Frank Ahearn strides up Third Avenue, New York, in his big suede boots, his thinning ponytail waving in the wind. He has a vente latte welded to his palm. Six feet tall, the goatee-bearded and denim-clad Frank M. Ahearn (pronounced Ayhern) could have walked straight out of a novel by his favourite mystery writer, Elmore Leonard. Like a Leonard character, he thinks fast and speaks faster. Born and bred in the Bronx - he now lives in Venice Beach, California - Ahearn notices everything that's going on around him. Nothing escapes him, because Frank M. Ahearn is a skip tracer. One of the world's best, he is employed by companies, private investigators and individuals to find people who have skipped town leaving behind debts, unpaid employees or angry partners.
"In 20 years, guess I must have found close on 40,000 people," says Ahearn, ignoring a pedestrian stop light. "I'm a New Yorker, man, I want to get there today," he shouts over the din of the traffic. "Most people who vanish just take off and go, right? BIG MISTAKE! I'll find you," Ahearn promises. "People leave behind their debts, they use their frequent-flyer programme to escape, not knowing that I can access that, along with their utility bills. People have no idea how many footprints they leave, how many connections they reveal."
Creating a pretext or a scenario to wheedle information out of people and organisations is Ahearn's key skip-tracing weapon. "You call up, you ask questions. In the end, every 'No' leads to a 'Yes'," he says, easing into a pizza at Grace's Trattoria, an unremarkable Italian on East 71st Street. "I'm very persuasive on the phone, and the people who work those sites are trained to sell stuff, not protect information."
The previous week in Los Angeles, it had been Ahearn's turn to say "No", to Sharon Stone and an offer to make a movie of his life. "I had dinner with her and her producers. They were not offering enough. Do they think I'm running a lemonade stall and desperate for cash?" Stone was interested, not only because Ahearn is a skip tracer extraordinaire, but because he has re-engineered his considerable skills to help honest people who have a genuine and compelling need not to get found by stalkers, kidnappers, violent partners or the Mob. Frank M. Ahearn is the man who can help you disappear.
As the world's number one 'privacy expert', Ahearn is in such demand that his website, www.frankahearn.com (aka www.disappear.info), with its useful subsections entitled 'Keys to Disappearing', 'Offshore Information', etc, gets up to 90 hits a day. "For a lot of people, disappearing is just one of those 'what-if' fantasies, but out of those 90, around half a dozen will contact me seriously wanting advice on how to start over some place else."
As the recession deepened, Ahearn began receiving so many e-mails from people who wanted to disappear, or insulate their dwindling assets, he has just published an 80-page guide called How to Disappear and Fall off the Grid... which can be downloaded for $19.99 from his website. "We're selling around 40 a week, most of them to people who work in the finance sector or related industries in America, the UK, all over Europe and Russia."
The skip-tracing side is also booming, with Ahearn's business partner Eileen Horan shouldering a huge workload for finance companies chasing bad debts. In the past, these companies would have gone straight to the 'repo man', who would go round to repossess goods to the value of the debt. Now, Ahearn says, "They use us to identify where the hard assets really are before moving to repo." The recession has been good to him.
One easy route to anonymity is to establish an International Business Corporation. IBCs, available in many countries, are both legal and allow for complete secrecy with directors and officers of the corporation not having to be listed. An IBC enables you to open an offshore bank account and get a so-called black credit card in its name, keeping your personal shopping history anonymous.
Surely this option is only open to the rich and financially literate? Not so, says Ahearn. "Anybody can set one up with, say, $5,000, and you can even do it online." There are other ways to keep you off unwanted radar. For around $12 a month, you can set up a JFAX or eFax account which means you can get a local phone number in almost any country. When someone calls that number, the message will be forwarded to your e-mail address. Nobody will know where you are. Use prepaid phones, internet cafes, and pay for flights in cash. "Anybody can do this," Ahearn says. "I can make people hard to find, but fake identities I don't do. They don't work, and most times they are illegal."
Neither will he help fake people's deaths, a process known as pseudocide, much in the news since swindling canoeist John Darwin and his wife Anne were jailed last year for faking his death in a £250,000 life insurance fraud. "Having all those photographs taken of themselves in Panama was a pretty dumb thing to do," Ahearn says dismissively. "After the Darwins were arrested, I got a lot of e-mails from people in the UK asking me to fix it for them to fake their death and disappear, but I'm just helping genuine folks get a little more privacy from those they don't want to know, and to help them stay off the radar."
Befitting a man who has the word Freedom tattooed across his back, Ahearn is always on the move, working out of a virtual office in California. He still flies weekly to New York, where his mum Ann runs a small business processing medical bills. His dad, also Frank, is seriously ill, meaning frequent bedside visits. Frank senior earned his living running illegal after-hours gambling clubs in the Bronx: "It was crazy, we even had a slot machine in the house where I grew up."
Ahearn almost crossed to the other side, applying to join the NYPD when he was in his early twenties, but balked when he arrived to do the physical and saw all the men in uniform. Instead, Ahearn got a job working for an investigation agency in New Jersey that put undercover agents in shops to catch employees stealing. He noticed that a colleague, Scott, spent his time accessing vehicle records and phone bills to find people who had taken flight - he was a skip tracer.
"The idea of creating a scenario and trying to find somebody sounded really intriguing," remembers Ahearn. "There were no databases then; you had to live by your wits." He asked his boss if he could have a shot at it. No, said his boss, Scott was doing just fine. A few days later, Ahearn went back to his boss and laid a copy of his phone records in front of him.
"That would be illegal now," Ahearn adds quickly, but it did the trick.
Ahearn rips into his pizza with his hands and smiles at the memory. He went on to set up his own agency on West 25th Street in 1986, pre-gentrification, when it was still home to street walkers rather than the loft apartments and boutique art galleries there now. In his first week he made $105, locating three cheating spouses, but he realised there was more money to be made out there.
He is particularly proud of finding White House intern Monica Lewinsky when she vanished following revelations of her encounters with ex-President Bill Clinton. Ahearn, posing as a UPS delivery clerk, Pat Browne, dialled a number on the pretext of wanting to return a water-damaged parcel to a Manica Lawindi. (I sometimes mistake a name because I want to appear stupid, so people might help me out.) The Spanish maid put Ahearn right on the name - and told him Miss Monica would be back at six.
Sometimes he doesn't know who he is looking for until he finds them, such as when a client gave him a list of phone numbers and asked him to find out whose they were, and if they were connected. Turned out they all had one man in common: disgraced publishing magnate Conrad Black.
Only once has Ahearn feared for his life. About 15 years ago, he was asked to serve legal papers on a Manhattan art dealer who had reneged on paying $300,000 for a car. "Although he had this exclusive, appointment-only brownstone gallery, he was never seen going in or coming out. One day I discovered he was there, so I called him up posing as an art dealer with some Van Goghs to sell. I could tell he was interested, so I told him I'm outside with the paintings. When I served the papers he went ballistic. He chased me for six blocks before he finally gave up. I really was thinking, "This is it, Frank Ahearn."
At the height of his skip-tracing career, Ahearn was employing ten tracers in a 1,000sq ft office in New Jersey. Business was booming. But things were getting out of hand: Ahearn was a workaholic and he was drinking too much. Then one day he had a big fight with Eileen Horan, who drove through the office wall, drunk, at two in the morning. "That made me realise that things were getting a little crazy here," he says.
It was seven years ago that Ahearn kicked the booze, left the bars and took to hanging around in bookstores reading and people-watching. He was in a branch of Borders in New Jersey when he saw a man in his late forties whom he came to know as 'Ken'. "In his hand he's got a book about offshore banking and he takes down a guide to Costa Rica. After he's paid, I go up, tell him I am Frank, that I am a skip tracer, and say: "I bet you are going to move to Costa Rica and bank your money in Belize." The guy looked stunned, asked me how I knew. Ahearn told him it was the logical thing to do, then added: "I don't know your circumstances, but if I was looking for you, I'd find you in minutes."
Ken had testified in a court case against his former employer, a company over-billing on government contracts. His identity was supposed to be a secret, but it had leaked. When he started getting threatening phone calls, he felt he had no choice but to disappear. Ahearn helped him set up an International Business Corporation in Belize, and Ken is now living happily and legally in Jamaica. Ken was Ahearn's first disappearance client, and there have been 30 more since.
But how does Ahearn know they are not money launderers, or worse? You can tell by the questions people ask, he says. Those who cut to the chase and start off asking about moving money offshore usually have an agenda, whereas genuine anonymity seekers frequently have little grasp of the financial issues - and often no idea how much cash they might need if they're not working. "There's no point Joe the bus driver in Detroit becoming Joe the bus driver in San Francisco," he says. "That's an easy find."
Ahearn has a sliding scale of charges for his disappearing act. It could be $30,000 or more, depending on how complex your affairs are, but out of that he may have to hire tax and legal experts. However, he charges victims of stalkers and abusive partners very little, if anything. "Call it Frank Ahearn's witness protection programme," he says.
Back out on the street, Ahearn is striding off to meet his next potential disappearee. He says that if he was ever to disappear himself, his preferred destination is Paris. "I reckon in five years you will find me hanging out in the Luxembourg Gardens. If you grow up in New York it's hard to move any place else," he says, "but Paris works for me. I like the culture, I like the coffee and I reckon it's better to be an old guy sitting on a bench overlooking the Seine than doing the same thing in Palm Beach."
And with that, the lights change and Frank M. Ahearn vanishes as quickly as he arrived. A few days later he e-mails: "Nice meeting you Tim, if you ever need to locate someone, do not hesitate to ask."
Artisans Might Be The New Face of Work
A couple of years ago, Chris Woehrle grew sick of corporate life and decided to become an artisanal food craftsman - any kind of artisanal food craftsman. "I spent a month making every item I could think of: kimchi, harissa, salsa, every kind of pickle imaginable, a bunch of different herb mustards," says Woehrle, who worked for a music conglomerate. And every time, he quickly discovered, "there were eight companies already doing it well."
This is because Woehrle lives in Brooklyn, ground zero of the artisanal-food universe, where competition is intense. Eventually, though, he and his partner stumbled upon a hole in the market: handcrafted, all-natural beef jerky. And so Kings County Jerky was born. Woehrle expects that the company will be profitable in a year or two, which is pretty good for a new small business.
Like many successful entrepreneurs in the United States, Woehrle followed what seems like an ancient business model: making things by hand. He rejected the high-volume, low-margin commodity business in which ConAgra and PepsiCo compete against each other with their Slim Jim and Matador jerky products. Instead, Kings County found a niche in which engaged consumers will pay a premium for a specialty product.
Contrary to popular belief, the revival of craft manufacturing isn’t just a fad for Brooklyn hipsters. (Woehrle resists the term. His beard is too short, he says.) Jason Premo, an entrepreneur I recently met in Greenville, S.C., is also studying the unmet needs of his customers and carefully making the things they most value, albeit on a more industrial scale. Premo, a former corporate manager, learned that many large companies faced challenges getting their hands on precision parts (like rocketry propulsion housings for ICBMs or rotor hardware for Black Hawk helicopters) that must be made of high-performance metal alloys and cut to exacting standards. So he and a partner bought a tiny metal-machining shop, invested in some precision machines and hired a few advanced machining experts. Their company, Adex Machining Technologies, now has contracts with Boeing and G.E.
It’s tempting to look at craft businesses as simply a rejection of modern industrial capitalism. But the craft approach is actually something new — a happy refinement of the excesses of our industrial era plus a return to the vision laid out by capitalism’s godfather, Adam Smith. One of his central insights in "The Wealth of Nations" is the importance of specialization. When everyone does everything — sews their own clothes, harvests their own crops, bakes their own bread — each act becomes inefficient, because generalists are rarely as quick or able as specialists.
For most of human history, though, people needed to do a bit of everything to survive. The result was a profoundly inefficient economy that required almost everyone to work very hard just to create enough of the essentials for survival; even then, famines were still disturbingly common. Efficiency, Smith explained, comes when individuals focus on specific tasks. The miracle of the Industrial Revolution was that through specialization, humankind became far more productive.
In the United States, this works so well that, despite all the economic pain we’re enduring, the average American leads a shockingly good life by any historical or international standard. As other countries move into mass production, the United States, even in the depths of economic doldrums, has a level of wealth that translates to fewer people willing to do dreary, assembly-line work at extremely low wages. More significant, we’re entering an era of hyperspecialization. Huge numbers of middle-class people are now able to make a living specializing in something they enjoy, including creating niche products for other middle-class people who have enough money to indulge in buying things like high-end beef jerky.
Economically, this was an expected outcome. The hot field of happiness economics argues, rather persuasively, that once people reach some level of comfort, they are willing — even eager — to trade in potential earnings at a lucrative but uninspiring job for less (but comfortable) pay at more satisfying work. Some research by the Chicago economist Erik Hurst suggests that half of entrepreneurs start businesses as much to pursue happiness as to make money.
When it comes to profit and satisfaction, craft business is showing how American manufacturing can compete in the global economy. Many of the manufacturers who are thriving in the United States (they exist, I swear!) have done so by avoiding direct competition with low-cost commodity producers in low-wage nations. Instead, they have scrutinized the market and created customized products for less price-sensitive customers. Facebook and Apple, Starbucks and the Boston Beer Company (which makes Sam Adams lager) show that people who identify and meet untapped needs can create thousands of jobs and billions in wealth. As our economy recovers, there will be nearly infinite ways to meet custom needs at premium prices.
Meanwhile, the idea (or at least the hope) is that as China and other emerging nations develop, the United States can stay on the profitable forefront, delivering specific high-tech parts to their factories and the latest upmarket foods to their middle class. According to this view, the fracturing of industrial manufacturing, however painful, has helped prepare parts of the economy for this new course.
The transition to an increasingly craft-centered economy will not be without agony. Woehrle and Premo succeeded because both had access to investors and the innate ability to segue from the salaried confines of corporate life to a much riskier, entrepreneurial world. A craft economy is far less stable: those who succeed this year may fail the next, as their once-unique products become commodities made cheaply overseas. Still, this new world seems, to some extent, inevitable. Instead of rolling our eyes at self-conscious Brooklyn hipsters pickling everything in sight, we might look to them as guides to the future of the American economy. Just don’t tell them that. It would break their hearts to be called model 21st-century capitalists.