Bill Ryan's Other Blog

When I first read about How to be Invisible by J.J. Luna in a Playboy article, I couldn’t wait until it came out. If you judge a book by the cover you might be turned off thinking its one of the many shady books “get a new identity” genre.  They are usually written for people who criminals and they are basically some derivation of “Find some dead person and get their birth certificate”. 

Luna is very serious about privacy and his book is for people who are on the up and up who want privacy.  He makes it very clear that he wants nothing to do with people who are trying to use his techniques to facilitate law breaking or tax avoidance.  Luna lived under General Franco and if you read his bio, you find out the following:

     In 1959, J. J. (Jack) Luna sold his outdoor advertising business in the Upper Midwest and moved with his wife and small children to the Canary Islands off the coast of West Africa. Outwardly, he was a professional writer and photographer. Secretly, he worked underground in an activity that was at that time illegal under the regime of Generalissimo Francisco Franco.
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     In 1970 Franco, yielding to intense pressure from the western world, moderated Spain’s laws, leaving Luna free to come in from the cold. By that time, however, privacy had become an ingrained habit. In the years that followed he started up various low-profile businesses, built them up and then sold them. 

The book starts out with a Quote, “Governments keep secrets from citizens, why shouldn’t citizens be able to keep secrets from governments.”  And that sets the theme for the rest of the book.  I highly recommend this book (make sure you get the updated version which deals with a Post 9/11 world).  He makes it very clear that there are a lot of folks out there who assume that just b/c you want privacy or keep things a secret, you’re doing something bad (and trust me – such people not only exist particular in law enforcement).  I reject that assertion and it’s easy to tear such an argument apart, but you’ll never convince people who like invading other’s privacy that they’re in the wrong.  And you can count on it, the more someone gets mad about someone else keeping things private, the more someone will use their position to invade other people’s privacy, the more butthurt they’ll get when someone does the same to them.  And the “If you keep secrets you have something to hide” crowd will cite every example like the one I’m about to use to back up their lame arguments.  They’ll claim that people like Luna are encouraging criminal behavior by pointing out how people could have gotten away with it.  Luna condems the law breaking in his example and so do i for the record, but that doesn’t invalidate his analysis.

Did you hear about Tiffany Tehan and Tre Hutcherson?  They were both married and living in Ohio but they weren’t married to each other.  Tiffany was in love with Tre and decided to disappear and start over with her lover.  the problem is, she didn’t tell her husband – she just said she was going to the store with their child and then took off, making it look like she was kidnapped.  Before long, she was caught. In a nutshell, here’s  what they did wrong according to Luna:

     1.  They allowed themselves to be caught TOGETHER in a surveillance video from an Ohio convenience store before they took off.
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2.  Tehan used her ATM card and was also caught on camera there.
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3.  Hutcherson traded in his VW the day before, and apparently put the new car in his OWN NAME rather than using a corporation, a trust, or an LLC. (Note to those in a hurry to buy a car—If Rosie Enriquez is paid online, she can often e-mail a scanned image of a shelf LLC within the hour.)
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A fourth error may have been to check into a motel in Florida that required photo ID. And a possible fifth error would be to carry a cell phone without removing the battery.
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I am of course not in favor of their actions but it’s always interesting to note how easily many such persons can be tracked.  Too bad for their sakes that they didn’t leave a false trail to the Canary Islands

So what would I have done? In addition to Mr Luna’s suggestions, I would have planned in advance. I’d start withdrawing a few hundred dollars a paycheck and stashing it in cash.  It’d have to be small enough your spouse wouldn’t notice but large enough that it could accumulate into a significant amount of money before long.  I’d also make sure I kept the money in small denominations for the most part.  One of the people should have purchased another car, a cheap but reliable one registered exactly as Mr Luna specifies.  I would load up on food and water and would even get two or three full gas cans which I’d put in the car before I left. neither of us would get out of the car for any reason until we were a few states away.  I’d make sure we only got gas (after our supply ran out) at old fashioned, out of the way stations.  I’d also don a subtle disguise, like a Gas Station attendant shirt or something that would make me look very ‘run of the mill’.  I’d opt to camp out for a while b/c national parks and trails are the perfect place to disappear for a while.  If no one was looking for your car, and you didn’t go into any big stores, you could easily disappear for a while and no one would think anything of it when they saw you.  After a few weeks, the hype would wear down and you wouldn’t be front and center on Nancy Grace. At that point, you could start re-integrating into society.  That’s why it’s key to have cash, and a lot of it, so you could hold yourself over for at least a month or so, the longer the better obviously. when you first started to come back in, you can find cheaper motels (which aren’t often very secure but they are low profile).  Then you could start working at one of the work pools or similar service that lets you work off the books.

At that point, I’m not sure where you’d go.  I can’t see any long term strategy that would work.  taking the kid is unforgiveable but it also greatly complicates things. Like it or not, the cops just don’t worry too much about missing adults especially when there’s no clear evidence of wrongdoing.  If you have a missing child though – not only does it attrack more attention in terms of being more conspicuous, it makes cops look a lot harder.  you could stay in some hellhole motel for years without being discovered if it was just two adults.  But throw in a kid and someone would probably call child protective services at some point (although Florida CPS is pretty  pathetic so they’d likely either lose your kid or turn the kid over to some sicko pedophile).  If you didn’t have the kid, you could easily skip over the border and live it up in Mexico for a while.  Or you could get over the border and then use your passport to get to Costa Rica or somewhere a little more liveable.  While there’d be a record of it, if you waited long enough, it’d likely not set off any flags that would get back to start (think about the Atlanta Attorney who had Tuberculosis – even with the flagging system in place, post 9/11, he was able to get through multiple airports).

No  matter how I try to slice it though – I can’t see how you could pull this off long term without a ton of money.  And even with a lot of money, I don’t see how you could do it with the kid unless you had enough money you could buy off border /customs agents.  In this case, every one of those wasn’t applicable so at some point, I think they were destined to fail.

Nonetheless, let’s say she and her husband wanted to skip town for legit reasons. Luna’s points would be totally applicable here and they’d be the difference between  getting away and getting killed (or whatever the reason was that would make you need to skip town). Just out of curiosity, if you wanted to skip town permanently and start over, assuming you had 10k saved up as of today and you didn’t have any kids – can you think of how you’d be able to do it long term?).  One thing I hope is that folks doing this will use Privicy and pay for it a few years in advance

I wonder what Evan Ratliff would have done differently? If you’re interested in reading about what it takes to disappear these days, make sure you read my post on it:

The other argument I typically hear is a reference to Evan Ratliff.  If you’re unfamiliar with him, here’s the rest of the story in a nutshell. He’s a free-lance writer and blogger.  He took a gig for Wired magazine that entailed disapparing for a month.  He was to try to hide out and anyone that found him would simply need to say the magic word, and they’d be privvy to a $5,000.00 prize. Ratliff gave it a great go, but before long he was caught. 

[tags]Tiffany Tehan and Tre Hutcherson, Tiffany Tehan, Tre Hutcherson, How To Be Invisible, J.J. Luna, Privacy, Atavist, Evan Ratliff, Disappearing[/tags]

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