-
At times we’ve all dreamed of starting over with a new life. But when necessity intervenes and escaping — immediately, permanently — is the only solution, you call Frank Ahearn.

as told to Alex Vadukul

What I do for a living is unique: I teach people how to disappear. I show them how to live off the grid and erase any connection to their former lives.

My clients range from the paranoid to the extremely wealthy. I hear from victims of dangerous stalkers and the corporate whistleblower who thinks retribution is finally coming his way. This past year it’s been mostly people in the finance industry. My concern there is that six months from now it could come out that they’ve done something illegal. I don’t like to help criminals.

Many people contact me thinking I’m going to hook them up with a fake passport and a whole new identity, but only the government can do that. What I do is make people hard to track down using a three-step process: misinformation, disinformation, and reformation. The first step means erasing and deviating publicly available information on a person. The second, disinformation, comes down to creating and spreading false leads about his whereabouts. I might take your debit card and have different people around the world make transactions so it looks like you’re living in different places. The third step is reformation — getting the person I’m disappearing to a destination without anybody finding out. I’ll teach the client how to live under the name of a dummy corporation, open offshore accounts, use only prepaid phones, and create complicated phone and mail-forwarding systems.

I have a partner, and she helps me disappear people. We have a rigorous method. She goes over my tracks, seeing if she can find my client. We do that until she can’t find anything. I rarely hear from my clients ever again. Payment is up front.

At the moment we’re working on one of the biggest cases we’ve ever handled. I won’t mention names, and I’m changing key details, but this is the gist: A Spanish billionaire who’s getting divorced claims he’s lost all his money, so he won’t fork over any to his wife. My client is the wife. We’re pretty sure her husband still has his money; he’s just moving it around, making it look like he doesn’t. He is criminally connected, so she’s worried that if he’s forced to give her a big settlement, he’ll try to have her murdered. So she can’t stay in Spain after the trial.

We’re probably going to set her up with a fake life in a big American city, like New York: fake addresses, fake phone numbers, fake school enrollment for the kids, fake memberships in local organizations, and so on. From the outside, it will look like she’s living there. But in reality she will be somewhere else. We’ll change the kids’ names, have them homeschooled, and teach them to use a New York SIM card in a cell phone when calling their father so he never knows they’re in another city. Some disappearances can be in the planning stages for months before they can happen.

There’s not just one way to do a disappearance, which is why the price for my services ranges anywhere from $12,000 to $25,000. Some cases don’t take much work — clients who have few friends and relatives, or clients who won’t have many people looking for them. Some cases do. It all depends on how many connections a client has — and how many he’s willing to lose.