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

ID cards are printed on plastic or on paper that’s coated (or specially laminated). It’s important that you get as close as you can to what the state you’re in really uses. Before you even begin the labor of cutting and pasting your handsome mug onto John or Jane Doe’s ID scan, be sure you are clear on the kind of medium you’ll be printing it on, be it PVC (polyvinyl chloride), Teslin, or whatever magical synthetic substance the federal government decides to make use of next.

So what if you’re in New York and your fake license says it was printed in 2006? Order yourself up a stiff drink and a flimsy, bendable ID, because the tactile is just as important as the visual when it comes to fooling your local bar bouncers and bank tellers. Final touches will include sizing the card so it looks and feels right in the hands of whomever handles it, but if you’ve nailed the finer details, that’s just busy work.

Earlier, I said one of your options for fake identification was among the spookiest you could try. This is the spookiest, for several reasons. Those reasons include the fact it’s one that’s been used by spies—aka “spooks”—and it involves the dead.

That’s right, we’re talking about robbing the dearly departed folks who have barely begun to cool on a slab in the morgue.

Here is one tried-and-true method for copping another’s name…

Obituaries.Keep a close eye on the death notices. If you are an African American male age forty-two, pay attention to blurbs about the demise of other black men who have just crested over the hill before fatally crashing into a telephone pole. Same if you’re a Caucasian woman, age sixty-two—look for white ladies who had a little too much fun in their early retirement. You get the picture. Bank on a death in the biggest city close to you as well. Everyone knows everyone in a small town—you don’t want to mistakenly acquire the identity of the Billy Joel of Podunk, USA.

Once you have a good match, pay close attention to how they went: if it was a particularly gruesome or violent death, that’s not your target. Law enforcement and national news reporters alike will be flying circles above that body like investigative vultures. We’re only interested in the unfortunate folks who passed relatively gently, from a rough go of pneumonia or a sudden cardiac event.

If you’ve happened on a decent candidate, track down his or her address. Here’s where the endeavor gets extremely squirmy, so steel yourself and get thee to an improv class—you can either A: go to the decedent’s (dead guy or gal’s) house and pretend you are a long-lost friend from elementary school who happened to be glancing through the grisly pages. Once there, you might ask for a better photo to remember them by than the one on your prayer card. Or B: you can straight-out burglarize the place of vital documents. Nothing else, of course—we’re not talking common criminality here, just some papers, that’s all. What’s the decedent going to need with those now?

At bare minimum, this will get you the foundation for securing some kind of temporary identification. There’s a period after a recent death, and that period varies widely, when the deceased person’s information is in limbo.

How that might work: much of the time, funeral directors are the folks who take vital information from death certificates or family records and bite the bullet of getting that stuff turned in to the authorities. Under their auspices, the dead person’s social security number, for example, is reported to the very cheerfully named Social Security Death Index. Yes, as advertised, it’s a big list of dead peoples’ social security numbers.

There’s no way that list is complete at any given time, but a good many of these folks who help burn up and bury our dearly departed are very serious about their jobs. It isn’t, after all, a career path for the lighthearted. So the method for securing papers from the dead just outlined above has to either be for an identification intended for short-term use or—if you are really enterprising, not to mention plain good at stealing—you can chance snatching up the decedent’s info before the funeral home gets hold of it. Fortune favors the bold!

Let’s say you’ve established a solid new set of vital documents. On paper, the new you is well-established. Now all that’s needed is to walk away from everything, right? Just put the necessities in a go-bag, drizzle some hi-test rum throughout the place, drop a match and walk. In the morning, the arson investigators will conclude you were roasted to a crisp. Hopefully this is something you do in your own discrete living space, not a shared condominium complex. I’ll keep a happy thought, and assume that any fires lit will be contained only to the space you settled in alone, preferably surrounded by a hydrated moat or not-so-flammable dirt lot.

Truth is, before you make that final leap into the great and anonymous unknown, you have to think about those investigators in your burned-out life, and consider what they might be looking for.

The creation of a new life while still living the one you want to exit just leaves a trail. There will be digital evidence, physical evidence, even eyewitness evidence.

Ever see a cowboy movie where the hero is trying to evade the posse of bad guys and so he breaks off a tree branch and sweeps it along the path behind him, erasing his footprints? That’s what we’re doing here.

Resign yourself to the truth now, compadre: you left something behind. The best we can do is try and minimize the danger that presents to your future endeavors.

Computers are not your friend.Of course, they are— while you’re cobbling together faked and altered papers, ordering necessary supplies, sending anonymous money orders, watching pornography, et cetera. Then, when it’s time to light out, that shiny glass and metal rectangle that gently warmed your lap through many a nervous night has the potential to be your worst enemy.

If you leave your beloved electronic devices behind—any of them—you risk leaving an open invitation to dig into whatever digital trails you’ve established since you first purchased those machines.

Of course, if there’s a relative lack of drama in your vanishing, then backtracking you through cyberspace won’t be too appealing to investigating authorities. However, it’s probably not the best idea to bank on the apathy of former friends, colleagues, and loved ones—even if they didn’t always display interest or shower you with compliments, their curiosity might inspire them to do a little snooping into your digital underwear drawer. So be thorough: clear your history and wipe that hard drive. But don’t stop there!

As you prep to go, trash that laptop. You’ll need to purchase something called a neodymium magnet. It’s the most powerful magnet you can buy. Run that piece of electro-magic all over your laptop.

Then, take said laptop into the backyard (or any relatively private location) and with a handheld implement such as a sledgehammer, axe, or even a very large rock, proceed to beat the living daylights out of it. Then burn it. Throw the ashes into the ocean and call it a day.

I know this is all a bit much, but hey: I’m making a point here. It’s just wise to eliminate those inroads into your life.

Proceed to do that with every digital thing you own. Phones, pagers, tablets, theremins: the works. For the love of all that was good and preprogrammable, take any copy machine you’ve ever touched and destroy it twice. Those things have a longer memory than the elephant you forgot to invite to prom.