“Why not take the ill-gotten money and run?
A touch of plastic surgery and a discreet payoff might purchase a sun-tanned life on an Indian Ocean archipelago, a number of which have no extradition treaties with the United States. Even a down-market move, manning an outboard motor for a skiff full of Somali pirates, seems preferable to a life term in a maximum-security federal prison.
Yet as more plutocrats face criminal investigations, few seem to view flight as an option. Perhaps it is a failure of nerve. Or perhaps, in this age of Facebook and “America’s Most Wanted,” the globe suffers a shortage of corners where a rogue might comfortably hide.” via NYTimes.
Odd coincidence. Not 10 minutes before I read this blog post and skimmed the article, I was telling this story to a coworker:
A friend from high school went to college at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, TX. He made friends with another student whose part-time job was as a courier for the Mexican mafia, so he said. Mostly he carried cash. One day, he just disappeared, and my friend assumed he’d gotten crosswise with his employers.
Eventually, his friend contacted him to say that he’d taken a bunch of money and fled. Of course, he didn’t say where. My friend never heard from him again.
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Entities who have big money stolen from them play very hard ball. They will spend up to half the lost sum to recoup. Think about how many trained and smart investigators half of ten or one hundred million would finance. And unlike say murder, where the motive to find the bad guy diminishes with time, there is always the presumption that much of the ill got gains remains intact. So those insurance guys are still looking ten years later.
Insurors and their investigators know that the first thing the thief will say to the guy that finds him will be an offer of a piece of the money to go away. Why won’t he take it? Because he knows that all who steal big money are punished, and he does not want to be.
If the thief relies on non-extradition after he is found, he may be kidnapped, taken to a country with draconian laws and miserable prisons,-Turkey comes to mind if you saw that movie-and found in the Istanbul Hilton with enough drugs to get life.
Insurors do not play fair, they have big resources, and they keep their own investigators honest by winning almost all the time.
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