KEY POINTS:
When police found an abandoned SUV on Bear Mountain suspension bridge over the Hudson River with the keys and a half-full bottle of painkillers inside the car and "Suicide is Painless" scrawled in the dust on the bonnet, the case seemed open and shut.
But notorious former hedge fund manager Samuel Israel III was trying to fool us again.
It is three years since Israel, scion of a wealthy New Orleans family with a rich pedigree in trading on Wall Street, admitted that the profits of his hedge fund business were an elaborate fiction: he had swindled investors out of US$450 million ($590 million).
The police are now certain he concocted a fictional suicide on the day he was due to report to prison to begin a 20-year stretch for fraud.
After a handful of arrests, and charges last week against Debra Ryan, the girlfriend he left behind, investigators have pieced together how Israel hatched his escape plan. What they don't know is where he is.
It is a mystery that is consuming the gossip-frenzied hedge fund industry. Namibia? Bahrain? Cambodia?
There are any number of exotic climes, countries without an extradition treaty with the United States, where Israel may now be sipping pina coladas.
Whether Israel really has managed to flee the US remains to be seen. For now, police are scouring the caravan parks in the northeastern US.
The authorities can ill-afford to let him give them the slip, since there is already one high-profile white-collar fraud suspect cocking a snook at the US justice system.
Kobi Alexander, accused of diddling the share options at his technology company, is on the lam and living it up in Namibia, where American attempts to extradite him are being ignored.
- INDEPENDENT
