop party organized by the man who owned the penthouse of the building where I lived.
I was even more surprised to find myself attending.
The penthouse in question was in Lyon, in South-Eastern France, where I’d settled sort of accidentally on purpose. I didn’t even know it existed before I came to Europe, but it suited me perfectly.
I tried to avoid capitals and major tourist hubs, but I needed a large city with a thriving business scene to explain why I was there. Lyon, with a population of about half a million within its city limits and two million in its metropolitan area, was the third largest city in France and a major center for banking and specialized tech industries like pharmaceutics, and a thriving hub for video game industries and tech startups, the latter of which I’d begun to dabble in.
It was also the location of Interpol headquarters, but I figured they would never think I’d moved right under their noses. And it kept me on my toes, so that I wouldn’t get too comfortable.
I’d first heard of the city from Elizabeth Harris, a woman I’d dated when I lived in Frankfurt, another banking hub, in Germany, to have a believable alibi. Or a backstory, if you prefer that word; someone I could refer to with ease to make it look like I had a normal past before coming to Lyon.
She was a Brit in her late thirties who worked for a huge international banking firm and was relocated every year or so. I’d chosen her especially knowing she would leave soon—I’d been hanging around in bars where bankers spent their evenings and eavesdropped on her conversation with her friends—and then chatted her up. She was a nice woman and I’d had a pleasant time with her, but when the time for her transfer came, neither of us was heartbroken when I didn’t follow.
She’d hoped to be transferred to Lyon, but instead she’d been moved to Singapore. I wouldn’t have minded living in Singapore—you could definitely disappear there—but instead I’d looked into Lyon and liked what I saw.
I arrived in early March and spent two weeks scouting locations. The old town was on a narrow strip of land between two major rivers, the Rhône and the Saône, which combined at the southern tip to form a peninsula—like Manhattan, but a fraction of its size. And like Manhattan, most of the city was spread beyond the rivers.
Unlike Manhattan, it had a thriving countryside with famous vineyards and other agriculture right outside the metropolitan area on the surrounding hills.
The city oozed history from the Roman era onwards, with ruins to prove it, but what spoke to me most was an area called Confluence at the southern end of the old town. It was an erstwhile industrial area that had been razed and was being transformed into a modern hub of small tech startups, with new, sought-after apartment buildings in the mix that didn’t have to conform to the architectural rules of the historical neighborhoods.
It reminded me of Red Hook, Brooklyn, the old harbor and industrial area by the East River where I’d run a hotel and casino converted from an old warehouse. Confluence had similar conversions, like the railway station slash mall, and it was constantly buzzing too, with new buildings rising everywhere, but on a smaller scale.
Everything was smaller here.
I’d lucked out and managed to rent a fully furnished third-floor apartment in an eight-story building that had probably represented the peak of architectural whimsy a decade ago with its green metal walls and irregular balcony placements, but it already managed to look old-fashioned. Inside, it was nice and modern.
It was located at a cul-de-sac by the Saône, the western of the rivers, and I had a view toward the hills of the fifth arrondissement across it from my balcony. Not that I’d spent much time on it so far, but it was early May, spring had sprung, and the sun was warming the south-facing balcony nicely. I might start having my morning coffee there.
I had rented an office in a new building full of similar small businesses by the Confluence railway station less than a ten-minute walk from my home. I didn’t really need it, I had an office at home, but it gave purpose and structure to my days.
And it kept my neighbors from getting suspicious.
I left for work every morning, had breakfast at one of the cafés by the quay outside the railway station, and spent the day handling my businesses. On my way home, I ate at one of the restaurants in the mall or ventured to the old town for the excellent cuisine Lyon was famous for, and then returned home to watch TV like a normal person.
I’d become a businessman sort of accidentally. But I liked it, I was good at it, and it gave me something to do. However, I hadn’t kept as low a profile as I thought.