Saul Goodman - Get Off the Grid! - Saul Goodman's Guide to Staying Off the Radar

• Bad guys want to get you.You’ve heard tell of federal witness protection. There’s many a true-crime miniseries about getting away from the tentacles of the cartel or the mob or the mystery book of the month club. Within all that drama and glamour is a rare but bare necessity.…

All too often, the tortoise-toed government might not be in a rush to whisk you away from that guy with a teardrop tattoo who’s expressed an uncontrollable desire to fry you up in a nice butter sauce. You and the bureaucrats may not feel the same sense of urgency about the matter. Even if the feds are patrolling the block on your behalf, there are simply times when the wolves are way too close to the door and an extralegal extraction must be performed. Those times certainly do include the collection of deadly debts for drugs, for illegal services, for legal services. Sometimes, you just know too much and there’s a guy who simply can’t afford your existence anymore. My friend, I support your existence. If you have to vanish because a wolf in human form is at the door with a cleaver and a smile, then get thee gone with my blessing.

I hate to be the guy to bring the comedown. It’s not my thing to pass judgment. If it had been, I might have wound up on the other side of the big oak bench. I might have been a less successful attorney-at-law and a more successful judge-at-large. But as it stood, my clients didn’t pay me to judge. Evaluate, sure. Counsel, yes. Level with them when necessary, if needed? Of course.

And yet… in the interest of covering as many bases as one man can (and I want to hit a homerun here!), even I have to admit that there are perfectly terrible reasons to disappear.

• Dead-beating the rap.In my legal practice, I was happy to be Albuquerque’s very own inflatable Statue of Liberty. I’ll take in those tired, poor, huddled masses. Even wretched refuse needs an attorney at some point. Still, I did sometimes get a little twinge of conscience if it seemed a client was trying to get out of paying for childcare or another dependent-related obligation. But still, it takes funds to pull this kind of thing off. My two cents is worth a lot more than advertised, and I’d like to offer that unless you have been breeding like a lecherous rabbit, the price of disappearing is going to be much greater than the price of child support.

• Fraud gone bad.Even in my unusual circumstances, I don’t mind declaring that fraud is mostly unpropitious. Though, let’s face it, some forms of fraud are slightly understandable. Hypothetically, let’s say you laundered money for drug dealers and made it a habit to skim a bit. You’re a modern-day Robin Hood, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. The poor, in this case, being yourself. Who could blame you? One day, a contact seems more suspicious than usual. You get the feeling that it’s time to take your stash and run, and more power to you.

Or, perhaps you’re “in the game,” but you’re not the type to play at the high-stakes table. There are low-yield frauds that take from the rich insurance companies and give to the poor slip-and-fall artists, though those situations rarely rise to the level of slipping out of life as you know it.

Don’t read me wrong—little seeds of fraud can grow into giant, uncontrollable beanstalks. I read about a guy—we’ll just call him John Woe—who teamed with his wife in a doozy of a life insurance fraud. They took some clothes out of John’s closet and played dress-up with a corpse they’d acquired, stowing John Woe’s deceased doppelganger inside a soon-to-be-burned-out car. When ole Johnny came up “missing,” Mrs. Woe received an impressive payday from her hubby’s life insurance company. Unfortunately for the Woe-ful duo, the insurers tested the corpse’s DNA and discovered the deception. As the icing on this morbid cake, the grieving Mrs. Woe promptly got a new boyfriend who was a not-so-dead ringer for her recently deceased husband, and the jig was up. Look, if you’re going to try to fake your own death so that someone else can collect the insurance money, you’ve got to be okay with never, ever touching a penny of that sweet payout yourself. Your fake death only works if it operates on the same prevailing characteristic of your real death: it’s permanent. So unless you were looking to get separated and you’re feeling especially charitable toward your soon-to-be ex, don’t try this one at home.

• In a word, murder.If sending a guy or gal a one-way ticket to Belize seems like the most direct solution to some very thorny problems, you’d better be geared up to weather the subsequent shitstorm. There was a Foreign Service officer in the ’70s who had killer language skills and a boatload of degrees. A regular Man from U.N.C.L.E. Oh, and he offed his entire family with a hammer and then disappeared from the face of the earth. He had the skill set and the lead time on the cops to get the hell out of the United States and begin a new life elsewhere, speaking any one of the five dialects he knew as fluent as a native would. If you have a talented tongue and a ride out of town, by all means—you do you. But why not just disappear, and skip the gruesome part?

Now, my friend, is the time to grab another cup of coffee or your choice of energy concoction. We’re getting off the stick. Like the old Morning Zoo Deejays used to scream, we’re locking into this channel now and breaking the knob off.

Imagine that I’m about to upend a big old tub of Lincoln Logs and we’re going to take a look at each one. By the time we’re done, we’ll have a built you a sturdy new life, your old self left behind. That shiny, newly named you will go striding off into the future.

Ha. No, seriously: best-case scenario is you get to the other side alive. You will be one lucky son of a gun or daughter of fortune if that wobbly toy house doesn’t fall apart in the first breeze. But see, that’s part of the fun—figuring out how we get to the end, so we can begin again.

Lawyering took an eye for details. I had to be able to spot a misplaced decimal on a shady accountant’s spreadsheet the way a keen ’49-er could see a fleck of gold in ten pounds of sand.

I can guarantee that if someone disappears, a focused acumen as sharp as mine will come knocking on your door. Thorough and patient peepers will absolutely find that one detail that you glossed over in your hurry to trip the light fantastic out of town before the villagers arrived with their torches.

Here’s some tough love: you are going to forget something. Doesn’t matter if you’re an astrophysicist or actress—particulars necessary to getting off the grid will fly right through your nervous brain.

Let’s start by ticking off a number of things that might help anyone find you if you up and run tomorrow. I’m talking about seemingly everyday items you probably don’t think too hard about as you glance at them in your wallet: credit cards, driver’s license or state-issued ID, passport if you ever had one, and your good old social security number.

The short list of documents that validate your existence as a semi-functioning adult? They offer a formidable set of obstacles on the journey into a new life. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. And if you’re starting over? These papers are the tip of a digital iceberg of interconnected information. You definitely can’t use them to set up your new life. You’ve got to start from scratch.

I’ll assume by this point that you’re totally clear on why you’re doing this in the first place. That’s settled business. Moving on to plan proper.