Money
Although many disappearees leave with little or no money in their pockets, this is most emphatically doing it the hard way. A financial cushion is a great boon to the lamster. A new identity is a very fragile and delicate thing while it is being established. Like any kind of lie, it can be quickly unraveled if it isn't well thought out. A cash reserve allows a little breathing spell in which to get used to the new identity.
If a man is flat broke when he disappears he is going to face some serious hurdles. Where will he live? If he turns to friends or relatives he risks being caught and leaving an easy trail by which to find him. If he sleeps in boxcars and under bridges he greatly increases his chances of an undesirable run-in with the law. How will he get money? He may have a difficult time finding a job if he hasn't been able to document his new identity. Even if he has documentation, careful scrutiny by a personnel department can lead to disaster for someone who hasn't built confidence in his new identity. And if he turns to crime to survive, we're back to the police again.
Identification
Identification is the key to establishing a new identity. Unless you are going to live like a wild man in the woods you are going to need some ID, and even then it couldn't hurt. The disappearee is somewhat aided here by the fixation in the modern world for paperwork. It isn't
who
you are that counts, but
whether you can prove it!
Most disappearees do not find it necessary to disguise their appearance or even change their lifestyles. So long as they can manipulate their paper identity they have very little chance of being discovered.
There is a whole chapter of this book devoted to establishing ID, so I won't go into great detail here, except to say that it is important to consider ID before making a break for it. It can take months for even a quick operator to put together a complete set of identification, and this under relatively ideal circumstances of having a stable residence and a confidential mailing address. After all, if you're planning to disappear you don't want the whole world to know you're collecting false identification. You don't want to find yourself in a situation where you need to get your hands on some ID fast. It's best to have your new identity set up in advance even if you will quickly shed your first identity for yet another one.
Mail Drops
As suggested above, one of the first things you should consider when contemplating disappearing is getting a confidential mailing address. You will likely want to get information about identity changing, like this book, that you don't want other people to know about. You'll also need the address for getting fake ID. And you may want to send some assets from your former life ahead of you into your new life. There are several ways to get such an address.
The first, and perhaps best way, is to rent an address. People and businesses all over the globe will sell you the use of their address for a nominal fee. These services are known as mail drops. It works like this: for a fee, someone will allow you to use their address for sending and receiving mail. Along with this basic service, mail drops provide a variety of extras. You can arrange to have them forward the mail you receive, or open certain mail on your instructions, or destroy mail, etc. They will also re-mail materials according to your instructions. For more information about how mail drops work and addresses and fees of mail drops, see the Directory of Mail Drops in the U.S. and Canada, listed in the reference chapter.
If your needs involve more than the services of a typical mail drop you may want to check on the huge number of enterprises in any large city that rent desk space, telephone service, secretarial service, etc. These firms cater to salesmen, construction workers, photographers, and other people with one-man businesses who need to have the appearance of a full-time office and staff. You can use their address as your business or residence address and hire them to handle phone calls and mail according to your instructions. Such services are especially handy when combined with mail drops for fabricating references on employment applications. More on this subject in the chapter on Coping.
Cars
It is amazing the number of people who take their cars with them when they disappear. When they do, it makes the Missing Persons Bureau's job so very, very easy. All they have to do is wait until the current license or registration expires, then get their information from the renewal or switch. Whether you sell it, swap it or ditch it, your car will be a very valuable and readily discovered clue to your new location and identity.
I interviewed one man who had taken off with his car but had no intention of allowing it to lead to his discovery. The car was a brand new, expensive model that had become the bone of contention between him and his wife. He grew to detest the car almost as much as he loathed her. When he left, he took the car with him halfway across the country.
He then located an auto wrecking yard on the outskirts of a small Midwestern metropolitan area where the employees stripped the car of any re-sellable items that couldn't be directly identified as having come from this specific car. He had all the legal papers to prove that he was at least
